"Coup de chance": Woody Allen signs his first film in French

Europe 1 09:00, 27 September 2023

Fanny (Lou de Laâge) and Jean (Melvil Poupaud) have everything of the ideal couple: fulfilled in their professional life, they live in a beautiful apartment in the beautiful districts of Paris and seem in love as on the first day. But when Fanny meets, by chance, Alain (Niels Schneider), a former high school friend, she is immediately capsized. They see each other very quickly and get closer and closer...

>>> A Love Letter to the City of Paris

If Woody Allen's cinema is indisputably associated with New York City, Paris has always occupied a special place in his heart. After filming – in part – Tout le monde dit I love you in 1996 and having made the French capital a character in its own right in Midnight in Paris in 2010, he returns this time for a film shot entirely in French. Initially, however, he planned to make COUP DE CHANCE in English and to stage Americans living in Paris. "I don't speak French very well, and I understand it even less, but when I finished the script, I thought it would be a great experience to shoot in French," says Woody Allen. "I've always loved European cinema, and French cinema in particular, and when I suggested the idea to my producers, they reacted enthusiastically."

>>> An exceptional cast

Lou de Laâge, Melvil Poupaud, Niels Schneider, Valérie Lemercier: a wonderful French cast to embody the characters of Woody Allen. "I never imagined that one day I would be asked to participate in a Woody Allen film," explains Lou de Laäge. "To anchor at a point in this man's journey felt incredible. It awakened a part of childhood in me. When I received the script, it was accompanied by a note where Woody told me that he offered me the role, but that if I did not like it, I just had to say it. There was a rare elegance there."

For Melvil Poupaud, the strength of the project and the opportunity to play for Woody Allen were unmissable. "There was in the script an absolute balance between the tragic and the comic brought to a paroxysmal point that is the mark of Woody Allen's genius," explains the actor. "In this film, in every shot, in every choice of staging, editing, music, we find a permanent balance between the pathetic and the funny, between the threat and the lightness, so that we laugh and shudder at the same time thanks to this incredible ambivalence."

For Niels Schneider, the musicality of Woody Allen's writing was obvious and a strength. "I put Coltrane at home to get in the mood right away and I understood that everything was in the writing: the lightness, the rhythm and the musical quality of the dialogues, characters who all had a soul, convictions and a natural way of speaking, themes that irrigate his entire filmography."

>>> 5th collaboration with cinematographer Vittorio Storaro

Legendary cinematographer Vittorio Storaro won Oscars for Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now, Warren Beatty's REDS and Bernardo Bertolucci's THE LAST EMPEROR. After A Rainy Day in New York, Wonder Wheel, Café Society and Rifkin's Festival, this is the fifth time he has collaborated with Woody Allen. The work on the light and the range of colors, from warm and golden tones to cooler hues, sublimate the beauty of Paris and accompany the emotional trajectory of the characters.

"The secret is to surround yourself with the best station leaders," says Woody Allen. "You have to know how to choose them and, then, do not muzzle and stifle them. On the contrary, they must be allowed to express themselves artistically in complete freedom. With Vittorio, we always work in the same way. He reads the script, we discuss the atmosphere of the film and, as with all my collaborators, I give him total creative freedom. He is a great artist and almost all his intuitions are correct."

"Coup de chance" is currently in theaters, in partnership with Europe 1.

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