“Nostalgia is a trap, there’s no question about that. It’s based on the idea that now is always terrible. So there’s always a sense that if you could have lived in a different time, things would have been more pleasant. One thinks back, for instance, to Gigi, and you think, well, this is Belle Époque Paris, they have horses and carriages and gas lamps and everything is beautiful. Then you start to realize that if you went to the dentist, there was no Novocain, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Women died in childbirth — there were all kinds of terrible problems.

Naturally, if I’m sitting here now, and they’re dying in Libya and the economy is going under and we have a terrible split in the country and they’re patting us down in airports, I think to myself, ‘God, wouldn’t I be better off sitting at Maxim’s in the 1890s?’ But it doesn’t really work that way, and that’s how nostalgia trips you up. For movies it’s great! In movies, you can create the past as you want to see it. But I do think that’s the sad note in my movie, that everybody doesn’t want to be where they are.”

- Woody Allen