An Interview with Woody Allen.

Woody Allen (II) Thursday September 27, 2001

GA: I think we'll perhaps go on to a lighter question. I think it's true to say that you're already completed the film after The Curse of the Jade Scorpion - Hollywood Ending? Without wanting to learn too much about it, would you like to tell us a little about it?

WA: I can tell you a little bit - not too much. Hollywood Ending is a film of mine that first of all I will say, oddly enough, I kind of like. Most of them I don't like at all. I don't have a good feeling about my films I'm very very critical about them and it's very rare I finish one and get a positive feeling. But Hollywood Ending I got a positive feeling. I think it's a combination of hard work and luck. Everything seemed to fall in very well. The performers I cast were wonderful, the idea clicked, the surmises and guesses I made about things in advance seemed to come out accurate - I seemed to be on the ball when I made it. It's about a neurotic film director who lives in New York - I told you I have a small range - and he tries to make a film, and I can't tell you what happens but I can only say a very, very bizarre thing happens to him. A funny thing - at least I hope it's funny, I believe it is. And the picture stars myself and Tea Leoni, who's a wonderful young actress/comedienne and George Hamilton, who I always wanted to do a picture with and finally found the exact perfect role for, Treat Williams, and a wonderful comedienne from American television, although I used her on the movie Celebrity briefly. It was great fun to do, and I think, if you saw the picture now, you'd like it. I maybe wrong, but I do think you would like that picture.

GA: You say you find it surprising that other people aren't so prolific, but why are you so prolific?

WA: Well, first of all, a film a year is not as prolific as you think. It seems prolific in comparison with other directors, who face problems that I don't face as readily. For example, I make pictures that don't cost, really, a lot of money, and so I always, in the past, raised the money for my films in advance. For several films I make what they call 'Three Picture Deals' or 'Five Picture Deals', so I have the money. Therefore, when I pull the script out of the typewriter - say it takes me two months to write, you know, I'm a fast writer, I'm not a perfectionist, I'm careless - and then I go right into production.
Now, another film director will finish the script, or have to buy a script from someone, then after he's got his script he's faced with the chore of raising a lot of money - maybe $40-60m. So he's got to go to lunch with a movie star and cajole the movie star into doing the film, and the movie star says, "I'll let you know in six weeks." Six weeks comes and he doesn't want to do it, so he goes to lunch again and tries the same thing with a director and he flies to California and the director says, "If you can get this actress, I'll do it," so he flies to meet this actress. This goes on for two years.
If he's lucky, at the end of two years, he raises the money. I don't have that problem, so it seems like I'm prolific, but he could be just as prolific as I am if he had the money. So that's really what it is. It's not a big deal to make a film - first of all, I don't make these monumental films with 10,000 people in or fly to a foreign country and set up a city there and live there for six months.
I make pictures about New York City, with the same crew I've been working with for many years, for the most part, and I have the money right away. So it takes a few months doing, a few months to shoot it, and now with television editing it goes like [click] that. It used to take me six weeks to edit a picture, now it takes me six days to edit the whole picture. So it seems like a lot, but it's not. I have plenty of time off to play with my band, to write other things - I'll write for the theatre or the New Yorker magazine, to play with my kids, to go to basket ball games. I'm not a workaholic. It seems that way, but it's not really so.

GA: Do you have one great, unrealised ambition?

WA: I'm 65 years old now and I've made over thirty films, I've been working for thirty years... I would like to, but I don't think it's going to happen, but I would like to make one great film. That would be a wonderful thing. I would like to, in the course of my lifetime and the course of my work, make a film that I could put on the same bill as Rashomon or Grand Illusion or Rules of the Game with impunity. I could just say, "They're showing, you know, Throne of Blood and my film," and feel completely at ease and not feel completely humiliated.
That is something I would like. I thought it was going to happen at one time in my life, I thought that, if I kept making films, sooner or later, through sheer quantity, I was bound to make a great film...
I'm starting to feel now that it isn't going to happen and I will have a body of work that ranges from, you know, so-so to decent. But never great.

GA: Well, for my money, you've made a lot of great films and I think that a lot of people here would agree.
[Applause]

WA: Er... but they would be wrong.
They would be being kind. I think if I got them alone, and I showed them what I thought were great films, which is the list I gave you of films to play here - they ask for suggestions of some favourite films of mine to play here, and I gave a list of films that included Grand Illusion and The Bicycle Thief and Citizen Kane and 2001 and I don't think I have a film that can be included in that list. I don't say this with false modesty, it's my objective opinion.

