My one regret in life is that i am not someone else by Joana Brito

MY ONE REGRET IN LIFE IS THAT I AM NOT SOMEONE ELSE

Programa

ActividAdes aCTiViDaDES pArAlelAs ParaLELaS

Terça-feira 3 Junho - 18:30 / 22:00

Todos Todos os os dias dias -- 14:00 14:00 // 22:00 22:00

Sleeper (1973)

Projecção Projecção de de curtas curtas metragens metragens

Quarta-feira 4 Junho - 18:30 / 22:00

Foyer Foyer do do Teatro, Teatro, uma uma exposição exposição de de

midnight in Paris (2011)

cartazes cartazes originais originais dos dos filmes filmes

Quinta-feira 5 Junho - 18:30 / 22:00

cine-teatro Cine-teatro constantino Constantino Nery Nery

Stardust memories (1980)

33 aa 14 14 de de Junho Junho de de 2014 2014

Sexta-feira 6 Junho - 18:30 / 22:00 / 24:00

Preço Preço das das Sessões: Sessões: Eur Eur 4,50 4,50

Love and Death (1975) Sábado 7 Junho- 18:30 / 22:00 / 24:00

iNFOrMAÇÕes iNFormaÇÕES

Take the money and run (1969) Domingo 8 Junho - 18:30 / 22:00

Tel: Tel: 229 229 610 610 1231 1231

Broadway Danny rose (1984)

www.boualibenhoja.pt www.boualibenhoja.pt

Segunda-feira 9 Junho - 18:30 / 22:00

Apoio: Apoio:

match Point (2005) Terça-feira 10 Junho - 18:30 / 22:00 Every Thing You always Wanted to Know about Sex (1972) Quarta-feira 11 Junho - 18:30 / 22:00 Hannah and Her Sisters (1986) Quinta- feira 12 Junho - 18:30 / 22:00 annie Hall (1976) Sexta-feira 13 Junho - 18:30 / 22:00 / 24:00 Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008) Sábado 14 Junho - 18:30 / 22:00 / 24:00 manhattan (1979)

Since the ‘early, funny’ films, Allen’s subject-matter has matured, but there’s a line of comic genius that runs from Sleeper through to Midnight in Paris. Thomas Hobbes declared that all laughter depends on sudden contempt, that flash of superiority when the other chap slips on the banana skin and we don’t. When we smile, we show our teeth. For this reason he warned against the self-deprecatory gag, for after all who wishes to pull down contempt on himself? No one seems to have told Woody Allen. Along with Alfred Hitchcock, Allen must be the most recognisable director in the history of cinema. In 1984 an anthology was published devoted to people’s dreams about him. To like his early films is to like him; perhaps the peculiar intimacy of his relationship with the audience stemmed from the fact that he had been a stand-up comedian. These films maintained that sense of performing to their audience – Annie Hall (1977) is as much about the faux-intimacy of addressing the viewer as is Alfie. There is nothing more intimate or more immediate than a joke. Allen knows this all too well, and in Annie Hall he dramatised it, showing the way that jokes establish sympathy with another person; they call for a response – you either get them or you miss them. It’s there in the moment when Alvy Singer (played by Allen) tries to repeat with another woman the laughter he had shared with Annie Hall (Diane Keaton) over their attempts to catch and cook a still- living lobster. We in the audience are free to laugh along or not; if we don’t, then what is at stake is perhaps not just our sympathy with the movie or its director. In his 1970s jeremiad The Culture of Narcissism, Christopher Lasch also worried about Allen’s use of the self-wounding joke. Allen, he asserted, was using humour to defend against the serious. Yet Allen’s wit was always more than that, a pre-emptive strike against one’s own pretensions, but also a bright disruption offering the possibility of insight. For all these reasons it’s hard not to approach Allen’s films biographically. The man on screen was always a persona, of course, and yet the works

