Interview with Woody Allen

Not surprisingly, Woody Allen in person looks exactly like he does in his films: short, cozily dressed, slightly stooped, with glasses that look slightly too big for his face. He has come to Washington to talk with three collegiate movie reviewers, he says, solely because Dreamworks, the studio that produced his latest film, "Hollywood Ending," asked him to: "Dreamworks feels it pays off at the box office. I see no evidence of it and would be happy not to do it." Nervous laughter from the assembled collegians. "But I don't want to be one of those people who makes the film and then says, 'I'm sorry, I won't do anything at all.' I don't want to just walk away from it. So I agreed to do a little something, and this is part of what they devised." Nevertheless, given that he's here, he seems willing to talk, and over the next half-hour he holds court amiably.

I ask, "In this film, we have Val Waxman, the Oscar-winning director, enjoys New York, looks like you, dresses a lot like you," but whose career has been torpedoed by his own truculence and studios' unwillingness to take risks. "Is this kind of the road not traveled for you? Can you see your career having taken a different turn at some point and ending up in the kind of hole that he was in?"

Allen responds, "I've been lucky. I've had a charmed life. It may be undeserved, but it's definitely been charmed. I've never had to go through any of the junk he went through and I've always been funded for my movies. But I will say in my own defense: I'm not as crazy as Val. I'm a responsible filmmaker who works industriously, and I've never been sued for noncompletion of a picture, or I'm not tempermental, I won't shoot if the weather's not perfect. He's crazy. And I exaggerate to make it funny, it's much funnier if he's crazy than not. So I never see myself going in his direction. It could happen to me, but so far it hasn't."

In "Hollywood Ending," Val suffers from psychosomatic blindness at the start of shooting on his new film, but soldiers on to save his career, somehow. Allen is asked if this could actually be done. "I don't think that you could fake your way through it," he responds. "When you make a film, you see that the director makes about a hundred decisions a day, and they range from serious ones to trivial ones. And many of them entail making a visual assessment of something. So there'd be no way. Even in this picture, I had to think of him having a collusion of somebody to act as his eyesight. Cause if I didn't have the Chinese translator or somebody to do it, then even he couldn't have done it. It's too tough to fake your way through."

I have had a question in mind, and I ask it now. "This is something that a lot of us college-age males, I'm sure, wonder about." Sitting directly across from Allen, I find I have trouble meeting his eyes. He's been so pleasant! But I'm a reporter. "What exactly is it like to be able to write a scene where Tiffani Thiessen says that she'll do anything for you sexually?"

"What?" Allen responds.

"In that one scene," I soldier on somehow, "where, right after the reporter says she has a crush on you, you come into her dressing room and she says she'll do anything for you sexually."

"Oh!" Brightly, now. "Sure."

"Is there kind of a charge in being able to write a scene like that?"

"Well, you can do things in film that you could never achieve in real life." General laughter. "It extends from less physically exciting things. You might be spending [time] in Paris, or in Venice, or some city that you want to visit for a period of time. You get a chance, if it's a period picture, to live more or less every day in the ninteen-twenties or thirties. If you're making a picture about football or baseball and you like that, and suddenly to be around, like, the Mets or Mike Tyson, or whoever it is you're exploiting. And the same is true with beautiful women. You do get a chance to meet many beautiful women that you would ordinarily not get a chance to meet, and you're in close contact with them every day for months, sometimes, and that's one of the perks that make up for the paparazzi.

"I never heard of that girl before, and she walked in one day when we were meeting people for that part. And she was so attractive, so amazingly attractive, I mean it really just takes your breath away. And the truth is, in reality, she was as nice as could be. And I never said a word to her. She came on the set, and she did her scene, and she did it well. Cause it was not easy what she did. She had to keep a straight face and keep the scene going while I'm acting like an idiot like that," i.e., psychosomatically blind and trying to escape her clutches. "But it couldn't have been nicer.

"What's really the best of it is when you're casting, and you're casting the part of a beautiful woman. And you spend the whole day, one after another comes in, you're in the room with your casting people and your heart just leaps!" Allen gestures ecstatically to the skies. "One woman comes in after another, and they're so beautiful, as opposed to if you're casting wrestlers or something and these gruff guys come in all day long. You spend six hours meeting these guys, Purel on your hands afterwards. But the women - it's one of the perks of the business.

One of my compatriots asks, "Did you ever have a situation like that, where someone threw themselves at you because of your directorial acclaim?"

"Not as openly as that, no, no, not really. You have to go through the same tedious and strategically planned process that an accountant would have to go through when he meets a girl. The thing that you have is access. That's the difference. A guy who works at an office or works in a laundry or drives a cab or is a schoolteacher, he has access to a certain amount of women, but it's limited.

"But in show business, the work is constantly with the other sex, and turnover is very great, and there's a high percentage of very attractive women that gravitate to the job. But when you finally do have access and do meet one, the process remains the same. You still get nervous enough to sweat it out, you still get rejected sometimes - your usual rate of rejection comes into play. You don't do any better than you'd do normally." This is somehow comforting, to me anyway.

Another co-interviewer asks whether Allen likes starring or not starring in his own movies better. "I do like to not be in it," he says. "I have no compulsion to be an actor and make no claim to be an actor. I would just as soon - it's a pleasure to get Sean Penn or Kenneth Branagh, who's really an actor, and direct them. As Jerry Lewis said, 'You don't have to shave every day then.' It sounds trivial, but it really is such a pleasure, to get up in the morning and not have to think, 'Oh, I gotta look good today, be clean-cut, get shaved, get into my costume and get make-up on and hit my mark and....'"

