WOODY ALLEN INTERVIEW by Norman Spinrad

Introduction
A week or so after attending an advanced press screening for Woody Allen's new film CELEBRITY, a bit of a celebrity turn out of the film itself, I found myself in suite at the Hotel Ritz, interviewing the celebrity author of a film about celebrity in perhaps the ultimate celebrity venue in Paris. Just the sort of thing that Kenneth Branagh's character does in the movie. And as I recovered from messing up the first 30 seconds of the recording, much like the celebrity-hound in the film might have done, it seemed like an inevitable place to start. Strangely enough, or perhaps not so strangely, less than a month previously, I had finished writing a novel in which a suite at the Ritz is used for somewhat similar purposes. Better still, the title in English is GLASS HOUSES, as in people who live in them (such as celebrities) shouldn't throw stones. Happily, we didn't.
 
WOODY ALLEN: On American television every single person is a celebrity, every priest and doctor and chef and lawyer.
 
NORMAN SPINRAD: Up to our wonderful president who essential- ly governs by polls, and in a sense is the ultimate celebrity. Which was half-mirrored in your movie, a very recursive movie. Kenneth Branagh is sort of doing your schtick, although the character he's playing is not like you and is not like the char- acter you usually play...I found that fascinating.
 
W.A.: It was just accidental.
 
N.S: Is anything accidental? I mean it's a very recursive movie in a way, the part where Kenneth Branagh is sort of doing your schtick, although the character he's playing is not like you and is not like the character you usually play...I found that fasci- nating.
 
W.A He's an interesting actor.I wanted an actor to play it origi- nally because I write in American slang but in the US you can't find regular men, they're all gangster or cowboys. ... I've used Michael Caine before, I've used Ian Holm, because in the US our stars, they're great but they're a tare certain types, they're Robert de Niro, Al Pacino, Jack Nicholson, Tom Cruise. It's very hard to find just a plain guy, who's not beautiful and not tough ... So I had to turn to... fortunately Kenneth was avail- able...
 
N.S: And he played as American as it gets. Bob Hoskins can do that too.
 
W.A: Certain guys can do it, it's amazing to me, and certain peo ple, and even good actors can't do it for whatever reason, it's the ear.
 
N.S: You couldn't play an Englishman.
 
W.A.:I once saw my friend Dick Cavette, I once saw him do a British play on Broadway and he played an Englishman, and I was just astonished. He could do it and act doing it not just do it for two minutes, but play a character.
 
N.S: The most amazing I saw was MOSCOW ON THE HUDSONB, with Robin Williams doing ten minutes of comedy in Russian.
 
W.A.: But of course Robin Williams does all these voices...
 
N.S.:Maybe it was lousy Russian but...
 
W.A.:But he does it convincingly,
 
N.S.: Yeah, yeah. But how much of that was planned?..
 
W.A.: It was pretty much all planned although I gave him freedom to ad lib if he wanted to and he felt a little at sea ad libing only because of having to do an American all the time. It was easier to do the dialogue as an American than to improvise as an American. Judy Davis did it to, if you were with Judy Davis here, she speaks with a thick Australian accent and, then turns it off and it's like you're with an American who lived there all her life.
 
N.S.:There are people who can do it.
 
W.A. You remember Sid Caesar? He was great at that.
 
N.S: He did a German film company making an Italian spaghetti Western, so he did Germans speaking Italian...
 
W.A. He had that same gift like Robin Williams, where he could do in the same show, he would do the German, the Japanese the Eng- lishman.
 
N.S.: Why black and white ?
 
W.A: Black and white's pretty..B. I don't know if you feel this way, but I feel that many of the greatest films I grew up on and loved were black and white, they're fun to watch, black and white is a pretty thing, you know pretty photography in black and white, and I'd say probably 90 o/o of the films I was influenced by and crazy about were black and white movies, I mean, you probably liked many of the same ones...
 
N.S.: Yeah... The whole idea of colorizing the stuff...
 
W.W. They don't do that so much anymore I guess there was so much displeasure at it, but there was a time there, for about two years when they were colorizing just about almost everything, it gave a strange look to it...
 
N.S.:No it didn't work, I mean it just didn't work.
 
W.A: And it was expensive for them to do it too, now they don't do it any more...Now you just never see it.
 
N.S: Because you lose the contrast of the black and white, you lose the whole thing. But do you think it had anything to do with the subject matter, that distance....? Of being about celebrity and stuff like that...? Because it seemed to work that way.
 
W.A.: There is a definite difference and distance between the lives celebrity lead and the lives that poor average people lead and it's a sad thing I mean they're so many privileges I'm sure you realize that you get as a celebrity that the average guy never get a chance to experience in his life ...
 
