Tuesday, January 03, 2006

Woody Allen Interview
Since I took a much-deserved holiday from Media Monday yesterday, I didn't get to post any of the great interview with Woody Allen LAWeekly published last week. I'm worried now that I've become so excited to see his new film. In recent years (like 15?) that has always been mistaken expectation.
“Look, I make a lot of films,” he says. “Some come out fairly good. Some come out mediocre. Some come out poor. This one came out well. I could see it myself: When I finished the film, I felt, ‘Oh, this is a good film,’ and it doesn’t surprise me that people are responding to it. I must say that I got every break a film director could want making this film. When I needed Scarlett Johansson, she was available. When I needed a rainy day, I got a rainy day. When I needed sunshine for a week, I got it. It was like I couldn’t screw the film up no matter how hard I tried. It is indeed a better film than most of the films I’ve made before — just by coincidence, by happy luck.”
....
I’ve also never minded failing. For some reason, that was not a sensitive thing with me. Now, I would rather succeed, of course! But I knew when I was making Shadows and Fog that there would not be a human being who would want to see it.”
....
I’m certainly not intellectual. I’m a middle-class person playing the part of a neurotic intellectual. People mistake that for who I am, but actually, I’m the guy who sits next to you at the ballgame or the movie house. I’m the guy who will be home tonight with a beer watching the Knicks on television. I’m not going to have my nose in my Kierkegaard.”...But surely, I say, you’ve read Kierkegaard, and Freud and Marshall McLuhan...

“But only because I had to to survive. I didn’t read them because it’s an instinct in me or because I liked it. I read those things because the girls I was dating wouldn’t go out with me if I hadn’t.

No comments: