Woody's London

THE director has spent 30 years and 25 of his 38 films making Manhattan as significant as any of his characters. At 69, he continues to make a film a year and this month his latest New York- based production, Melinda and Melinda, reaches UK cinemas. His London movie doesn't have a release date yet; Allen is still putting the finishing touches to Match Point, as it is now titled after being known only as Woody Allen's Summer Project during filming last year.

Since the director's regular production designer, Santo Loquasto, was unable to come to London with him, the role of realising Allen's vision fell to a British designer, Jim Clay.

"He was so meticulous and imaginative - sometimes quite astonishing - on a very limited budget but producing very large impressive sets for me," Allen enthuses. "There were a number of things that didn't exist in the form that I wanted them and he had to manufacture them. He did beautiful opera sets from scratch - he just invented them himself - and he made the interior of Tate Modern art gallery for me."

Allen says that Clay was just as important in selecting the locations for the film: "I'd never heard of what you call the 'Gherkin', but Jim showed me the exterior and the interior - both worked very well visually for me. Jim also showed me certain neighbourhoods, with very wealthy homes [in Belgravia and Pimlico] we had to shoot in. I also needed some tennis locations and he put me on to some that were perfect for the character but also were quite lovely to look at [Queen's Club, west Kensington]." (The British-American cast includes Scarlett Johansson, Brian Cox, Emily Mortimer, James Nesbitt, Steve Pemberton and Jonathan Rhys-Meyers.) Allen is a secretive director and his plot outlines often change but early details reveal the story of a young tennis instructor who becomes entangled with a wealthy family. This leads to his rise in the world of the upper classes and affairs with two women, which have murderous consequences.

The subtext of social tension - a recurring Allen theme - has been reflected in the choice of locations, ranging from grand country estate homes to the Covent Garden Hotel and the Curzon Cinema in Soho.

"Naturally, the most important thing is that you don't want anything to conflict with where the character would realistically be," says Allen, who spent five weeks scouting locations with Clay, "or where the scene might realistically be played.

"But the second thing you want is a place that has a strong visual sense, and that always becomes a problem for the art director. They can frequently give you accuracy for the character but nothing interesting visually, or some great visual that bears no relationship with the character. Jim Clay was able to do that for me perfectly."

From Clay's point of view, it was essential to avoid making it "look like a tourist movie", and where possible he "would throw those elements away. For example, you just have to be very careful how you show the Millennium Wheel.

I was prepared to argue that case but I didn't have to in the end because Woody's so astute."

Allen was less concerned about architectural cliches. "I don't recognise them as such," he says, "so I'm sure I shot a certain amount of picture-postcard London, but that wasn't on my mind. I was just trying to do the story."

Tate Modern immediately occurred to everyone as the ideal building for a Woody Allen film. "It has all those warm colours," says Clay. "It's vast and it has a fabulous light quality, which changes throughout the day. At eight in the morning, when the sun is just coming in through that end of the Turbine Hall, it's just a magical space."

The real challenge was to make all these disparate elements of the London urban landscape coherent, both in this film and in the broader context of Allen's oeuvre. "The Millennium Bridge links the South Bank so successfully with St Paul's and it has this fantastic backdrop.

Cinematically, that stretch of the river looks absolutely stunning," says Clay. "And, of course, bridges figure a lot in Woody's movies, as well, so I suppose it's a little homage to some of his bridge shots. We've also used Hungerford and Blackfriars bridges."

Allen's films also frequently include long scenes with one continuous shot as the characters walk and talk through block after block, down the long, straight streets of New York. These kinds of streets don't exist in London, so St James's Park was used to accommodate extended pieces of dialogue.

Surprisingly, the thing that Allen seems to admire most about London is the weather. "One thing that London has, that New York does not have, is beautiful skies: the light that you get in London, the grey, flat light, gives a colour saturation to everything that's very rich and very beautiful.

That was a big plus for me."

His delight in finding overcast skies contrasts with most film crews who come to the UK: they wait days for the sun to appear, resulting in the locations having a flat, unfamiliar appearance on screen. We will have to wait to see if in Match Point the director has successfully brought our city to life on film. It might even be that we feel, as Clay did, that, "He made me see London differently."

. The full version of this article appears in the April issue of Blueprint magazine, out today.

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