N.S.: That is true!
 
W.A.: I mean if you call up tonight for a table at a restaurant--
 
N.S.:Maybe!
 
W.A.: No, they'll give it to you... This is what a celebrity goes through, first of all they get more money than other people , not necessarily deserved, but more money, a guy teaching school in a poor black neighborhood in the United States, where it's a real difficult job and dangerous, and he's really trying to help and trying to do a good thing, he gets paid very little money while a celebrity makes a jerky movie, a really stupid movie with car crashes or special effects and gets 20 millions bucks.
 
N.S: Or like these basketball players on strike for whatever, 30 million dollars ...
 
W.A.: I know, that's so sad, kids go to school, they don't gradu- ate from the school, they're not literate, they come out of school at 19 years old they get signed to a 126 million dollar contract--
 
N.S.: I mean, I wouldn't complain! But I don't have the height.
 
W.A.: And then you get a strike, I mean it's just amazing. I'm not saying the players are wrong....
 
N.S.: No, they're really not wrong, because the others guys--
 
W.A.: The other guys have more money! They do the paying.
 
N.S: But there's still something disproportionate about it...
 
W.A: Yeah, and it's really hurting, you know I'm a big basketball fan and we probably won't have any season this year.
 
N.S: I doubt it.
 
W.A.: I wonder what it's gonna do to the sport in general. You know it was so going so great in general, there was such great momentum going, and then suddenly this has been the biggest sport collapse in the history of the United States.
 
N.S:Well, of course it happened to baseball a few years ago.
 
W.A.: It happened to half the season,
 
N.S: Yeah but they canceled the World Series. And it took them take them years to come back.
 
W.A.: It's just terrible.
 
N.S.: But the other side of celebrity which is very good in the movie, is that there are certain things that ordinary people have things have that celebrities don't have...
 
W.A.: Yeah, privacy.
 
N.S.: Like being able to walk in a restaurant and not be bothered I mean I don't have much of that, I've experienced it in a few places, cause I'm a writer I don't have that much face celebrity ordinarily.
 
W.A.: So you have the best of it, You have the celebrity privileges, you can get a reservation when you call up...
 
N.S: I had a taste of it in Romania though, for various reasons.
 
W.A.: In Romania?
 
N.S: I was maybe the first American writer to do pr for a book in Romania. My wife and I came down on the train from Bucharest for a week to the Black Sea to away from it, but we were met at the station with a television camera , and this was a small city and it proceeded from there ...
 
W.A.: So you had no peace.
 
N.S. Not that much. Face recognition! Face recognition!
 
W.A.:Right, so I'm not crazy when I say it's an unnatural feel- ing, I mean, if it happened to you there, and you get followed around the restaurant the hotel and all that...
 
N.s: Well the most bizarre moment was on the beach, my wife was topless and not too many people are topless there, these young kids come over and totally ignore her. All they want is an auto- graph and they go away and she's really pissed off.
 
W.A.: That's very funny.
 
N.S: But ordinarily you don't get that if you're a writer, how many writers have face recognition value, no matter who you are? A handful, it's not the same thing.
 
W.A.: Right writers.. But of course in the United States now with the talk shows, you get a lot of writers on television. Years ago, if you were Flaubert, or... a writer in the previous century, you 'd have total anonymity, total, no one would know your face but now on television, everyone does knows Saul Bellow's face and Norman Mailer's face...
 
N.S: A few people... But you know, even actors, I suppose, politicians, prior to the invention of photograph, didn't have this problem.
 
W.A.: Right.
 
N.S.:It's the photography..
 
W.A: A different Presidential campaign and reaction time.
 
N.S: I mean a president could probably walk the street in those days without being recognized. A funny thought.
 
WA : Where do you live ?
 
N.S:Here.
 
W.A.:You live in Paris?
 
W.A.:Where are you from originally ?
 
N.S.: New York.
 
W.A.: Why did you settle in Paris ?
 
N.S.: It's a long story, I originally came here to write a book that was set here and then liked Europe. was in the middle of everything was going on. And also, like you only more so, my work is better received here and even though I have to struggle with French, I just came from a diplomatic conference where I had to do the whole thing in French, even though I have to struggle with French, which is the price you pay, I feel more culturally connected here than I do in the States.
 
W.A.: And you've been able to live here for how many years now ?
 
N.S; Nine years.
 
W.A.: And no problem adjusting or anything...?
 
