Trailer
Plot summary
Gil Pender is a screenwriter from Pasadena who would rather write novels, and he is in Paris with his fiancée, Inez, and her wealthy parents, who are there on her father's business. Gil loves the city's artistic past, especially the 1920s, and wants to stay and finish his novel; Inez dismisses the idea, and she is more impressed by her old college friend Paul, a professor who lectures about French history, than Gil is. One night, after wine tasting, Gil walks back to the hotel alone and a car full of 1920s partygoers carries him to a party, where he meets Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald. The same thing happens on later nights, and he meets more artists of that Paris, among them Adriana, a designer and Picasso's lover.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Midnight in Paris (2011)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- The William Faulkner estate sued Sony Pictures Classics over the line "The past is not dead. Actually, it's not even past", a paraphrase of a much-quoted line from Faulkner's 1950 book Requiem for a Nun, claiming it was an unlicensed use.
- Sony called the Faulkner action "a frivolous lawsuit", and in July 2013 a federal judge in Mississippi dismissed it on fair use grounds.
- Allen originally wrote Gil as an East Coast intellectual but rethought it when he and casting director Juliet Taylor began considering Owen Wilson: "my fear was that he was not so Eastern at all in his persona", he said, realizing a Californian Gil would be richer.
- Carla Bruni, singer-songwriter and wife of former French president Nicolas Sarkozy, was recruited by Allen to play a museum guide; he shot down reports that one of her scenes took over 30 takes, calling such stories "inventions from scratch", and false reports that her scenes were refilmed with Léa Seydoux.
- The film earned $56.3 million in North America, overtaking Allen's previous best, Hannah and Her Sisters, at $40 million, and as of 2016 it was his highest-grossing film with $151 million worldwide on a $17 million budget.
- Allen employed a reverse approach in writing the screenplay, building the film's plot around a movie title he had already conceived, "Midnight in Paris".
- This was the first Woody Allen film to go through a digital intermediate instead of being color timed the traditional photochemical way; according to Allen its use here was a test to see if he liked it enough for his future films.
