When Victor Lownes (who would later become my husband) came over from Chicago to open the Playboy Club on Park Lane, Allen would hang out at his house in Knightsbridge. “It was like a mini Hefner Playboy Mansion,” he recalls, “in the sense that, in addition to some very beautiful women, you’d find all the movie guys in town there – Warren Beatty, Roman Polanski, Michael Caine, Terence Stamp, Albert Finney.” And when Allen wasn’t playing poker, “we’d go out to the discotheques”.
It was a heady time to be in London, “which was tops in music, fashion and film. The James Bond films were being made here, Peter O’Toole had just made Lawrence of Arabia, the Beatles were in town, so I would run into them frequently”. Meanwhile, Allen’s wife, the actress Louise Lasser, was working in the States. “I guess that it was not a good sign for our marriage that, two weeks after the wedding, I came to London for eight months and she stayed in New York.” (The couple would split, but Lasser would go on to appear in many of Allen’s films.)
Despite the poker and the disco and the role in Casino Royale, Allen wrote his first play Don’t Drink the Water while in London and opened Lownes’s new Playboy club. “Victor asked if I would do the opening night party, be the attraction. And I was. We had a great time, and everybody came – Julie Christie, Ursula Andress, Margot Fonteyn, Rudolph Nureyev, Peter Cook and Dudley Moore.” And as well as giving the Brits a taste of American stand-up comedy, Allen also got to know British humour. “I liked Spike Milligan and Peter Sellers,” he recalls. “Peter Cook was a genius and I knew Dudley very well; he was in my play, Play It Again, Sam, here in London. I loved the Monty Python team. Benny Hill was great, if a bit ticklish.” Of today’s talent, he rates Eddie Izzard highly.
Over the years, Allen came back to London to publicise movies, but didn’t stay for long – until Match Point. “That was a great experience for me. Because I wasn’t sure. I’d been making so many films in New York over the decades and I thought, how would it be to be working in London? But it turned out to be a very positive experience.
First of all, living here for a time was a delight; the weather was cool and fresh, unlike the New York summer which is very brutal. The skies here are often quite grey, which is great for the kind of photography I like to do. The crew was wonderful, and I had a great time with the actors who were incredibly talented. I’m not just saying these things, because I came back again this year to do the very same thing, another film,” with a cast which, like Match Point, is headed up by Scarlett Johansson.
In one of Woody’s short stories called The Lunatic’s Tale, a professor, Dr Ossop Farkis, falls in love with one woman’s mind and another woman’s body. He successfully performs a transplant to create the perfect being. Asked what he would fuse together of the cities he’s worked in to make a perfect city, Allen ponders, “New York is a great city, no question, but it will never be as pretty as London or Paris. Those are two very beautiful cities to look at and they each have their own temperament. Paris is more like New York in terms of the energy and rhythm, whereas London is more relaxed.”
Yet key to London’s appeal to Allen as a director is “the way the film people work here. Filming in New York, or anywhere else in the States, it’s very union-oriented and very regimented. Here it’s like student film- making, in the best sense of the word: everybody does everything. The stand-in directs traffic, the cameraman runs in front of the camera and stands in, I can move chairs. In New York you have to have a formal break for an hour and ten minutes either side for travelling, here, you just grab a sandwich; everybody is just interested in making the film. Brits take cultural life very seriously, so you get this enormous vitality and concentration on the project.”
One big change for the better since Allen first came to London is the food, the director even going as far as to say that “there are more terrific restaurants in London now than in New York”. When we have dinner at Drones, he orders a grilled Dover sole. “Are you sure you wouldn’t rather be tucking into a six-inch-high corned-beef sandwich,” I ask, “like they serve at the Carnegie Deli?”, like the comics in the opening scene of Broadway Danny Rose. “I don’t eat that sort of thing in NY,” Allen retorts.
Or go to those places. Match Point shows city life at its most upscale – as the central character, a handsome tennis coach (played by Jonathan Rhys-Meyers) finds himself drawn into the warm and expensive bosom of an upper-crust English family, befriending the son of the house, marrying the daughter (Emily Mortimer) and becoming the protégé of the financier father (Brian Cox). In his second London movie, Allen also looks set to focus his lens on the moneyed classes, filming scenes at Windsor races and Annabel’s. Allen seems not to know quite why this happens. “When you step back and look at many of my pictures in New York and the two in London, they are about classy people,” he says. “So it may be that something in me psychologically tends to write about that, and I don’t know why that is because I was raised pretty lower class. My father did many menial jobs, from bar tender and cabbie to bookmaker. We never had any money; my mother had to work in a flower shop all her life. But for some reason I make films about people in New York who live on Fifth Avenue and Park Avenue and upper-class people here in London who are, as you put it, ‘nobs’.
“When I was coming up as a comedian, people in New York were convinced I lived in Greenwich Village because they’d think, ‘Here’s this offbeat comedian who plays in tiny, intellectual clubs; he’s a beatnik or bohemian, who won’t get dressed up to go any place.’ The truth of the matter is that I’ve always lived on Fifth Avenue, in a penthouse, and with a chauffeur. I have a built-in sort of low-life quality about me and I don’t look classy. I don’t look or dress like a nob, but I’m always writing about them – and living that kind of life.”
Match Point goes on release on January 6