GA: Hands up for questions. Yes.
Question one: I'm interested in where you get your ideas from?

WA: Well, you know, it's a funny thing. It's good luck in my life, it's the one thing I can do. I was thrown out of school, I'm not a good student, I have no competence in any particular area. For some reason, since I was a kid, I could make up stories, I could make up funny jokes and I could always do it. To this day, when I'm walking down the street or having dinner, ideas will hit me, and I write them down on matchbooks or napkins and throw them in the draw. People ask me whether I think that one day I might wake up one morning and run dry, but I've had the opposite feeling - that I would die before I had time to write all the ideas in my drawer.
When I used to write for television, many years ago, we used to go in on Monday morning, and on Saturday night there was a live television show, and we had to come up with ideas. There was no way out of it. I could sit in a room by myself and come up with ideas. It's the one thing in life that I can do. I can't question it, it's like looking a gift horse in the mouth. I can just do it. They're not titanic ideas - they're not Shakespeare or Chekhov, but they're enough to let me life a very nice living all my life.

Question two: There are about thirty or forty books written about you. Have you ever read any of them, did you like any of them and do you plan to write your autobiography?

WA: I don't read about myself. That's one of my disciplines. When I first started as a film-maker, I used to read the reviews. Now, the United States is a big country, so there used to be a pile like this. I would start to read them and this person would love it, this person didn't like it, this person thought this was my strong point and this person thought it was my weak point. By the time this was over, it cost me aggravation, and I couldn't think straight because there was so much conflicting assessment. So I stopped reading them and I stopped reading about myself. I don't read my interviews, I don't read the books on me. Eric Lax stayed with me for years and did a biography and I found him very nice, and I spoke to him and allowed him to do interviews with friends and relatives and he watched me make films. But I didn't want to read the book because I don't want to waste any time thinking about myself.
I have thought, at times, of writing an autobiography, but I don't think I'll ever get around to it. Sometimes, at night, I'm falling asleep and I think about my biography, and I write little things - they're very dramatic and anecdotally wonderful, but I don't think I'll ever get round do doing it because it's probably a waste of time. Maybe if I live as long as my parents - my father lived to 100 and my mother is 95 - if I live a very long life and I can't make films or can't write for the theatre or can't do anything else, then I might do it. But otherwise, I don't think I will.

Question three: How have the events of the 11 of September changed New York?

WA: I don't think that they've really changed New York. Every country, every city, has its tragic events - there are floods and fires and murders - and of course you grieve and its traumatising, but, you know, time passes and you rebuild and you move on with your life. Even before I left New York last week, people were starting to very slowly get back on track, and that's what will happen. The same thing happened in Oklahoma City after the terrible terrorism there. It's traumatic for a while but they'll either rebuild the twin towers as a symbolic gesture, or build something comparable in its place.
They'll be a cosmetic change - airport security will be much more severe and the government will get into the business of protecting the country in a more dedicated fashion - but I don't think anything will really change. The Yankees are playing their baseball games, the Mets are playing their baseball games, people are going to the movies, the theatre will build itself up and the nightclubs, and it will just take a little while to rev up after an unusually traumatic event. I believe that the people who perpetrated it never believed that it was going to succeed as fortuitously for them as it did.

Question four: Did you enjoy the stand-up you used to do, and do you ever miss it?

WA: I did enjoy it, yes. I was very nervous at first, and for the first year or so the tension was terrible, and that militated against full enjoyment of it. But I did enjoy it finally. The only thing I didn't enjoy about it was that if you're a stand-up comedian, your schedule is too rigorous. I would play two shows a night and three on weekends. This would be seven nights a week that I was working. Then I would fly out the next morning after three weeks in New York and play three weeks in St Louis, and then three weeks in Washington and three weeks in San Francisco, and I could go six months without having a night off. I found that debilitating and too strenuous.
But the actual contact with a live audience, especially after you've achieved a little confidence is a pleasurable interaction, one that you don't have in film. In film you have the advantage of being able to do it once and get it right and then not having to be there anymore - going home and it plays all over the world. That has its own compensation, but there's something about having contact with a live audience that's very exhilarating.

Question five: How do you reconcile the contradiction of the meaningless of existence and the great value and meaning of art?