seemed like fragments of a great confession: regarding Annie Hall, Allen and Keaton had been lovers (her real name is Diane Hall); Radio Days (1987) is slantwise memoir. It’s symptomatic that so often when Allen imagines a character writing, what they produce is part autobiographical fiction, part wish- fulfilment. For me, as an adolescent in the 1980s, Allen’s films opened a door to sophistication – not that alluring knowingness of defeat that permeates a movie like The Third Man, but a world of dining out, love affairs and cultural consumption. The first time I heard of the possibility that someone could enter psychoanalysis was through Woody Allen. A film such as Love and Death (1975) appealed to the teenage me, who had just discovered Russian novels, loved them and yet could find it funny that I loved them, a turn of events that little in my environment allowed for. With Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), it’s hard for me to be objective; it seems so personal to me, it’s sometimes a surprise that other people know it. Allen has lamented that his work has had no cinematic influence, that he has no followers. If that is true, he may console himself with the certainty that his art has extended into people’s lives. Few of us (hopefully) have had a Scorsese moment or met a Coppola character. Yet who has never felt that they were, even for a moment, inside a Woody Allen film? And who has never met (or been) a Woody Allen type, neurotic and self-effacing? By engaging with everyday life, he has permeated it. In the 1970s, Allen looked irreverent, hip, a part of the New Hollywood generation. In an age of “auteurs”, he was the auteur personified, the writer, director and star of his films, active in the editing, choosing the soundtrack, initiating the projects. His modishness stemmed from his films’ willingness to talk about sex; no one noticed that for all the talk his films held back from depicting the act itself. He was modern enough to seem part of a contemporary. ◆

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Cinemaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s great experimentalist 4

Allen’s wit was always more than that, a pre-emptive strike against one’s own pretensions, but also a bright disruption offering the possibility of insight. For all these reasons it’s hard not to approach Allen’s films biographically. The man on screen was always a persona, of course, and yet the works seemed like fragments of a great confession: regarding Annie Hall, Allen and Keaton had been lovers (her real name is Diane Hall); Radio Days (1987) is slantwise memoir. It’s symptomatic that so often when Allen imagines a character writing, what they produce is part autobiographical fiction, part wish- fulfilment. For me, as an adolescent in the 1980s, Allen’s films opened a door to sophistication – not that alluring knowingness of defeat that permeates a movie like The Third Man, but a world of dining out, love affairs and cultural consumption. The first time I heard of the possibility that someone could enter psychoanalysis was through Woody Allen. A film such as Love and Death (1975) appealed to the teenage me, who had just discovered Russian novels, loved them and yet could find it funny that I

Along with Alfred Hitchcock, Allen must be the most recognisable director in the history of cinema. loved them, a turn of events that little in my environment allowed for. With Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), it’s hard for me to be objective; it seems so personal to me, it’s sometimes a surprise that other people know it. Allen has lamented that his work has had no cinematic influence, that he has no followers. If that is true, he may console himself with the certainty that his art has extended into people’s lives. Few of us (hopefully) have had a Scorsese moment or met a Coppola character. Yet who has never felt that

they were, even for a moment, inside a Woody Allen film? And who has never met (or been) a Woody Allen type, neurotic and self-effacing? By engaging with everyday life, he has permeated it. In the 1970s, Allen looked irreverent, hip, a part of the New Hollywood generation. In an age of “auteurs”, he was the auteur personified, the writer, director and star of his films, active in the editing, choosing the soundtrack, initiating the projects. His modishness stemmed from his films’ willingness to talk about sex; no one noticed that for all the talk his films held back from depicting the act itself. He was modern enough to seem part of a contemporary social problem, the exemplar of the modern narcissist, the distracted consumer of “relationships”. But actually even while he was in vogue he was already out of time, an old-fashioned guy aghast at contemporary vulgarity. He was already in his early 40s when Annie Hall came out; his music was Bechet and Duke Ellington, not Hendrix or the Eagles. In an era of unconventionally good-looking leading men, Allen presented the most unlikely romantic hero of all: the balding, bespectacled nebbish up against smouldering Al Pacino. The mood of the times was for antiheroes, for downbeat rebellion. But by virtue of his ordinariness Allen was the greatest rebel of all, offering a way to be male without being a conventional Hollywood he-man such as Robert De Niro or Jack Nicholson. You can see it in the way the two types drive – in one case Gene Hackman weaving and screaming down a one- way street in The French Connection, and in the other Allen, a man ill at ease with the mechanical environment, sputtering out of Manhattan in Broadway Danny Rose (1984). Both types derived from old movies – for one the Western hero or film-noir tough guy, and in Allen’s case, Bob Hope. Allen was sexual, but no “stud”, sensitive, courteous, and above all both funny and ultimately earnest. One of his great gifts to cinema has been to por-

