Interview: Wood Allen

Just who is Woody Allen? Everybody thinks they know him. I’ve never spoken to the man yet I expect to know him like an old friend. When we speak over the phone, it’s 12pm in New York. I’m full of expectation. The line is distant and fuzzy. I wait for him to come at me a mile a minute down the line. But he doesn’t. Allen speaks slowly – gentle, thoughtful. There’s music in his voice. But he sounds tired. Who wouldn’t be? He’s written and directed a film a year for the past 40 years. And, when asked, he’s more than happy to burst the myth that we all think we know Woody Allen.
“There is no Woody Allen figure really in any of my movies, actually,” he says. “They are totally fictional characters that I wrote... But, ahh, I’m nothing like the character in the movies. People always think that I am of course, but they don’t have the faintest idea...”
And I’m willing to go along with that. Even as I listen to him pepper his phrases with those trademark pauses (“ummm” and “you know”) and the non sequiturs that litter his speech. And then, a little while later, he drops in the phrase “existential philosophy” and a smile breaks on my face. And he gets excited when we get to talking about death. If this isn’t the Woody Allen we all know and love, then who could it be?
There lies the problem with Woody Allen. His films are so interwoven with his personal preoccupations, they can be hard to untangle. Whatever approach he has taken for his movies (cut and paste together in any order: slapstick, farce, parody, screwball romance, chamber drama or tragedy) his distinctive voice shines through. The Brooklyn-born auteur has made a career kvetching about his insecurities: love, death and everything in between. He makes us laugh at our own anxiety. (The tagline for Annie Hall was “A nervous romance”.)
Critics would happily split Allen’s career into three stages. There are those early films (his first proper film was Take the Money and Run in 1969) which bustle with beguiling slapstick, cheeky literary references and Allen’s trademark New York Jewish neuroticism. Then Allen hit his stride in 1977 with Annie Hall which won four Oscars. In that middle period, he made one extraordinary film after another. Ask a Woody Allen fan to choose some DVDs to take to a desert island and it would be a difficult choice between films such as Manhattan, Zelig, Broadway Danny Rose, The Purple Rose of Cairo, Hannah and her Sisters, Radio Days or his final masterpiece Crimes and Misdemeanors. Those films are glorious: rich and warm, deeply textured with an elasticity his later films lack. They are not just deeply funny still, but improve with age. But things have slowly dived since Crimes and Misdemeanors in 1989. Though there have been moments. With each new release there has been talk of a revival though critics have ho-hummed and fans have grumbled.
And now, there’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona, a hit with US audiences. Though critics have fallen on both sides, surely its success makes Allen sleep better at night?
“Nah, I never think of those things,” he says chuckling. “I’ve been ahh… I’ve had so many box-office failures in my life ahh... so many more than successes, that, ahh, that I’m used to it and I’m always surprised when a film of mine does anything at the box office. I haven’t read a criticism good or bad of a film of mine in 30 years.” Not even a sneak peek? “No, I have no temptation whatsoever,” he says.
And what about the critics who say Woody Allen hasn’t made a great film in 20 years? Surely that has to get under the skin? “It’s a matter of non interest to me,” he says. “Like those sports that I’m not interested in. You know, like, I’m a great basketball and baseball fan. I’m devoted to them. And boxing. Hockey is a sport that I never got interested in and so hockey has no interest for me whatsoever. It’s just completely uninteresting. And I feel the same way about... uhh... things written about my movies. Not just criticism but any, you know, insights, or observations about them. They are all something that I have never been interested in.”
Vicky Cristina Barcelona, he says, came about because Spain put the money up. (The film, shot mainly in Barcelona, makes a small detour to Oviedo, where there is a statue of Allen.)
Vicky Cristina Barcelona tells the story of two chalk-and-cheese American friends (Rebecca Hall and Scarlett Johannson) who go to Barcelona for a summer. Both are seduced by the appropriately named Juan (Javier Bardem), a strutting artist with a crazy ex-wife (Penélope Cruz) whose tempestuous lunacy spills all over the place. Both Cruz and Bardem dial the Latin heat to sweltering. Life lessons are learned and then discarded. Nobody knows what they want.