WA: I'm ashamed to answer this question because I stick it on to keep the audience happy.
The truth of the matter is that a film like Hannah and Her Sisters, that was not the original ending of the picture - where I go into a movie and see this Groucho Marx movie and suddenly life is affirmed for me - because I don't really feel that so much, I feel that the best a Marx brothers movie could do for me is to distract me and give me an enjoyable hour-and-a-half, but that's all. The movie ended grimly in my first cut, and the audience was enjoying themselves through the whole movie and then it just fell off the table, the end was so bleak.
It was Chekhovian and very bleak. I never went back to Hannah, and Hannah's sister left me and was married to another person and I never found any solace in anything. People were enjoying the movie... by lack of skill, they were enjoying the movie on a different level, so when I had this profound ending it seemed forced and very disappointing to everybody. So I had to change it, because the film built to an affirmation. So I stuck in this affirmation at the end. I've done that before, but I must say that if I was to make my real feelings known all the time, my films would fail all the time - I go along at an entertaining pace and then, in the end, say, "But I must say, finally, that life is meaningless, it's cruel."
And then the audience, you know... You can't do it! So it's a phoney thing that I do, and I apologise.

GA: Do you actually do previews with audiences before you release the films?

WA: No, I don't. I don't give any previews. I play the film in my cutting room and I let one or two friends see it. I'm dead set against that. I think any director who is serious about his work is dead set against that. The Hollywood notion of people who screen films and then hand out pieces of paper and you write what you think about it and the audience tells you what to do. So when I've changed an ending to a film to make it more upbeat because the film is so disappointing, I always feel ashamed of myself, I always feel like I'm copping out at the end.
But it would be the worst thing in the world to screen it to audiences and they say they want a bit more of this character, less of that character, a longer scene here... These poor directors who are slaves to the studio run home and change the film to accommodate the audiences. The audience is making the film and not the film-maker. I don't really preview them. I can sense that a film is going a certain way and if I stick to my original concept, then it's going to die - maybe I wasn't skilful enough to prepare the audience for this pessimistic ending, so I have to do a re-evaluation, but it's still based on my own evaluation of my film.

Question six: Why did you force Kenneth Branagh to adopt the same limited range as yourself in celebrity?

WA: Well, Kenneth is a brilliant actor, and I was lucky to get him for the film. The film requires a forty-year-old, and I was sixty when I made it. The problems of a forty-year-old are profoundly different from the problems of a sixty-year-old, so I was looking around for someone who was a wonderful actor and could be convincing serious and convincing amusing. Kenneth's name came up and I thought, yes, if he can do an American accent, he'd be ideal for it. And he was great, and I was thrilled and lucky to get him.
Now, there were people that felt that I should have played the part, and they criticised the film on that basis. Why have Kenneth in the film doing what I would do? The truth of the matter is that I feel they were giving me an unfair criticism, they didn't like the film - which is fine - and they couldn't quite focus on why they didn't like it, so they were saying, "I didn't like this film because Woody Allen should have played this part, and Kenneth Branagh played it and he was a surrogate character for him." And they were groping to find out why they didn't like it.
I think 100 years from now someone will see that film and either like it or not like it, but it will have nothing to do with Kenneth playing the part in terms of reflecting me. I just feel that there were people who saw it and liked the film and had no problem with Kenneth playing that part. There were people who didn't like the film, and they groped for a way to express what they didn't like, and it centred on that criticism. But that wasn't really what they didn't like - it was the story or the writing or somewhere that I failed for them, and they couldn't put their finger on it.

Question seven: What was it like being Godard's King Lear, and what is it like acting for other directors?

WA: It's been fine acting for most directors... I mean, I've had very little experience of it because I never get asked to be in people's films. When they do ask me, I generally jump at the opportunity because it's an interesting thing for me, and I give myself over to the director completely. I do exactly what they want. I think I'm a pleasure to work with...
No, really, because I know what a tribulation it can be if you get stuck with an actor who gives you a hard time. I do anything that they want me to do and I'm very nice: I'm on time, I learn my lines, I hit my mark, I try anything they want me to try, I do as many takes as they want. With Godard, the experience was bizarre because he's a genius and he asked me to do this film, King Lear, and I would never have said no to him because he's one of the great luminaries of cinema. He said it would only take a couple of hours and I turned up one morning and it did only take a couple of hours, and he was on the set in a bath robe, smoking a cigarette and asked me to do a few things, and I thought to myself, "Gee, this is going to either be a work of genius or a complete catastrophe."
I never saw the film, but I've heard from people that it's really godawful... and it doesn't surprise me for a second. But I'm proud to be associated with him, because he's a genius, you know, when he misses, he really misses.

Question eight: We had Liv Ullman on here on stage, and she described the meeting between you and Ingmar Bergman at dinner, and her version was that neither of you spoke all evening. What is your version of the story?

