 He was listening to one of the composer's albums of overtures and thought, "this would be a beautiful thing to make ... a movie in black and white ... a romantic movie".Allen has said that "Manhattan" was "like a mixture of what I was trying to do with "Annie Hall" and "Interiors"" and that it deals with the problem of people trying to live a decent existence in an essentially junk-obsessed contemporary culture without selling out, admitting that he himself could conceive of giving away all of his "possessions to charity and living in much more modest circumstances," adding that he has "rationalized [his] way out of it so far, but [he] could conceive of doing it.