Woody Allen considers his 1985 feature, The Purple Rose of Cairo, as one of his few films that is “fairly close to what I wanted to do” when he set out to write it.
As for the film’s origins: The Purple Rose was a film that I just locked myself in a room to write. I wrote it and halfway through, it didn’t go anywhere and I put it aside. I didn’t know what to do. I toyed around with other ideas. Only when the idea hit me, a long time later, that the real actor comes to town and she has to choose between the screen actor and the real actor and she chooses the real actor and he dumps her, that was the time it became a real movie. Before that it wasn’t.”
