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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 January 2010
Woody Allen gave the New York Times a fairly straightforward explanation for the genesis of The Purple Rose of Cairo. He told Eric Lax, “After working on one thing for a while, and for a while is one film because that takes a year to do, you want to do something different. I had just made Zelig and Broadway Danny Rose, and I thought this was a different kind of movie. I thought it would be interesting if a character came off the screen.” Allen goes on to say how the film came together for him as a concept:
The thing that really started to cement it for me was I realized that in addition to all the ensuing complications of that, there would be an actor playing that character. Once it occurred to me that it would be part of his problem, too, and that I had a totally fictional character and an identical real character, I thought there was enough substance to do a film that I hoped would be entertaining and also about something: the difference between fantasy and reality and how seductive fantasy is and how, unfortunately, we must live with reality, and how painful that can be.
Allen adds that this contrast between fantasy and reality provides the necessary “elements” for a successful film: “I thought it had good elements to it: comic elements, surreal elements, farcical elements. I thought it was material that it would be worth it to work a year on.”
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