N.S.:Oh there's a problem adjusting to the language...but aside from that...Also, I arrived here as a celebrity! Which helps, especially when I was getting my papers done and they were giving me a hard time. I just called my publisher and said "Make this go away." And they said, "Well there's a police official who wants an autographed book." Fine. So we got the diplomatic section.
 
W.A.: So where in New York where you from?
 
N.S.: I grew up in the Bronx and lived in Manhattan, then I lived in LA then I lived in London, then I lived in New York, LA, London...
 
W.A.: But this is...?
 
N.S.: Yeah, I like it better here. I don't like this weather, I don't like getting sick every winter...
 
W.A. But apart from that...
 
N.S.: Yeah. It's a personal individual thing too, but I feel very well treated here as a writer, as an artist but I even feel a sense of civic obligation here that I don't in the States I mean I get these fancy things, go to some nice place. go to Monaco .. stay in a hotel like this... but I also get asked to do tough schools for no money, things like that.... And I do it.
 
W.A.:Right.
 
N.S.: Because I feel obligated.
 
W.A: You feel you want to make a contribution.
 
N.S. Yeah. I didn't feel the same thing in the States.
 
W.A.: Right, because they don't have the same affection for an artist. When you come here as an artist, you feel, from an average person in the street right up to the most sophisticated person, that there is a genuine enthusiasm they have for art in general and one's work.
 
N.S.: When you're in the States and you're a writer and you've got money and you walk into a bank and you've got money, you're a bum with money. If you're broke, you're just a bum.
 
W.A.: Right!
 
N.S.:Have you ever thought of living here ?
 
W.A: I have thought of it at times, and I talk about it with my wife every now and then, but I don't know whether I'd be able to leave New York or not...You know what I feel, it's like I can't get the nerve, to leave, to plan to leave, but whenever I come here, if I never returned it wouldn't bother me.
 
N.S: That's how it happened with me. For years I said, I'd like to live here sometime. Then I came with my wife, we were new together at the time, she felt in love with this city and I cooked up an idea to do book set here, the whole thing was synergetic. I said, ah, we'll go here for a year.
 
W.A.: Ah hah!
 
N.S: And then stayed! I had a nightmare with the house I was subletting In LA to awful people.... other words, I didn't move clean at all... I've still got staff in storage in Los Angeles, tons of my books.
 
W.A.: Right, just never went back. And that's the way I could conceive of myself doing it.
 
N.s.: I think you'd have a good time here...
 
W.A: Oh I think so too! Because whenever I'm here, I love it and I always feel depressed when I have to leave here.
 
N.S.: You could keep a place in New York too, I suppose.
 
W.A.: Right, but that would be the way to go, to not have the anxiety of well, I'm moving, I'm selling my apartment...
 
N.S.: No, no I know people who have done that and it's too dras- tic.
 
W.A.:.Yes, that's a drastic way to do it.,
 
N.S.:Besides, if you have a decent apartment in New York it's always worth something...
 
W.A. Where do you live here ?
 
N.S. I live in the 5th on the Left Bank across from Notre Dame off the Place Maubert.
 
W.A.: And you walk around, just enjoy the city...?
 
N.S.:Yeah, it's really nice down there, that's a part of Paris that's like a little village. I know people, I know everybody on the street by now, and that's a thing here maybe you don't get in New York. I'm a little bit of a celebrity too, because I'm on television. But there's, at least in certain places in Paris, there's this kind of neighborhood village life, where you're just like the guy who buys the meat. And that's good for your head I think, that's really good for your head... Which brings me to another question which is the music, because this interests me too. I'm doing a little bit of music now, a bit of painting. I don't know how serious you are about the music, what I mean is, I feel it's really good for my head to be doing something else which is not what I'm expected to be making any money at, and I'm certainly I'm not as good as that, as I am as what I really do...
 
W.A: But it's fun, right. It's no different as I see it than being a weekend golfer... It's a hobby and it's fun...Do you devote a lot of time?
 
N.S: It depends. right now, I'm working with a band here called Heldon, I don't even know what I'm doing, I'm writing songs, I'm helping with the mix. I sing one little cut, I'm not very good. They seem to think I'm more important than I am. And these are friends of mine, this group consists of Richard Pinhas, who's a long time musician but also has two doctorates in philosophy another novelist, Maurice Dantec, me, a singer, David Korn, who also does other things, but we're making a serious album and it's a lot of time in the studio.
 
W.A.: And you're writing for it? You're writing songs? So you know enough music, harmony. to be writing songs?
 
N.S: No, not to arrange, I can write tunes, I can write lyrics, I can coach a singer. It's very interesting these songs get created, they get created in a rehearsal studio, with people you know, jamming and... some lyrics in some cases, some tracks in others. ...
 