On the other hand, when he's directing himself, "All I have to do is pick out the shot, and stage the actors using a stand-in for myself, and I frame it through the camera, get it exactly where I want it, and I've worked it out, the cameraman lights it. There it is all ready; I just walk in front of the camera and I do it.

"I wrote it! And I know how I want it to sound. So I just go around and make it sound like that. If I have to make an actor do it, he may get it perfectly the first shot out, but he may not. Very often they don't. And I say, 'Could you be a little more fearful, or anxious, or something?' And he tries, and it's not quite right, so I'm working on it, I'm working on it. Or they'll say, 'I don't know what you mean.' Or sometimes you get someone that can't do it, they say, 'Gee, you're hearing it with your timing, but I don't have that timing. I have my own timing.'

"Believe it or not, I know it sounds silly, it's an absurd example, but if I could do everything, it would be simply it. Be the cameraman shooting the thing, put the lights where I want to. You always have to explain to someone what you want. And sometimes they get it, sometimes they don't, sometimes they can't do it. So in terms of directing yourself, it makes it so much easier if I'm the guy that does it."

The discussion turns to control of the filmmaking process. "If [studios] put together some project conceived in total venality, they'll hire talented people, they'll get like Billy Crystal and Robert DeNiro, or Robin Williams and someone else, but the picture will look middle-of-the-road and uninspired and formula, because they're trying to make $150 million, and very often do because they're hiring good people. If they hire a director, they hire a traffic cop. They get a guy who will not bring the picture in over budget, who's not going to be crazy or have too many ideas of his own.

"But you can imagine if they hired an artistic director - to use an extreme example, if they hired Fellini to come in and do a picture like that - it would look nothing like what they wanted it to. It would have a totally different personal look to it. And they would cut their throats. If you care about your picture and you've written it and you really want to make your picture, the more control you have, the better shot you have getting what you want later.

"I know many directors who deserve to be treated well and to be given final cut and to be given freedom, and they don't get it. You'd be shocked at how many directors of real stature have got to use the star that the studio says, or one of three that the studio says, if they want the money for the picture, and they've got to show their dailies to the studio, and they can't reshoot a scene without permission from the studio. And then the studio, in the most horrible thing of all, will take the finished version of the film and show it in a theater and give out these cards for people to give out. And average guys are writing, 'Well, I think the girl should be nicer when she comes on and less argumentative.' And, like voting, if they get enough of them, it's like the people are making the film. They're so desperate to get a product that the audience will like and come in and see because the stakes are so big. They're spending 60, 80 million dollars with the possibility of making 150 or 200 million dollars, so they think the way to do it is to use all these terrible, Philistine devices, and that's a shame."

Since films are pitched to people our age and slightly younger, Allen worries that we may not really be aware of what cinema can do. "I have a feeling that people in your age, for the most part, don't have access to great films. I have a feeling that if I was to be able to show the films that I think are great to people that are your age, but not in any kind of film classes, that they would like them, that they would not think they are homework.

"When I was your age, I could have access on any weekend in New York in the movie theaters to a couple of Italian films, French films, Swedish films, a Bunuel film, a Kurosawa film. And we would see them, and we would all be talking the next day about it, and everyone would say, 'Oh, you've got to see this, it's incredible.' And so much more interesting than any of the American things being done. And the next week more would come out, and more, and a lot would come out, and they would be the substantive films that we would discuss.

"There is something that goes along with the ritual of, you get your boyfriend or your girlfriend and you go to the movie theater, and you wait on line for a little bit of time, just a little bit of foreplay. Not for two hours in the freezing cold, but a little time on the line. And you see, you know, interesting, attractive people on the line; it's a communal experience. And you into the theater and there is some kind of anticipatory buzz. And then the lights go down and suddenly the screen is big, and you see Anna Magnani and she's big. And there's something about that that's ritualistic, going back to Greek theater.

"I think if I was to stop a number of your friends and say, "Have you seen 'The Seventh Seal' or 'Persona'..." It's amazing to me. And yet, why would I think otherwise? Why would you have access to see these? But if you did see them, you'd love them.You'd go out and be shaking people by their lapels. 'You've got to see this! This is nothing like the garbage that's fed to us in movie theaters. This is really, you know, not insulting to your intelligence and confrontational to all the real problems of life and beautifully done and imaginatively shot, and it doesn't look anything like those high-gloss, formula things.' It's a shame. So I don't really know what's really going on, but I'm sure that if I stopped a hundred young kids from the best universities, they would not have seen 'Rashomon.' And they should see it on a screen. And if they did see it, they'd love it. They'd be knocked out by it."

Allen hopes the same thing happens with "Hollywood Ending."

Various notes on this interview:

• No, he didn't really answer my question about writing sex scenes for himself and really, really attractive young women. I would have been fine with pursuing that one to the bitter end except that it might have gotten my two compatriots thrown out along with me, which would have made me feel way worse than pressing Woody Allen on this issue would have.
• I don't think Woody Allen actually knows anyone my age who is not a movie reviewer. The key phrase in his little paragraph describing his cinemagoing Utopia is "in New York," not "when I was your age."
• This is a longer edit than the one that appeared in the Diamondback, by about 1000 words. A very rough transcript exists with about 2000 more words of Woody Allen talking. If you are interested, please e-mail me and I'll hook you up with it, but I'm not going to edit that thing.

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