Reports of Woody Allen’s career being over are highly exaggerated. The legendary filmmaker has hit a rough patch due to the #MeToo controversy that has dogged him for years, making it impossible for him to mount a project in the United States and Amazon unwilling to release his completed A Rainy Day in New York. That hasn’t stopped Allen, however, who is already hard at work on his next film, which we now know is working under the title of Rivkin’s Festival and will likely only be released internationally.
Allen has assembled a cast that includes Christoph Waltz, Gina Gershon, Louis Garrel, Elena Anaya, Sergi Lopez, and Wallace Shawn for a film that we know will take place at the San Sebastian Film Festival. It’s there that an American married couple will find themselves in a complicated romantic entanglement caused by festival’s magic. The wife enters into an affair with a brilliant French movie director, while the husband falls for a beautiful Spanish woman.
Speaking at a recent press conference, Allen sidesteps the controversies but does say that he never considered leaving the business…
“I have never thought of retiring. Since I started, I’ve always tried to focus on my work, no matter what happens in my family or with politics. I don’t think about social movements, for example. My cinema is about human relationships, about people. And I try to have humor in them. If I were to die, I would probably die on a film set, which may well happen.”
While a lot of actors have written Allen off, one who has come to his defense is Gershon…
“Living in the United States now is crazy. There’s a lot of rivalry, a lot of hatred, it’s wild times. One has to make sense of all those situations. I am very aware of the subject of women’s rights, but I am also delighted to be in a Woody Allen project. I think the Me Too movement has promoted very good things, but it’s also really important that people take a look at every situation individually and really make up their own minds about them.”
Filming on Rivkin’s Festival kicks off this week. [Deadline]
