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from page 63
We've never had more than a two- or
three-minute conversation.
"He's a very private man," Stiers
adds. "He lives a lot of his interior
life on film and makes jokes about
his charming maladjustments and
idiosyncracies publicly.
"I think it's sort of flopped. Where
most of us evolve friendships where we
can admit to these things with trust,
he trusts the film public to laugh and
personally is muted, even guarded."
Allen's sense of himself as well as
other actors is exceptional, Stiers
adds. "He doesn't ask them to do
what he does, and he doesn't cross
over into what they do.
"In that regard. I think he's a remark-
able writer, and having written that care-
fully; he's also directed, and that's why he
stays out of the way as a director unless
he really needs to fix a little moment."
In the moments we shared with
Woody, herels more of what he had to
say about his latest film, his child-
hood, his Judaism and his career.
WOODY
On his love for film noir ...
In the early '40s in my neighborhood,
you could see two, three of those a week,
and I always wanted to make one."
"It's a very colorful era of New
York, full of great theater, great night
clubs, great jazz."
On how he gets his ideas ...
On his childhood ...
"Sometimes ideas come to me based
on something and sometimes they just
come spontaneously. [For this film] I
wrote out two lines and threw it in the
drawer, and it was in the drawer along
with a lot of other ideas of mine.
"A couple of years ago, I went
through some of these notes I had
and I noticed there were a number of
comic ideas I'd accumulated.
"Small Time Crooks was one; this
was one; a film I just finished titled
Hollywood Ending was another one.
"The idea just came to me once
that it would be a funny idea if I was
hypnotized and I was the criminal as
well as the person pursuing the crimi-
nal. And since I'd always wanted to do
a fast bantering film, the two came
together very easily [for this film]."
On his love for period films ...
"W hen I grew up [in the early
"Well, I grew up on those. They
were crime stories or romantic stories,
office comedies or mistaken identity
comedies, and one of the staples of
them was a hostile relationship
between a man and a woman. It was
that fast banter between a man and a
woman, and you always knew they
would get together, even though osten-
sibly they hared one another deeply
and kept digging at one another.
"This was a very pleasurable kind of
film for me to see when I was younger.
'40s], hypnosis was half-comic, half-
sinister. So, everything just conspired
to make [this film] set in the '40s.
"Plus visually, I've always liked the
'20s, '30s and '40s for films. When I
do a period film I don't do the 1800s
or the turn of the century. Really what
I do is the '20s, '30s or '40s because I
like the music. I like the clothes. I like
the way women look. I like the way
the guys are. I like the soldiers and
sailors, the gangsters with their violin
cases and the machine guns.
RISING STAR from page 63
family and practicemedicine on the
West Coast, "she's not as naive [now].
She's grown up and is able to defend
herself and take care of herself more as
a woman and a person.
"It comes with experience," he adds.
"Inspiration for most artists comes
from negative experiences."
"I was doing what I love to do every
day — act and dance," says Elizabeth
of Showgirls. "The joy was so sweet
and the main thing for me was that,
right after that, I just wanted to get
right back to work."
Her first movie after Showgirls was
First Wives Club, where Berkley played
the girlfriend of Goldie Hawn's ex-hus-
band. The film's stars, Hawn, Bette
Midler and Diane Keaton, were actress-
es who'd "been through everything in
this business, and were so inspiring and
so encouraging," she says.
the business."
Things could have tuned out differently
When she accepted her first leading
role in Showgirls, directed by Paul
Verhoeven from a script by Joe
Esterhas of Basic Instinct fame, Berkley
was hoping the experience would give
her career a boost as the next Sharon
Stone. Instead, she was vilified on a
personal level as well as for her per-
formance in the film, and just about
laughed out of the industry
"Liz took the fall for the movie,"
says Jason Berkley. People attacked her
character as a person, he says, making
up rumors and saying things about her
that were untrue. The filmmakers
never defended her.
But, adds Jason, who'll move out to
L.A. at the end of the year to join his
"I was a nice child. I didn't have a
miserable childhood. My parents
loved me. I was a very, very bad stu-
dent, but I was not unpopular. I was
a good athlete, the first one picked,
not the last one. I didn't like school at
all; I didn't function in school. But
amongst the kids it was fun.
"I lived in a nice neighborhood, in
Flatbush in Brooklyn, and it was at the
time a lower-middle class neighborhood
and everybody was nice and safe. You
could play ball on the streets all day
long. It was a nice childhood actually.
"The only thing I regret — but I
regret it only in fantasy because I
don't know what it would have been
like — I wish my parents had raised
me in Manhattan. Because the great-
est thing you can do for a kid is to be
raised in New York City.
"Because I can see with my own chil-
dren — within a radius of 20 blocks
from the house [there] are theaters and
museums and opera and everything,
stores — it's just a great exciting place.
"Brooklyn was not that. It was much
more suburban, but still very nice."
On being raised in
a Jewish home...
"I was raised in a religious home and
it was unreasonable and forced religion
that turned me off it.... I've never got-
ten over that feeling. And I hold a very,
very dim view of all the religions."
Berkley played another well-
reviewed role, an actress/love object
opposite Matthew Modine, in The
Real Blonde, directed by Tom DiCillo,
and then was cast by director Oliver
Stone as Al Pacino's high-priced call
girl in Any Given Sunday.
Last year, she did a play in London
directed by Sir Peter Hall. Lenny,
based on the life of Jewish comedian
Lenny Bruce, starred standup comedi-
an Eddie Izzard in the leading role;
Berkley played Bruce's tragic, doped
up wife, Honey Harlow. The Times of
London dubbed her performance a
convincingly vulnerable portrayal."
It was a serious play but "I was cracking
up during this one scene," recalls Berldey.
"Lenny is talking to the audience, and
refers to me as 'the ultimate shiksa god-
dess.' The guy playing Lenny Bruce is
not Jewish. And here I am, lying on