87-Manhattan - Director:Woody Allen - Cast:Woody Allen,Mariel Hemingway,Diane Keaton,Michael Murphy,Anne Byrne and Meryl Streep.

"Q:You're certainly not fond of Manhattan. Why did you beg United Artists to burn the negative?

Woody Allen:I was sick of it by the time I'd finished editing it. The same is true of many of my films. It's like being a chef: you prepare the meal, you add all the spices and by the time it's ready you don't want to eat it. I'd lived with Manhattan for too long. I wanted to be rid of it. In fact, I've never gone back to any of my movies. I made 'Take The Money And Run', my debut, 35 years ago, and I've not seen a single frame since. People always ask me about certain scenes in my movies and, more often than not, I can't remember them. They know my films better than I do.
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"I write about what I know. I mean, Marty(Scorsese) knows a certain New York and Spike Lee knows a certain New York. They feel it and they write about it very, very well. I wouldn't have credibility in my work if I was writing about those kind of things. As a citizen, I'm interested in social issues and political commitments. As an artist, I'm not. It's philosophical subjects and relationships that interest me."

-Woody Allen-

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"I don't think Woody Allen even remembers me.I went to see Manhattan and I felt like I wasn't even in it...I only worked on the film for 3 days,and I didn't get to know Woody.Who gets to know Woody?"

-Meryl Streep-

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"I had a real huge urge to show New York as a wonderland and I completely exorcised that feeling in Manhattan."

-Woody Allen-

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"There's a problem in the self-definition and public perception of me.I'm an art-filmmaker,but not really.I had years of doing commercial comedies,although they were never really commercial.Pictures like Take the Money and Run and Bananas were forerunners of movies like Airplane--although they didn't make a fiftieth of what Airplane made.First there was a perception of me as a comedian doing those comic films,and then it changed to someone making upgraded commercial films like Annie Hall and Manhattan.And as I've tried to branch off and make more offbeat films,I've put myself in the area of kind of doing Art films--but they're not perceived as Art films because I'm a local person,I'm an American,and I've been know for years as a commercial entity.So they're not seen as being Truffaut films or foreign films or Bunuel films,yet they really don't have much more commercial appeal than that."

-Woody Allen-

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"I can never bear seeing a headline like 'Woody Dying to be Taken Seriously',It misses the point entirely.I don't want to be taken seriously.I have been taken seriously.The comic films are taken quite seriously--too seriously.It isn't that.Certain ideas occur to me that are not comic and that's the long and the short of it.I don't sit at home wanting to play Hamlet or wanting to be taken seriously.I just want to feel free to create any kind of work that occurs to me and do my best of it."

-Woody Allen-
Woody Allen: A Biography by Eric Lax

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"For all the fuss about Manhattan, it never won any awards - even Gordon Willis' photography was ignored. We shot in black and white because it's so beautiful, and we went for widescreen because I wanted to do an intimate picture in a format that was associated with epics and war pictures. I wanted to show that you didn't need thousands of soldiers to fill the frame.

I knew it was beautiful - I was working with a great DoP - but I had no idea it would become so iconic. We went down to the 59th Street Bridge at five in the morning, taking our own bench because there aren't any there! We shot the scene again and again as the sun came up"

-Woody Allen-(about the most famous shot on the film)

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