W.A.:What instrument do you play ?
 
N.S.:I don't play anything, a little keyboard.
 
W.A.: You can write and you can do it on a keyboard.
 
N.S.: I have the music in my head and I can write the lyrics, and I can work with a singer and a band in a rehearsal studio and somehow in the communal thing, the group, if it's a good group like this, which it is, it just comes out. It's a case of who did what? it's interesting.
 
W.A.: That's amazing because I can play, not well, but I can play, but I couldn't write a tune if my life depended on it, you know, I wouldn't know where you begin, I wouldn't know where to begin to write a tune. And I can play, I can improvise a little bit, not great but enough for simple New Orleans music but to sit down and write a tune, ...I've never written a song lyric in my life, and wouldn't know where to write a note...
 
N.S.:I wrote a couple of novels where I had to write song lyrics for the books, and I found that I couldn't do that with- out having the music in my head.
 
W.A.:Ah,ah...
 
N.S.: And it put the music in my head.
 
W.A.: Well did you study anything musical when you grew up?
 
N.S.: No, nothing! And then when I saw that these little elec- tronic keyboard are starting to come out, I went all over New York, I had to have one, I'm not gonna send away mail-order, I want it now!
 
W.A.:Where were you educated ?
 
N.S: City College in New York.
 
W.A:But you never studied any kind of music?
 
N.S. Oh, a little bit, but I never learnt to play, I never learned to read music
 
W.A.:Can you sing ?
 
N.S.: This is a matter of opinion. I don't think I can sing. I sang one cut on this. I'm beginning to think I can. I just had an experience where we had a genius remix of our singer David Korn's vocals and---500% improvement!
 
W.A.: It's amazing what they can do. N.S.: I wrote a novel about this before it happened. And that's how I got involved with this band. And then when I was here, my friend Richard Pinhas said, sing a couple of cuts on this album. I said, "I can't do that." He said, "Don't worry." And he augmented it and did all this stuff, and I had a single! It gave me an idea to write a book about this. About what it does...I think...musicians hate this, some musicians hate this... what it does ...it makes craft less important than talent. It gives people like me who never learned to play an instrument a musical a musical expression without skill.
 
W.A.: So you hear the tune in your head?
 
N.S.: Yeah, so the question is how do you get it out if you don't have a good voice and can't play anything?
 
W.A.: But you could to write it down,
 
N.S.: Oh that's a little advanced, to hear it in your head and write down the notes!
 
W.A. Pick him out and then write it down...
 
N.S.:Yeah, but now I've got a program which will simply type the sheet music.
 
W.A.: That's just amazing to me, amazing because I can't do it, I can't sing, I don't have a good ear for music, I've lot of enthu- siasm and love for the music but no real ear.
 
N.S. Well Woody, what I learned was, people had told me all my life, you have no ear for music, you can't sing, but now, I've decided they're wrong. I never learned to play an instrument really, and I was never encouraged to sing, but I can hear a bad note, I can hear, I have an ear.
 
W.A.:So you can hear if something sharp or flat ?
 
N.S.: Yes, but I don't have a way... The problem is finding a mode to express it..."
 
W.A.: So if I blew into my clarinet and I was flat you would hear it ?
 
N.S.:Probably, and I would hear a note that was wrong in a song.
 
W.A.: I can't do that, I can't tell if I'm sharp or flat , the guys in the band say to me, you're sharp. Oh really?
 
N.S.: I think the biggest thing I've found is that you can do more than you think can do.
 
W.A. That's amazing..
 
N.S.:You can really do more than you think you can do.
 
W.A.: But musically I feel some people are just gifted...
 
N.S.: That's true.
 
W.A.:And at some point in your life you found.
 
N.S. I'm not gifted, but I'm not hopeless.
 
W.A.:Hey, but if you can write a tune!
 
N.S. Well maybe, I still don't think I'm a singer but some people do. Let's see. I had a couple of question. Yes this is import- ant... Why do you think that your work goes down better here than in the States? And it does, commercially and even critically.
 
W.A.: I don't know.
 
N.S: Me too.
 
W.A.: The only theory I have--I may be right I may be completely wrong--all the filmmakers I liked were foreign filmmakers so you know, by watching all their films and loving them over the years, there's something that get in your blood, the same way that I play New Orleans music from listening to those guys that I'm making film that in some way resonate with a foreign sensibility.
 
N.S.: And yet they're very American films.
 
W.A.: I think they, are but they play them in America, and in America, you know what has usually been the case for me, I've done pretty good press over the years but no customers, and here I get both, I mean people come. I don't know, maybe it's exactly what you say, they love American films and my films are very American and that's what they 're liking.
 
