INTERVIEW:He walks the same stretch of Central Park every day, finishes work at six on the dot, and practises his clarinet daily - even though his wife can't stand it. Woody Allen shares his regular joe existence, and a birthday, with DONALD CLARKE
I HAD ALWAYS told myself that, if I ever got to meet Woody Allen, I would make sure to point out that we shared a birthday. For important people such as Bette Midler, Gilbert O'Sullivan, the late Richard Pryor and this writer (all born on that day), a flashback sequence in Annie Hallholds a particular significance. Peer closely at the blackboard – the scene involves hero Alvy Singer's schooldays – and you will spy the relevant date scribbled hurriedly in chalk.
“Bette Midler might have spotted it,” Allen says. “That’s right. I wrote that there on purpose. In all the years since the film came out you are the only person who has ever noticed.”
That indulgence over, we get down to discussing one of the most significant careers in US entertainment history. I find the great man, ever busy, ever fretful, sitting in an editing suite in New York city. We have been brought together to discuss You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, a London-based comedy, which is released here this week, but, such is Allen's work rate, he is already finishing off the next movie. Midnight in Paris will open the Cannes Film Festival in less than two months' time, and stars Marion Cotillard and Owen Wilson (French first lady Carla Bruni also puts in an appearance). Then he's off to Rome to shoot his 2012 release.
The man deserves a rest. Doesn’t he? Now 75 (we weren’t born on exactly the same day, you understand), he has been delivering comedy – and, occasionally, Bergmanesque introspection – to the public for more than half a century. Every year, opening with titles in the same font, a Woody Allen movie makes its way into cinemas. Not all are as well received as his early classics. A few fail to even get distribution in these territories. But the machine chugs away. Would he ever take a break?
Puffing with good-natured exasperation, he bats the question aside. "I do a lot of resting," he says "I loaf a lot. To make a film every year is really not a big deal. If you talk to a cab driver or a construction worker or someone who uses a jackhammer, you'll hear about hard work. I still have time to write for the New Yorker, to write plays, to play with my children, to go to basketball games. I am not a person who likes vacations like fishing or going to China. I like to stay at home and watch basketball. I get a lot of time off."
He goes on to make comparisons with such perfectionists as Stanley Kubrick and Terrence Malick. While directors such as these have been known to wait hours for the right shot, Woody claims that, come six o’clock, he packs up his megaphone and heads home to watch the basketball. He’s not obsessive. He’s not fanatical. Well, maybe not. But he certainly seems a creature of habit. No other director has, for such a long time, maintained such a rigorously disciplined routine. Does that tell us something about his home life?
“I am a creature of habit,” he says. “I get up in the morning and do the same things every day. I take the kids to school. I do the treadmill. Then I work. I stop and practise clarinet, then go back to work. I take a walk in the same area of Central Park every day. I eat at the same restaurants. My wife complains about that. She objects to my unwillingness to change.”
That sounds like Woody Allen. Such are the apparent parallels between his life and his work we all feel we know him. Married to Soon-Yi Previn, a woman 35 years his junior – and, notoriously, once his stepdaughter – he will keep making films in which older men romance younger women. (In You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, the septuagenarian Anthony Hopkins steps out with the 33-year-old Lucy Punch.) The characters he plays in his films sound very like the man to whom I am talking: neurotic, concerned with death, inclined to psychoanalysis. You can even catch snatches of his early home life in the pictures. Radio Daysand Annie Hallboth feature a harassed Jewish boy, raised in Brooklyn, saddled with noisy, squabbling relatives.
“That part of the films is true to my life,” he agrees. “I always lived in a noisy house. I always lived with aunts and uncles. In those days one family could never afford to pay all the rent. They would end up doubling-up. There were always cousins, aunts and uncles about the place. It was a really hectic atmosphere.”
Were his folks funny people? “They were not funny in the sense of being witty,” he says. “They didn’t make jokes. But if you observed them carefully, you realised their habits and behaviour was very funny.”
