Allen debuts film in Venice

VENICE, Italy -- Woody Allen has a past in Venice: The 67-year-old filmmaker got married here, he's filmed in the canal city and he's won awards here. But never before has he turned up at the world's longest-running film fest -- until now.\n"They've invited me many times, and I've always made some excuse and never come," Allen told a packed news conference. "Last year, I went to the Cannes Film Festival because the French people have been so supportive and I felt that I had to make some gesture. I felt the same about the Italian people."\nThe film he offered Venice on Wednesday -- "Anything Else" -- tells the story of a young comedy writer (Jason Biggs of "American Pie") who falls for a manipulative seductress (Christina Ricci) and then struggles with the consequences. Allen plays another comic who becomes Biggs' mentor, offering fatherly and sometimes paranoiac advice.\nThis comedy of chatty neurotics on Manhattan's Upper East Side, who seem unable to remain monogamous, might seem like rehashed Allen material. Yet "Anything Else" provides a somewhat fresh and often amusing take on familiar themes -- Allen's character even trashes the idea of psychoanalysis.\nAllen's New York has also changed. It's still full of jazz, strolls in Central Park and wisecracks. But it's also a city traumatized by Sept. 11, a fact notable in Allen's character David Dobel, a literate and philosophical man who also happens to stock up on guns and survival equipment for a hostile world.\n"The world obviously is in a particularly tense state at the moment," Allen said Wednesday. "Of course, it always is tense. But at the moment it is even more exaggerated than usual.\n"The character I play in the movie is a sort of paranoid product of the enormous tension that rains down on everyone, the world having gone in the direction it has gone in."\nAs for the making of the film, Allen said he carefully chose the actors he wanted, then left them without much direction, as is his tendency.\n"I don't talk to them a lot," he said. "I get out of the way. They can improvise if they want to. They can change the words. They make me look good."\nAllen said he'd long admired Ricci's work. She, meanwhile, explained how tense she'd been on the set.\n"I think Jason and I were really happy to have each other," she said. "We were so nervous to work with Woody, really nervous during the shoot."\nBiggs was thrilled to have been in an Allen film.\n"I'm really proud of the film. It was an amazing opportunity," he said.\n"Anything Else" was the main draw here on the first day of the 11-day festival. However, Allen's film is not in competition for the Golden Lion award.\nTop contenders for that prize include "21 Grams," by Mexican director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, who gained fame with "Amores Perros" in 2000; as well as Christopher Hampton's "Imagining Argentina," with Antonio Banderas; and "Zatoichi," by Takeshi Kitano.\nOther big draws at the festival are the Coen brothers' latest film, "Intolerable Cruelty," starring George Clooney and Catherine Zeta-Jones, as well as "The Human Stain," based on the Philip Roth novel, starring Anthony Hopkins.