In a remarkable career revival, Woody Allen yesterday lifted the 58th Cannes Film Festival to giddy heights with the world premiere of his new serious movie about lust, love and murder.

Match Point, starring sensuous American starlet Scarlett Johansson and brooding Irish actor Jonathan Rhys Meyers, wowed the critics in the morning and played Cannes last night -- out-of-competition because Allen abhores prizes.

But the 69-year-old Allen does crave attention and, despite stuggling to make out questions because his hearing is deteriorating, he played to the press conference yesterday with a combination of serious insight and classic quips.

On the subject of the sex and violence in Match Point, Allen said: "If you think the movie has a certain amount of sex and a certain amount of violence in it, I thought that it was discreetly done. There wasn't a lot of overt sexuality -- there was implied sex -- and there wasn't a lot of overt violence in it -- just off screen. So it may have been sexy for one of my movies, but, by the standards of movies in general, it wasn't really."

On abandoning his sacred Manhattan and filming Match Point entirely in England as a British production: "I did the film in England because, in the United States where I've been making films for decades, it has become increasingly more difficult.

"I can get financing, but it's become more and more prevalent for the studios to want to participate in the project.

"They don't want to be thought of as just a bank. They want to feel that they have something to say about the cast. They want to read the script. They like to occasionally come to dailies. And I have never worked that way in my life and couldn't work that way.

"So I don't let the people read the script and I don't let them talk to me about casting or to see anything. I want the money in a brown paper bag, and to give them the film a few months later and that's it. In London, the financing was such that I could work exactly that way. I didn't have to go through any kind of rigamarole with any American people."

On casting Johansson, who replaced English star Kate Winslet in the role of the temptress whose fate is at the heart of the film: "Originally, I cast an English girl in Scarlett's part because I thought everybody had to be British. I didn't think I had any option to cast an American in anything."

Allen then learned that the British tax breaks allowed some flexibility and he re-cast the role with Johansson. "I thought she would be fantastic for this and happened to be available and willing to work for the very, very small money we can afford to pay people. It's a very democratic way of working -- everybody gets nothing and everyone is billed in alphabetical order, no matter how big a star he or she may be. It depends on the letter of your name. It's very low key.

"She was willing to work that way because she was interested more in the creative aspect of the thing than in the usual superficial rewards of the film business. So I hired her."

REPRISE: Scarlett Johansson was so keen on Woody Allen and Match Point, she is willing to go at it again. She stars in his next flick, also to shoot in London this summer.

"I'm glad that we're working together again," the stunning but stunned-looking Johansson said in one of the few moments where she was willing to speak up yesterday.

"It's a thrill. I don't know about being his muse, but it's certainly nice working with him again and we get free lunches on set, too. That's nice."

WEDDING BELLS: Cannes gossip mongers are abuzz with the news that Justin Timberlake flew into Nice yesterday. The notion is that he may be scouting hotels nearby where he can marry his fiancee, actress Cameron Diaz, in another surprise celebrity wedding, a la Bennifer II in Niagara Falls.