The film is shot both in English and Spanish and I wondered if that posed any problems.
“It was not difficult at all,” Allen says. “There was a script and they obeyed the script, although there were times I asked Javier and Penélope to improvise and they did improvise in Spanish and I didn’t know what they were saying. But I could tell from their body language, their physical actions, that they were doing the right emotions. It worked out pretty well.”
And how much input did Cruz, now Oscar nominated, give for her character? “I felt she created it all,” he says. “You know, she comes from there, she brings that presence. She gets out and does it and she brings it to life. I write down the character but, you know, when you see a character in script form it’s just lifeless words and you give it to 20 different actresses and you’ll get 20 different versions. She was the one that brought all the fire and the passion and the vitality to it.”
The film riffs on a classic Allen theme: the conflict that occurs in relationships when people just don’t know what they want. At 73, has Allen come any closer to knowing anything for sure? His voice brightens. “I’ve achieved no wisdom whatsoever,” he says. “I’ve, you know, after all the years, all the problems remain the same. I haven’t really... I feel these things are all unknowable and unsolvable and they will be the same problems a thousand years from now.”
One of the joys of Allen’s great comedies is the way they take these problems into account. They are buoyed up with a witty, knowing humour, but never lose sight of what is essentially tragic. And yet, Allen has said many times over the years that if he could give up comedy to be a great dramatist, he would. Does he now feel any different?
“Well, I’d love to be able to do, you know, great heavy stuff, you know, just from a pure pleasurable point of view. It’s fun to write a tragedy or a melodrama. I enjoy that. But, ahh, I’ve been able to do comedies over the years, that have been... the strength of them has been that they’ve been basically serious and like Vicky Cristina, kind of sad, the futility of life underneath them. On the other hand, that quality that makes them interesting to a portion of the people keeps another portion of people out of the theatres.”
And who might that be? “Well, there are people who go to the theatre and see a comedy and they want to laugh and be entertained completely. They’re not interested in the sadder side of life or the other dimensions of life. They get that if they go to a drama.
“But if they go to a comedy, they want to see, you know, girls and guys, doors slamming and guys in the wrong beds, and things like that. And they want to laugh. They want to put their troubles away while they laugh.
“My comedies, you know, don’t let them usually do that. They laugh when they’re funny but, you know, they’re always mindful of the sad undercurrent of life and that would be off-putting.
“I do want to make people think and feel a little bit about the poignancy of life and you know I hope that they’re entertained when they do it. I don’t want it to be homework. I don’t want them to feel it’s a course in existential philosophy or a course in interpersonal relations or something. You know, I want them to come in and enjoy themselves. But I don’t want them to just have a mindless experience. I want them to, you know, to get some sense of the underlying tragedy of life.”
Allen has his eye still firmly on the future. His next film, Whatever Works, stars Curb Your Enthusiasm’s Larry David. It sounds like a perfect fit. (“I feel comfortable with him doing my material. He gets it.”) While he plans to return to London to shoot his next film in the summer. (“I like being in London. The weather is cool. The skies are grey.”) Does he ever revisit those earlier movies? “No, no, I never do that. That would depress me. I mean, I’d be sitting there thinking, ‘Oh God, what did I do? I can do that so much better and I shouldn’t have done this and that – it’s so obviously wrong.’ I’d be nothing but critical and there’s nothing I could do about it.”
Woody can’t face his own movies. He famously can’t deal with death. Though after 40 years of talking about it, it’s not for want of trying. Does it get any easier at 73?
“I’ve thought about death every day,” he laughs. “Since I was eight years old. And I haven’t come any closer [to accepting it]. Because there’s never been any room to come closer. And I mean, it’s something that I always think about. It’s the number one factor – one’s mortality is the number one issue of one’s life. So you know it hasn’t increased for me but that doesn’t mean it’s still not enormously prominent.”
So what does he think the public will make of him when Woody Allen finally gets around to dying? “They’ll say, ‘Who are you thinking of? Who....?’”