Woody Allen on ‘Rome,’ playing himself and why he skips the Oscars

“I finished writing the script and saw that there was a part that I could play,” Allen says, explaining his return to the screen after so long. “I never force it. I never write something for myself. I’m trying to be faithful to the idea. . . . If I had made [this picture] in the United States, I could have played Roberto Benigni’s part. . . . If I was 50 years younger, I would have played Jesse’s part. Right now, I’m reduced to fathers of fiancees.”

That last line is delivered with the resigned inflection and flawless timing audiences have come to expect from Allen, who, from the moment he appears in “To Rome With Love,” delivers the nervous one-liners and sense of rumpled haplessness his fans have adored since his earliest films. “It’s effortless,” he says of slipping into his on-screen persona. “It’s the only thing I can do. I’m not an actor. I can’t play Chekhov, I can’t play Shakespeare or Strindberg. I can do that thing that I do.

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Penelope Cruz and Woody Allen open the Los Angeles Film Festival with the premiere of their latest movie, 'To Rome with Love,' and talk about Cruz's sexy role.

“There’s a few different kinds of things I can act credibly,” he continues. “I can play an intellectual or a lowlife.”

The downside of developing such a strong alter ego, of course, is that when people meet Woody Allen, they expect to meet Woody Allen: an extension of his speech patterns and personality, to be sure, but also a character he has created over years on stage as a stand-up comic and as an actor in his movies. “I’m not as crazy as they think I am,” he says. “They think I’m a major neurotic and that I’m phobic and incompetent, and I’m not. I’m very average, middle class. I get up in the morning, I have a wife and kids, I work, I’ve been productive, I practice my horn, I go to ballgames, it’s a normal kind of thing. I have some quirks, but everybody has some quirks.”

By “they,” Allen is referring to his fans, who tend to be rabid, able to quote lines from every Allen film going back to “What’s Up, Tiger Lily?” with impeccable accuracy. They’re the filmgoers who have stuck by Allen throughout his one-movie-a-year production pattern (despite the ups and downs such consistent output inevitably entails), who kept coming even at the height of romantic controversy and who made last year’s “Midnight in Paris” the biggest commercial hit of Allen’s 47-year career.

Allen won his fourth Oscar for “Midnight in Paris,” for best original screenplay (his films have won 11 in all). As always, he declined to accept the accolade in person. “They always have it on Sunday night,” he says of the Academy Awards ceremony. “And it’s always — you can look this up — it’s always opposite a good basketball game. And I’m a big basketball fan. So it’s a great pleasure for me to come home and get into bed and watch a basketball game. And that’s exactly where I was, watching the game.”

Did he at least flip? “No, I wasn’t flipping. I had no idea of anything that happened. When the game was over I was exhausted and I went to sleep.”

Allen’s career has been so workmanlike and regularized, his references to his past films so offhanded, that it’s easy to forget: This is the man who made “Bananas” and “Sleeper” and “Love and Death” and “Annie Hall” and “Manhattan” and “Hannah and Her Sisters,” whose career phases include a musical (“Everyone Says I Love You”), austere dramas (“Interiors,” “Another Woman”) and, most recently, city symphonies paying homage to London (“Match Point,” “Scoop,” “You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger”), Barcelona (“Vicky Cristina Barcelona”), Paris (“Midnight in Paris”) and now Rome.