Allen Stewart Konigsberg was, you hardly need to be told, raised in a busy corner of Brooklyn. His mother was a bookkeeper and his father worked as a waiter and a jewellery engraver. He didn't do well at school, but, from an early age, he enjoyed constructing gags and experimenting with magic tricks. An entry to show business came when he sold a few jokes to a prominent newspaper columnist. Following studies at New York University, Allen, then just 19, secured gigs writing for The Ed Sullivan Showand The Tonight Show. A hugely successful spell as a stand-up comic followed.
Every now and then, he must wonder what would have become of him if he hadn’t made it into show business. “I would have been in trouble,” he says. “I was at school with a lot of boys studying to be doctors, lawyers and accountants. I was a very poor student. I would not have been able to do any of those things. I would have got a labouring job. I would have been an elevator operator or a cab driver – something that didn’t requite any education. I might have got a job selling things in a store. I was very lucky I had a talent for being amusing.”
It is tempting to divide Woody Allen's career into two unequal parts. Before the release of Annie Hallin 1977, he was, whether directing, writing, or performing, regarded as a brilliant, but uncomplicated funny man. Hysterical early films such as Love and Deathand Everything You Wanted to Know About Sex But Were Afraid to Askmay have had allusions to Leo Tolstoy and Michelangelo Antonioni, but, in form and tone, they remained rooted in vaudeville territory.
After winning an Oscar for Annie Hall(he did not attend and still refuses to join the Academy), Allen began embarking on more studied, character-based pieces such as the beautiful Manhattan and the ponderous Interiors.
" Annie Halldid feel like a breakthrough," he says. "I had been doing joke movies and I decided to do something else. I decided to try and get the audiences actually interested in the characters. I sacrificed some of the jokes. And the audience went with it. It worked quite well."
NOT EVERYBODYwas convinced. As is often the case with Allen, we find, within his films, observations on this key chapter of his life. A superb sequence in Stardust Memories, his 1980 Felliniesque take on movie celebrity, finds visiting aliens turning to the protagonist, a director of comic films, and intoning: "We like your films, especially the early, funny ones."
Does he see the distinction? “It’s interesting to me,” he sighs. “That was just one little light joke in the movie, but it had a disproportionate effect on the audience. People began to say it even more: ‘I like your early funnier films’ or ‘I prefer these recent films to your earlier, funnier ones’. Somehow that resonated with people.”
At any rate, the later films brought him a great deal of critical respectability. In a rare transformation, a comedy professional found himself lauded as one of the great American auteurs. Every time it looked as if he was about to go off the boil, he'd deliver another gem: Crimes and Misdemeanours, Husbands and Wives, Deconstructing Harry, Sweetand Lowdown. Actors still win Oscars appearing in his films. As recently as 2009, Penélope Cruz nabbed a statuette for Vicky Cristina Barcelona.
Looking at the array of talent in You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger– Naomi Watts, Josh Brolin and Antonio Banderas join Hopkins – one could be forgiven for thinking he merely has to pick up the phone to secure any actor on the planet.
“I get turned down all the time. That’s a real myth. People are busy. They don’t want to work for the money we pay. They don’t like the script some times.” He would, I imagine, be too discrete to name names. “Oh no. There’s no secret of the people who’ve said no. I’ve been turned down by Jack Nicholson, Robert De Niro, Dustin Hoffman. Right down the line. Philip Seymour Hoffman, Nicole Kidman, Albert Brooks. They’ve all said no.”
One wonders if his tangled home life has, from time to time, scared off potential stars. Previously involved with Diane Keaton and Louise Lasser, Allen settled down with Mia Farrow in the early 1980s. They adopted two children and had one biological son, Satchel Farrow (now known as Ronan Farrow). When it emerged that he was carrying on an affair with Soon-Yi, whom Mia had adopted with Andre Previn, her former husband, the tabloids, quite understandably, reacted with gasps and retching noises. Ronan disowned his dad and remarked: “He’s my father married to my sister. That makes me his son and his brother-in-law. That is such a moral transgression.”
