In Woody Allen’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona, the narrator (Christopher Evan Welch) while talking about one of the central female characters Cristina (Scarlett Johansson) who has almost moved to Barcelona and is living in with an artist Juan Antonio (Javier Bardem) says, “She was already thinking of herself as a kind of expatriate, not smothered by what she believed to be America’s puritanical and materialistic culture, which she had little patience for. She saw herself more a European soul, in tune with the thinkers and artists she felt expressed her tragic, romantic, freethinking view of life.” For those of us well-acquainted with Woody’s movies and the man himself, this is in a sense, him talking about himself. And as if to prove us right, in a recent interview, he said he wanted nothing more than to be a “foreign filmmaker” but he couldn’t because he lived in Brooklyn.
But as years went by and filming in the Upper East Side of Manhattan was no longer viable financially and logistically, he found an opportunity in the shortcoming.
It began in Britain, where he made a string of movies — Match Point, Scoop, Cassandra’s Dream, and later You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, and then he moved to Barcelona showcasing Spain in an utterly romantic manner - with the film that won Penelope Cruz her Academy Award, Vicky Cristina Barcelona, then came the incredibly magical Midnight in Paris. Now there’s To Rome With Love.
All these films, Woody says, were generously funded by Europeans who had faith in him enough to not even ask to read his scripts.