Approaching 80 with a handful of Oscars under his belt, Woody Allen says what drives him still is the desire to make a great movie.
"I'm 76 now so I don't think that's going to happen, but I keep trying," he told journalists in Paris on Monday, while promoting his latest offering, To Rome with Love, which stars Penélope Cruz and Alec Baldwin and sports a cameo by Allen himself.
"I'd like to make a movie that I could show unashamedly at a film festival," he said.
Of the 45 films he has made, about six or eight were "better than the others", Allen said. "But I would like to make a great movie and that drives me."
A comic study of the fickleness of celebrity, Allen said his new film, like all his stories, has a sad underside: "Underneath every story that I write, even if they are played out in a comic manner, there is a sad kind of reality to them."
Allen said he had no intention to retire soon. "Maybe some day I will be forced to retire because I am older, but I would just write for the theatre or for the printed page. I can't think of being alive without working."
He said he hoped to shoot several more films in Europe, and had been approached to do work in China, Russia and South America. His next movie will be set in San Francisco and New York. * AFP
