MIDNIGHT IN PARIS won best original screenplay and Woody Allen has the most nominations in this category with 15, and the most wins with 3.
MIDNIGHT IN PARIS is a 2011 romantic comedy fantasy film written and directed by Woody Allen. The plot centers on a small group of Americans visiting the French capital for business and pleasure.
The protagonist, a screenwriter, is forced to confront the shortcomings of his relationship with his fiancée and their divergent goals due to his magical experiences in the city beginning each night at midnight.[4] The movie explores themes of nostalgia and modernism.
Midnight In Paris script movie trailer
Produced by Spanish group Mediapro and Allen’s Gravier Productions, the film stars Owen Wilson, Rachel McAdams, Marion Cotillard, Kathy Bates, Carla Bruni, Adrien Brody and Michael Sheen. It premiered at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival and was released in North America in May 2011 good movie photographer
The film opened to widespread critical acclaim and has commonly been cited as one of Allen’s best films in recent years.
In 2012, the film won both the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay and the Golden Globe Awards for Best Screenplay; and was nominated for three other Academy Awards: Best Picture, Best Direction, and Best Art Direction.
Writing
Allen employed a reverse approach in writing the screenplay for this film, by building the film’s plot around a conceived movie title, ‘MIDNIGHT IN PARIS. [15] Allen originally wrote the character Gil as an east coast intellectual, but he rethought it when he and casting director Juliet Taylor began considering Owen Wilson for the role.
Midnight In Paris script
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“I thought Owen would be charming and funny but my fear was that he was not so eastern at all in his persona,” says Allen. Allen realized that making Gil a Californian would actually make the character richer, so he rewrote the part and submitted it to Wilson, who readily agreed to do it. Allen describes him as “a natural actor”.
Filming
Principal photography began in Paris in July 2010.[16] Allen states that the fundamental aesthetic for the camera work gave the film a warm ambiance. He describes that he likes it (the cinematography), “intensely red, intensely warm, because if you go to a restaurant and you’re there with your wife or your girlfriend, and it’s got red-flecked wallpaper and turn-of-the-century lights, you both look beautiful. Whereas if you’re in a seafood restaurant and the lights are up, everybody looks terrible. So it looks nice. It’s very flattering and very lovely.”
Midnight In Paris – screenplay story structure analysis
To achieve this he and his cinematographer, Darius Khondji, used primarily warm colors in the film’s photography, filmed in flatter weather and employed limited camera movements, in attempts to draw little attention to itself. This is the first Woody Allen film to go through a digital intermediate, instead of being color timed in the traditional photochemical way. According to Allen, its use here is a test to see if he likes it enough to use on his future films.
Allen’s directorial style placed more emphasis on the romantic and realistic elements of the film, than the fantasy elements. He states that he “was interested only in this romantic tale, and anything that contributed to it that was fairy tale was right for me. I didn’t want to get into it. I only wanted to get into what bore down on his (Owen Wilson’s) relationship with Marion.”
Locations
The film opens with a 3½-minute postcard-view montage of Paris, showing the usual and iconic tourist sites. Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times describes the montage as a stylistic approach that lasts longer than necessary to simply establish location. According to Turan, “Allen is saying: Pay attention — this is a special place, a place where magic can happen.”[18] Midnight in Paris is the first Woody Allen film shot entirely on location in Paris, though both Love and Death (1975)[19] and Everyone Says I Love You (1996) were partially filmed there.
Midnight in Paris script wrter Woody Allen hugging cast members Owen Wilson and Rachel McAdams
Filming locations include Giverny, John XXIII Square (near Notre Dame), Montmartre, the Palace of Versailles, the Opéra, the Sacré-Cœur, the Île de la Cité itself, and streets near the Panthéon.
Marketing
The film is co-produced by Allen’s Gravier Productions and the Catalan company Mediapro[21] and was picked up by Sony Pictures Classics for distribution. It is the fourth film the two companies have co-produced, the others being Sweet and Lowdown, Whatever Works and You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger.
In promoting the film, Allen was willing to do only a limited amount of publicity at the film’s Cannes Film Festival, during its debut in May. Wilson was already committed to promoting Pixar’s Cars 2, which opened in late June, several weeks after Allen’s film arrived in theaters.
Due to these mishaps and the small budget for promotion, Sony Classics Co-Presidents Tom Bernard and Michael Barker used guerrilla marketing campaign to promote the film. His company has spent $10 million marketing the film, which is a fraction of what a studio shells out for a summer tentpole film. Bernard describes that when buying advertisements, he and his team went through TV Guide, not the ratings book, because they were trying to find their niche audience, not just the broad public through shows with the biggest ratings.[22]
The film’s poster is a reference to Vincent van Gogh’s 1889 painting The Starry Night.
The Sony Classics team decided to take a lemon and make lemonade. They obtained a list of reporters who were invited to the Cars 2 junket and sent them press notes from Midnight in Paris, encouraging them to ask Wilson questions about the Allen film during the Pixar media day.
Wilson happily complied, answering queries about his character in Paris that provided material for a host of stories. Sony Classics also got a hold of Wilson’s schedule of TV appearances to promote Cars 2 on shows like Late Show with David Letterman, then bought ad time for Paris spots on the nights when Wilson was a guest
Midnight In Paris Cast
The cast includes (in credits order):
Owen Wilson as Gil Pender
Rachel McAdams as Inez
Kurt Fuller as John, Inez’s father
Mimi Kennedy as Helen, Inez’s mother
Michael Sheen as Paul Bates
Nina Arianda as Carol Bates
Carla Bruni as Museum Guide
Yves Heck as Cole Porter
Alison Pill as Zelda Fitzgerald
Tom Hiddleston as F. Scott Fitzgerald
Corey Stoll as Ernest Hemingway
Sonia Rolland as Josephine Baker
Daniel Lundh as Juan Belmonte
Thérèse Bourou-Rubinsztein as Alice B. Toklas
Kathy Bates as Gertrude Stein
Marcial Di Fonzo Bo as Pablo Picasso
Marion Cotillard as Adriana
Léa Seydoux as Gabrielle
Emmanuelle Uzan as Djuna Barnes
Adrien Brody as Salvador Dalí
Tom Cordier as Man Ray
Adrien de Van as Luis Buñuel
Serge Bagdassarian as Detective Duluc
Gad Elmaleh as Detective Tisserant
David Lowe as T. S. Eliot
Yves-Antoine Spoto as Henri Matisse
Laurent Claret as Leo Stein
Vincent Menjou Cortes as Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec
Olivier Rabourdin as Paul Gauguin
François Rostain as Edgar Degas
Karine Vanasse as Belle Époque woman
Michel Vuillermoz as King in Versailles.
Owen is a natural actor. He doesn’t sound like he’s acting, he sounds like a human being speaking in a situation, and that’s very appealing to me. He’s got a wonderful funny bone, a wonderful comic instinct that’s quite unlike my own, but wonderful of its kind. He’s a blonde Texan kind of Everyman’s hero, the kind of hero of the regiment in the old war pictures, with a great flair for being amusing. It’s a rare combination and I thought he’d be great.” – Woody Allen, in production notes about the film
