Four years on from To Rome with Love, Jesse Eisenberg has reunited with Woody Allen for Café Society, a golden age of Hollywood treat that shows there's no loss without a gain and no gain without a loss. Harry Guerin finds out more.
In the pacy romantic comedy-drama Eisenberg plays Bobby, a New Yorker who leaves the family jewellery business to make his fortune out West. There, he is taken under the wing of his movie agent uncle Phil (Steve Carell), falls for Phil's secretary Vonnie (Kristen Stewart) and becomes something of a Tinseltown player.
But this being a Woody Allen film, the path of true love never runs smooth and another woman appears in Bobby's life, divorcée Veronica Hayes (Blake Lively). If you're an Allen or Eisenberg fan, the not-so-simple twists of fate here will provide plenty of old school fun.
Here Eisenberg talks about the story, his character and the biggest misconception about Allen.
Woody Allen and I have a slightly different perspective on Café Society.
I think he has a more cynical, nihilistic perspective on the movie - this kind of true love maybe is not possible because circumstances will always get in the way. It's a kind of cynical take on the way the world screws up good planning. My read on it is a little different, just because I'm the actor at the centre of this experience. I'm thinking of it maybe in a more internal, emotional way, rather than objectively as a story. My read on it was just that even in our happy moments we're lamenting what could have been, and occasionally wishing that we had taken a different path. I would say that's a less cynical read on it.
I love characters that, if possible, have two sides to them.
As an actor it makes it, first of all, a more interesting experience to film over the course of several months, because you're not just doing one thing over and over. But what I mainly like about it is that each side reveals the other. So Bobby's innocence and naiveté in the first half of the movie is actually a cover for a burgeoning confidence that ultimately manifests at the second half of the movie when he gets older, gets married, has a child, becomes a successful nightclub owner. To me, both of those sides are really part of the same person. We are as many people as people we know, and we're different people with different people in different situations.
Woody Allen has a very hands-off approach.
He allows actors to bring themselves to the role, to improvise, to play a scene like they would like to play it, even if it's not how he imagined it. He makes so many movies that I think he is not precious about each individual scene or performance, and I think the movies are better for it.
Probably the biggest misconception about Woody Allen is that he doesn't like actors.
I think he loves actors - look how many movies he makes with wonderful actors and how many actors love working with him. The reason I think that might be out there is because he doesn't 'indulge' with the actors. He doesn't constantly celebrate them on set and tell us how great we are. I personally don't like that stuff, so to me this experience is very comfortable. To me, he's the person who loves actors more than anybody.
Café Society is in cinemas from September 2