WA: I wish she was here now because it's completely wrong. She got us together in New York, years ago, for dinner and I was nervous beyond belief because this great, great genius had deigned to speak to me, let alone have me for dinner. So we went to his hotel room and I found him to be completely down-to-earth, totally conversational, spoke to me about things which I'll tell you about, not at all the dark, foreboding genius that you might think. He was as sweet and friendly and down-to-earth as you can imagine.
We spoke about... he said he had the same problems with films as I had - that he'd open a film and the producers would call him and predict how much money it was going to make and then 24 hours later reality sets in and we both realise that our films aren't going to make $20m, or $20 even. And he spoke to me about his insecurities as a director - about having these dreams where he comes on to the set and can't speak. We spoke about things that were bread-and-butter and totally down-to-earth and not at all like a great, mystical genius like I had built him up to be.
I thought that he'd be wearing black and would appear in a puff of smoke... But it was not like that at all, and Liv Ullman joined the conversation, and Bergman and I talked about authors we liked, and wine, and work habits. It was very nice and warm and familiar. And many years later I went to Sweden and he called me and we had a two-hour conversation on the phone and again it was the same kind of thing. We talked about our fears - I talked about my fears and he talked about his, but I'm me and he's Bergman, so it was very funny to me.
I hear that on his set he's very touchy and warm and holds you, and I found that to be the case at dinner. So it's not at all how Liv Ullman described it.

GA: So Bergman can touch your clothes, but other people can't.

WA: Bergman, yeah, Bergman can have my clothes.

Question nine: Have you ever had to persuade an actor to be in one of your films?

WA: There have been times when I've not been able to persuade them. Usually if I send them the material and they're available they either want to do it or don't want to do it. There's this myth that I just call up people and everybody wants to be in my films and they just never say no. It's not true. Many people who get a lot of money are willing to work with me for no money. This is true. But there have been any number of people I've called up over the years and given scripts to, who've said they want to be in a film of mine and they say, "I like the script. And you know I normally get $20m." The whole picture doesn't cost $20m, so it's not possible.
So I have been turned down by some very famous actors that I wanted to be in my films. I've never had to persuade anybody, either they want to do it or they don't.

Question ten: Do you rehearse a lot, is the rehearsal process important.

WA: I don't do any rehearsal at all. It's part of a method of working that I've evolved that works for me. Other people rehearse. I've acted in pictures for Paul Mazursky, who rehearses everything meticulously, he puts tape marks on the floor and walks to your mark. After a couple of weeks in the rehearsal hall we rehearsed on location. I never do that. Sometimes I don't even know what I'm going to shoot that day. I like it to be fresh. The assistant director gives me the list of stuff I'm supposed to do and I set up the shot then we call the actors to the set and then I say: you walk here and do this, you walk there and do that, you come over here. Ninety per cent of the time they say fine, once in a while they say that seems funny to them and unnatural and ask if they can walk somewhere else. I say yes. Walk over there. I shoot a lot of long masters. I don't shoot a lot of close-ups over the shoulder. I try to get the whole scene in one shot if I can.

Question eleven: Where does the motivation come from to keep making films if you're a pessimist?

WA: For me, it's really like therapy. If you take an inmate in a mental institution they give them basket weaving and finger painting... You know, it's good for their health, it's good for their stability. With me, it's movies. If I didn't make movies, if I didn't work then I'd sit at home and brood and think and my mind would drift to unsolvable issues that are very depressing. If I work I become obsessed with characters and what joke to use, and these are problems that are solvable. They're annoying, but they're solvable. If I didn't work I would be facing problems that I didn't want to think about.

Question twelve: Which of your films so far have you had positive feelings about in the same way that you're positive about Hollywood Ending?

WA: I had positive feelings for Purple Rose of Cairo, Zelig, Husbands and Wives and Bullets Over Broadway. And I'll tell you why. They weren't exhilarating feelings, but they weren't positive. For me, the success of a film is when I get an idea in the bedroom and write it, ninety-nine per cent of the time the film I end up with bears little relation to the brilliant idea I had in the bedroom. The film may be a success with the public, but I feel that if only they knew what I had conceived in the bedroom they could really see something great. If only I could've given them that.
Those films that I mentioned were fairly close to what I wanted to do. So I count those films among the films that I feel more sanguine about.

GA: I'm afraid that's all we have time for.

WA: Thank you all for coming, I'm flattered and astounded that you showed up, and if you see my movie, don't be too harsh on it. I gave it my best shot and I hope at least some of you like it. But I can't guarantee it. I'll make it up to you on the next one.

GA: Thank you, Woody Allen.