N.S.: I don't know what it is, it's very strange what they like or what they don't like.
 
W.A.: But thank God, right?
 
N.S.: Yeah, yeah! That's one of the reasons, I suppose, I'm here.
 
W.A.: But don't you find that in European countries as well, because I do, and they're very good audience for me, in Italy and Spain, and Greece just not America. You know it's not horrible, but it's nothing thrilling.
 
N.S: But also in America, it's certainly happened in books, and it's certainly happened in movies, if you don't do a 100 mil- lion dollars, you've done nothing.
 
W.A.: Ah but I can't even imagine that ballpark to think in. I'm happy to do ten million dollars in the United States. Happy to do ten. It's a huff and puff and struggle to do ten. Whereas some- body else puts out a film, and in the first weekend, in the between the Friday when it opens and Monday morning it's made 27 000 million dollars.
 
N.S.: Or it hasn't, and it drops completely dead in three days.
 
W.A.: And then they fire the head of the company.
 
N.S.: They fire the head of the company, and the director never works again. Or gets more money for the next one.
 
W.A.: Right that's the other alternative, gets more money for the next one.
 
N.S.: I've been talking to several French directors, they all want to make films in English, and American-type movies, they feel the French cinema is just dying.
 
W.A.:The European cinema. When America cut off European cinema, I think it really hurt. When I was younger, we used to have a very good foreign film open once a week.
 
N.S.: Yeah, but you grew up in New York, like I did, not in Keokuk or somewhere.
 
W.A. I grew up in New York, yes, but at least in New York and hopefully in LA and Boston, there was the new Truffaut or the new Monicelli or Jeremy or De Sica or Fellini or Kurasawa, one after the other, every week there was one. Now--nothing! You get one and 6 months later another one, maybe. I mean there was a thriving foreign film market, you had every Rossellini film or Fellini film that came out, now you don't have that, so they don't make the films.
 
N.S.: The Italian film industry is shot, it hardly exists any- more.
 
W.A.: And it was so grand, so glorious!
 
N.S.: And the French are the last survivors, in a way, of the non-anglophone cinema. And they're looking over their shoulder and sweating. I know directors here that are shooting commercials. Because they're not ready to make move yet, to get the kind of property that they think will, because there is a creative quandary here. They feel that they've got to make a movie in English, because that's the finance of it. And even they say that a certain the kind of film that used to be made here, like the nor film, the policier film, if it's not American, the French won't go see it.
 
W.A.: Oh I see.
 
N.S.: And also now they can't get it distributed anywhere and somehow, something has gone out of the French cinema. I think this is tragic.
 
W.A.: Oh, terrible!
 
N.S.:I get work because...I'm primarily a novelist but I've become script doctor because I can work back and forth between French and English, and they all want to do it in English, which doesn't seem to me to be their salvation.
 
W.A.: I know, because what we want is a thriving French cinema, those film makers that were great in French were inspirational.
 
N.S.: Even the French ones want to do it in English. I just saw last night TWELVE MONKIES. There was a small credit that say it came from a French movie, LA JETE, which I had never heard of, and that happens a lot. Like with THE TOY. Instead of releasing the French movie in the States, they say the rights to Hollywood to remake it!
 
W.a.: Yes that happened to a number of films that were successful in Hollywood.
 
N.S.:It depends what you mean by success.
 
W.A: I mean they were financially successful.
 
N.S.:But it's not successful for the original.
 
W.A.: No for the people here it's nothing, it's humiliating I think.
 

N.S.:English is taking over the world. I just wrote a piece about it. And it's not by design, this is not an American plot or anything like that. It's just that it's the biggest market, and the United States dominates it because it's the biggest part of the biggest market and it just takes over. I don't know what their solution is.
 
W.A.: Right, the solution is that there's no viable foreign film culture in the United States any more, not even in New York, there's an occasional one that creeps in.
 
N.S.:What do you think, would they do better dubbing thank subtitling?
 
W.A: No. Everyone I know hates dubbing.
 
N.S.: Here they dub everything.
 
W.A.: Right.
 
N.S.: Here it's good, in a way, you have you choice.
 
W.A.: Right, here it's a different thing, that's they're custom. But in New York, the public for foreign cinema would not come to a dubbed film.
 
N.S. You think so?
 
W.A.:Right.
 
N.S.: Here what they do...I don't know what they're doing with your film because I saw the American....
 
W.A.: They do subtitles in certain places and dubbed in others.
 
N.S.: Yeah, so you have a choice. Even in Paris, and even on the television channels, usually they have a choice, depending on when you catch it, whether it's in French or in English.