Fans of Woody Allen have been anxiously awaiting Whatever Works, which opens the Tribeca Film Festival next week, Allen’s first New York-based film in years and his first ever collaboration with Larry David, of Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm fame. Happily, David, who at first looked a stretch to fit Woody’s cerebral, romantic, if kooky sensibility, is something of a homecoming for the writer-director. “It used to be Diane Keaton with me–she always used to tell me, ‘I’m terrible, I’m awful, I can’t do it, you should get someone else.’ And she was always brilliant. Well, Larry is like this,” he tells The New York Observer’s Sara Vilkomerson. “I gave him every opportunity to get someone else,” says David, whose turn with Allen, it must be said, is reminiscent of and as apparently unlikely as his role in a Martin Scorsese film in the third season of Curb Your Enthusiasm . Happily too, the partnership is, according to Vilkomerson, a success: “Whatever Works is Woody Allen exactly as you want your Woody Allen to be. It’s witty, dark, poignant, zany and hilarious, and showcases a New York filtered through the Allen lens as we’ve never seen it before.”