Against the odds, their subsequent marriage has lasted for 13 years. It comes as something of a shock to realise that, at 40, Soon-Yi is closing in on middle age. In Wild Man Blues,a 1997 documentary on Allen's experiences playing clarinet in his jazz band, he remarks that Soon-Yi has little interest in his films. Has that situation changed?
“She’s not thrilled. She’s a strong critic of my work,” he says in a voice that betrays a hint of terror. “She cannot bear my clarinet playing. She closes all the doors when I practise and never comes to any of my concerts. As for my movies, there are some she likes more than others and some she doesn’t like at all. But that’s not necessary. The relationship was never based on that.”
It’s been a most peculiar life. Yet he seems to have arranged matters very much to his liking. Every day is very much the same. The pictures emerge like clockwork. If you hadn’t seen one of his films, you could be forgiven for thinking he was totally at ease with the universe. However, anxiety continues to lurk. Talking about Stardust Memories, he explains that his intention was to demonstrate that life is wretched for every human being. The poor have it worse. But the rich are also doomed to illness and annihilation.
“People get old and they die,” he says mordantly. “They get diseases. They break up with their loved ones. Their children get diseases. Everyone ends up in the same junkyard – whether you are rich or poor. Poor people have it worse. But the rest still have it pretty bad.”
Did analysis make him feel any better about the universe’s cruelty? He has always been an enthusiast for the psychiatrist’s couch.
“I am not in analysis now,” he says. “But I have gone in and out. I have found that it’s been helpful to me. I hoped it would transform me into a thoroughly content human being and it never did. But it has been helpful to me.”
It’s hard to know quite what to make of all this. One imagines that anybody laid so low by existential gloom would have trouble leaving the house in the morning. Yet, when not discussing disease, loneliness and starvation, he comes across as a reasonably content sort of fellow. Is the misery a bit of a pose?
It seems not. “I am only content within the context of the horrible predicament we live in. Human existence is a sad and tragic framework. I am not as miserable as a guy on my building who is a quadruple amputee.”
He pauses to consider the horrifying advance of time. “But it doesn’t get great for anybody. Let me tell you that.”
Leave ’em laughing, Woody.
You Will Meet a Talk Dark Strangeris on general release
Five great Woody Allen moments
The robbery note, Take the Money and Run (1969)
The scene where Woody, playing a useless criminal, hands over a poorly written note to bank tellers takes the prize. "I have a gub?" the mystified employee puzzles.
Annie's terrifying brother, Annie Hall (1977)
Alvy Singer's meeting with a man so weird he could only be played by Christopher Walken. After listening to his tortured ramblings, Alvy remarks: "I have to go now, Duane, because I'm due back on the planet Earth."
Opening scene, Manhattan (1979)
A writer hammers out thoughts on New York while monochrome images of the city spool before the lucky viewer. "Chapter One. He adored New York city. He idolised it all out of proportion. Eh uh, no, make that he, he romanticised it all out of proportion." It's a joke, but the lines clearly reflect Allen's true feelings.
Helium-fired gunfight, Broadway Danny Rose (1984)
Pure old-school knockabout humour. Danny Rose dodges gunshots in a room full of helium balloons. Inevitably, squeaky-voiced mayhem ensues. "Don't tell me you're the beard, you goddamn little rat."
Diane Weist's seductions, Bullets Over Broadway (1994)
Playing a grand theatrical dame, Weist pours herself over poor John Cusack. Her fruity blathering is heightened to hilarious effect. "No, no, don't speak. Don't speak. Please don't speak. Please don't speak. No. No. No. Go. Go, gentle Scorpio, go. Your Pisces wishes you every happy return."
. . . and one recent gag
Whatever Works (2009)
Larry David leaps out of bed and, torn by existential despair, declares: "I've seen the abyss." His girlfriend, watching TV, calmly replies: "It's okay. We'll watch something else."
