Woody Allen: A Life in Movies

Author: Richard Schikker (USA)
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2006-06-01
Features: The entire spectacle of survival has a magical quality; it's like a trick that your mind can't quite wrap its head around. Rather than calling it a trick, I might say it's a serious joke. The only way to escape it is to assume there's some kind of magical solution—a kind of magic that pulls you out of your ordinary reality. Woody Allen, perhaps the most profound, witty, and prolific filmmaker of our time, rarely speaks about himself and is often misunderstood. In this interview with critic Richard Schikker, he speaks at length for nearly four hours, covering all aspects of his life as a filmmaker. Through this, readers can understand where his passion for cinema comes from, how he makes films, and how he uses them to explore the themes he is obsessed with: morality, faith, the war of the sexes, the conflict between reality and fantasy, and the role of chance in life.
Before the interview text, Richard Schikker provides a lengthy preface that outlines and summarizes Woody Allen's cinematic journey. After the interview text, there is a comprehensive filmography of Woody Allen's works. Concise yet profound, this book is the best entry point into the world of Woody Allen's filmmaking.
In my opinion, when you were young, you seemed quite different from many film enthusiasts because you didn't show an early interest in becoming a filmmaker. Am I right? At first, I aspired to be a screenwriter. I wasn't particularly interested in cinema back then. When I was a teenager, American films seemed foolish, while theater had a solid reputation. Those playwrights were the ones who could write outstanding works, while filmmakers were mostly studio people who mostly made, as you know, commercial films. So, I wasn't very interested in becoming a filmmaker. I only developed an interest in cinema after writing the script for Take the Money and Run. As a screenwriter, I had the obligation to be on set and watch them film. It was a typical Hollywood film, even a satire of Hollywood cinema—in which there were all those things that are inevitable in such films, things that earn laughter (or flattery), which were truly annoying. After the film was finished, I couldn't even accept it. That experience was truly embarrassing and humiliating. I vowed that unless I directed the scripts I wrote myself, I would never write scripts again. That's how I joined the film industry. But when I was young, I certainly wouldn't be the one operating the camera. You know, to this day, I pay very little attention to the technical aspects of filmmaking. In my personal view, technological advancements in the film industry are only valuable when they help you tell your story more effectively. But now, many films are just bombarding audiences with technology, making technical displays the content of the film and filmmaking for technology's sake. I strongly dislike this and have no interest in it. However, from another perspective, you've also said on several occasions that when you were a child, you loved watching movies, and they served an important function in helping you escape reality. P61