By Thomas Chau in New York City

Woody Allen may not be the revered filmmaker he was ten years ago but he still manages to gain a chuckle out of all of us every now and then. This weekend, his latest feature "Melinda and Melinda" opens in theaters everywhere. Allen mixes tragedy and comedy together in this film about duo stories surrounding a troubled woman named Melinda (Radha Mitchell). "Melinda and Melinda" features an all-star cast which also includes Will Ferrell, Chloe Sevigny, Amanda Peet, and Chiwetel Ejiofor. Below, Allen talks about his latest feature as well as his career.

Q: I heard this was a project in the works for a very long time. What about it was so enticing to attack?

WOODY: There have been many times when I've had ideas that I felt would have worked either way, the idea could have been written amusingly or as a serious story and in the past I'd always chosen one and gone in that direction and here I had an idea and again I thought gee this could make quite a serious story, but it could also make a quite funny romantic story and then it occurred to me why don't I alternate the two and see if I could picture and maybe learn something from trying to juxtapose the two. Of course, I learned nothing in trying to do this. It was fun to do, but it was not enlightening.

Q: Do you prefer to write the comedy or the tragedy?

WOODY: It's always fun to write the heavy stuff for me because over the years I've done a lot of movies and almost all of them have been comic so it's fun to do something occasionally that's very, very heavy just for the change, but then when I realized I was going to be working with Will, I went back over the script and tried to customize it more for him and that became fun.

Q: Will Ferrell plays what you would normally play as the alter-ego. Is it similar or different than how you envisioned the part?

WOODY: First of all, he's so physically different. He's a big, silly person and everyone that's seen him and laughed at him as I have in these broad, broad ridiculous comedies the question was could he act and be believable as me. It turned out because I guess his size and his face and whatever talent he has that he's vulnerable, there's something sweet about him and your heart goes out to him and he's very, very amusing. Now, there were things in the script, in the actual dialogue of the script, that he couldn't do, since I'm writing the dialogue, the tendency s to write it for myself. Even though I knew I'd never be playing it, but I write it instinctively for myself, but I had to cut some lines and some dialogue out of the thing because he couldn't do it. It just never sounded funny when he did it, but there were things that he did do that I could have never imagined when I was writing it before I met him. I never could have imagined for the script and these were contributions that he would make that are just so built in to his ridiculous persona, you know the way he moves, there's something in the look of his face, it's intangible, but it's silly and sweet.

Q: How does your casting process now?

WOODY: It's always a question of who's best for the role, and that's the first thing you think of. Then you find out that your choices are not available or that they won't work for no money, which is what we have, so that's really how we do it. Now, sometimes you get very, very expensive actors who couldn't care less about money and they're available and they rush to do it. They love it.

Q: So how did casting Radha come about?

WOODY: In this picture, it was very tough to find somebody who could be very dramatic and convincing and handle the light romantic stuff as well. Sometimes when we're filming, she had to do it in the same day. We'd come in the morning and she come in the morning and she'd cry and attempt to commit suicide or something and then in the afternoon she'd have to be light and frothy. I'd never heard of her. I had no idea that she existed even. And then I saw a scene from "Phone Booth," the Joel Schumacher movie, and I thought she was very good, very attractive and very convincing actress. Then they sent me some independent film footage of her and she was very, very good and I called her and she wanted to do it and I just felt why not, I've been very lucky in the past with women I've worked with whether they were known or unknown, but even unknowns, I've been very, very lucky with them and I felt you know it seems to me that she could do this, and she looks great, she's charming and she's good actress and she was great, but it took a long time to find her. It was a very tough part.

Q: You've been known to fire some of your actors while shooting. Why does this happen?

WOODY: Well, what firable really turns out to be in the end is my casting mistake because the person does no wrong. I hire them and I'm convinced that they can do it and then they come in and they don't do it. This has happened to me before and I try every conceivable way I can to get them to do it. I talk to them, I explain it, I try to be as lucid as I can and then if that doesn't work, sometimes I try and trick them in a transparent way and I take the script and I say let's see, the camera comes in over here and then he says this and then I act it out for them and I'm hoping that they'll pick it up from me and sometimes they do, but sometimes they don't and no matter what I do I can't get it. So I'm not the skilled director like Elia Kazaan was or Mike Nichols where they can get a performance out of someone that can't act. I can't do that. I don't know how they do it, but I can't do it so after three days of trying to get the person to do the scene with every resource I can think of, I fire them because I don't know what else to do. I feel we're doomed if we use them, the whole picture will die and I can't think of what else to do. If I was more resourceful or if I had cast more judiciously, although I think I'm casting judiciously at the time, but it's possible someone will come in and read and they'll be very goop at the reading and then for some inexplicable reason they can't do it when the time comes. It doesn't happen a lot, but it does happen occasionally. It has happened to me through the years at times and you know, it's a terrible thing.

Q: Is it an honor that some of the best actors out there still want to work with you?

WOODY: I'm not surprised because they only work with me if they're between desirable jobs. If I call and actor or an actress and someone else like a Steven Spieberg or Martin Scorsese is calling them; they're fine directors and are offering them substantial money, they have no interest in me at all, but if they just finished a picture and they've earned their 10 million dollar salary and they have nothing to do till August and I call them in June and they like the part, you know, they say why not?

Q: Will you ever direct something that somebody else has written?

WOODY: I've never done that. I really have only directed because I'm a writer and I like to write. But I wouldn't rule that out, now that I'm getting older to try the experience once, just to see what it would be like to direct somebody else's script, but I've only directed in the past cause I wrote the script. The fun was getting my idea on, not directing.

Q: Do you ever wish you could direct a $100 million dollar film?

WOODY: I wish I had the hundred mil, but it's very hard. People are making films, and in my lifetime it went so that the average film is 50-60 million dollars and 100 million dollar films are common and considerably more. I'm making films where everything, my salary, the whole film will be like a maximum, maximum of 15 million dollars or 14 million dollars and it's tough because there's a lot of things I want to do that I can't do and you know they'll say when I did this next film that hasn't come out yet, match point, they said to me you're not going to be able to afford music. You just can't. And I figured out a way, by sing all opera, and that I was able to conive with an opera company that was putting out an Enrico Caruso album to get the music. But there's a lot of things you can't do. Any kind of special effects or reshooting things and taking the proper times, you can't do it.

"Melinda and Melinda" opens in limited release this Friday.