HOLLYWOOD -- The only place Woody Allen ever really wants to be is in his bed. "My spot on the bed is my spot in the world," he explains.

It's where he watches baseball games, and reads, and where he writes, usually in the morning, because if he starts at night, he sometimes gets so excited he can't go to sleep. It's where the act of imagination is actually "pleasurable and I might go cast the people and see my characters come to life," he says.

He sounds less defiant than resigned. Of all the major American artists, Allen has experienced one of the cruelest and most violent whipsaws of fortune, of tumbling from audience adulation to mass approbation. His solution to the vagaries of public estimation is to hold fast to the belief that none of it means anything. "When you're a kid you think to yourself, 'Fame and fortune and it's going to be so exciting and ...' -- but then you quickly find after three or four films, you find, 'Wait a minute, the upside is nothing and the downside is nothing.'"

From the way Allen is talking, one would assume it's the eve of the release of one of his misfires, the platoon of piffles including "Celebrity" and "Anything Else" that followed the public scandal of his 1992 breakup with Mia Farrow, the ugly accusations (denied and never proved) of child abuse and his later marriage (now 10 years running) to Farrow's adopted daughter, then-22-year-old Soon-Yi Previn.

In fact, he has made one of his most charming and funny movies in more than a decade, "Vicky Cristina Barcelona," the tale of two American young women (Scarlett Johansson and Rebecca Hall) who, while summering in Spain, tumble into a relationship with an attractive, woman-loving artist (Javier Bardem) and his addled but delicious ex-wife (Penelope Cruz).

The film, opening Friday, is a distillation on the vagaries of love with each woman struggling to find a stable foothold: the sexual adventuress who's chronically dissatisfied (Johansson), the risk-averse would-be academic who's in danger of squelching life's passion (Hall) and the intoxicating, anarchic spirit (Cruz), who makes art great and life hell.

On a recent weekend, Allen was holed up in a hotel room, giving interviews -- a rare burden for Allen, who used to be able to escape such routine experiences.

The filmmaker, 72, is living in Los Angeles for the next month, staying in a hotel with his wife and two young daughters while he makes his opera debut directing Puccini's comic opera, "Gianni Schicchi."

He is frailer than expected, in a pristine blue-checked shirt and chinos.

He has totally gray hair, thick black glasses and skin that is curiously unwrinkled. One gets the sense that he would be happiest if everyone just left him alone to do his work. His manner is sweet but cagey.

Allen admits that going to Barcelona, Spain, to make a movie fulfilled his fantasy to one day be a European filmmaker. "I always wanted to make the kinds of films that I saw in the 1950s.

The Truffaut films and the Goddard films and the Bergmans and Fellinis, and those are the films that always influenced my work. And I've always copied them and been influenced by them.

'Vicky Cristina Barcelona' looks to me, when I see it, like one of those films. It's got all the earmarks: the music, the people bicycling through Europe, the interaction of the characters and the out-of-focus scenes that you see in those pictures."

When a Spanish company, Mediapro, approached him with the proposition to finance a film in Barcelona, the writer-director basically thought, "Why not?" "Barcelona is a city that I can live in very easily," he says.

"If they mentioned some city in the Ukraine or the Sudan or something, I would have said no. But Barcelona is a beautiful, wonderful city."

While New York City is a character in many of his films, Allen had never specifically written a movie for a locale, but his task got easier when he received a call out of the blue from Cruz, who asked if she could come meet and visit him. "And when I saw her, I thought, 'My God, she's -- if you can believe this -- more beautiful in person than she is on the screen.' I thought she was so beautiful it took my breath away."

Cruz told him that she'd love to be in his Barcelona film and by the time she left, "I would have given her all the furniture, you know?"