Blue Jasmine opens in a week in New York and Los Angeles, and the cast has been asked about Woody Allen everywhere they go. We covered some of the other cast, and now we have new comments from Alec Baldwin and Andrew Dice Clay.
Alec Baldwin spoke to the Independent.
He’s also excited about Blue Jasmine, the new film from Woody Allen, in which he stars. This is Baldwin’s second outing with Allen in two years, after starring in To Rome With Love. “I love Woody, I adore him,” he says, though this time the draw was the chance to work with Cate Blanchett, who plays Jasmine, “a very troubled woman” suffering from a typically Allen-like midlife crisis. Baldwin plays Hal, her spouse, “perhaps not the best husband in the world”.
After spending all those years “in the comedy coal-mine” of 30 Rock, Baldwin admits that he “hadn’t been around the dramatic actresses of that level for quite a while. And Woody really put her through the machine, because she’s so talented. Take after take after take of very exhaustive, emotional scenes. I sat there at the end of the day and thought, ‘She is unbelievable.'”
Wall Street Journal covered Andrew Dice Clay:
“I was doing Westbury Music Fair out in Long Island,” Mr. Clay explains. “I was packed up, ready to go back to L.A., and I got a call from my manager Bruce Rubenstein. He goes, ‘Look, stay in New York, I want you to meet with Woody Allen. He thinks you’re right for a part in his movie.’ I’m like, ‘You’re kidding, right? Woody Allen wants me in his movie?’ If he had said Scorsese, I would get it.”
Juliet Taylor, Allen’s casting director, spoke about Clay’s casting
“We had been working on this part for ages. We were having a little trouble finding the right balance,” Ms. Taylor says. “As Woody said—he always uses the word—he wanted him to be a ‘lowlife’ kind of guy, but he didn’t want him to be a mobster kind of guy. Kind of crude, but not a bad guy. We were sitting around brainstorming, throwing out ideas and names…Woody said ‘What about Andrew Dice Clay?’ and we went, ‘Oh, my God—where has he been?’ Truthfully, I hadn’t heard much about what he had been doing in recent years. I knew he had had that sort of fracas years ago, about the sort of misogynistic content of his act. I suppose he fell out of favor after that period.”
The whole article is full of great stuff. Check it out on WSJ.
Paradiso Films, the Dutch distributor for ‘Blue Jasmine’ has posted some good stuff on their Facebook. It includes an interview, in Dutch, and a new image we have yet to see of Cate Blanchett.
Finally, ‘Blue Jasmine‘ has been added to the line up of the Deauville American Film Festival in France. The festival kicks off on 30 August 2013, which is weeks before the proper French release on 25th September.