tray through his own acting and through the casting of men such as Owen Wilson in Midnight in Paris (2011) a decent way to be a man. Yet many people hate Allen’s films. Like Bob Dylan, he has lost his form and yet the current work strikes many viewers as a comeback. More accurately, he has always made some weaker films, had some bad runs (most notably from Scoop in 2006 to Whatever Works in 2009), but he clearly has it in him to produce at every turn in his career vibrant, spirited movies: Midnight in Paris (2011) is possibly a slight work, but is also (in my eyes, at least) perfect. Some avoid his movies, feeling they know in advance what

away from New York in a film such as You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger (2010) there was a sense of business as usual. And yet, close up, what strikes us now is both the remarkable consistency of Allen’s vision and the surprising variety of his films: from a modern fable like Zelig (1983) to the science fiction farce of Sleeper (1973), from the fantasy of The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985) to the problem play that is Crimes and Misdemeanours (1989). Above all, his subjectmatter has matured as he has. The early works depict the archetypal young adult about the city, but later he has turned to the problems of middle age and, more recently, old age. It’s possible that his audi-

His great subject is the illusion offered by art. Watching films, and making films, have offered him – and us – a place of escape. they’re going to be offered. They can indeed feel, when viewed at a distance, as though they are just more of the same for ever: the older man and the younger woman, the shrinks, the neurotic loser, the architects and writers and theatre people. It can seem as though everything takes place in an insulated Upper East Side world, exploring the travails of an arty, intellectual, comfortably bohemian middle class that hardly exists anymore except in a fossilised state. Even

ence has aged with him, and that he means little to most people under 30. I recently showed Annie Hall to a group of 20-yearolds; they concentrated gloomily as though confronted with one of Strindberg’s heavier efforts. Accustomed perhaps to The Hangover and Knocked Up, they even seemed doubtful whether it was a comedy at all. The audience when I saw Midnight in Paris clearly loved it; but at 46, I was one of the youngest people there. Perhaps Allen now seems a comfortable figure, the official bard of bourgeois Manhattan. In fact,

he is one of American cinema’s great experimentalists in narrative, a man devoted to finding out as many different ways as possible to tell a story. The fruits of his years in psychoanalysis are apparent here. Annie Hall tries every means possible to fragment the individual and its story: split-screen scenes, empty frames, black frames, subtitling (to show what people are really thinking), a disembodied soul drifting off during sex, a cartoon version of Woody, confrontations with the younger self, the man up on TV versus the same man on the street. It’s tightly structured, but the film’s surface is nonetheless non-linear, digressive and self-questioning. If the early films seemed self- obsessed, Allen responded by moving on to the group portrait, creating narratives that were diffused and decentred, with double or even triple plots. Such movies produced a complex image of their social milieu. He is a man immersed in Americana, who has also been sceptical about America. His inclination towards European cinema could account for his perceived lack of success with the American audience. Without his penchant for WC Fields and Mort Sahl, he might have fully been what he almost is, the American Eric Rohmer. In fact Allen had the enormous gift of creatively loving both Vittorio De Sica and the Marx Brothers, Ingmar Bergman and Born Yesterday. This complex taste is really the source of all that is best and all that is most contradictory in his films. He favours European slowness, yet his own films show a preference for American rapidity – a cut-to-the-chase rhythm that feels urban, that suggests New York. Sometimes one suspects that, like Graham Greene, he divides his movies into “novels” and “entertainments”. As with Greene, it’s apparent that many of his most profound works belong in the latter category At his darkest, he proffers comedy without affirmation, an unrelentingly desolate view of life. In Crimes and Misdemeanours, Lester, the fatuous director of sitcoms (played by Alan Alda), repeats his possibly absurd mantra, “In comedy, things bend, they don’t break”. Yet in several of Allen’s best “com-

He has deserved something of his reputation for angst but there are as man films that celebrate the silly. edies”, breaking is precisely what things do. Like Thomas Hardy, he clearly feels that in a world without God life is meaningless; like Hardy, too, there’s a reliance on coincidence and the unlikely accident to twist the plot. Art has loaded the dice. Increasingly his characters are caught up in the machinations of design. They may invite such contrivance, for after all they so often seek to disrupt their own lives, to break up marital bliss for a risk. In Allen’s comedies, the ordered life is always provisional. Collapse comes with an affair, a mix-up. If order is restored, then that, too, is a makeshift solution. In works such as Crimes and Misdemeanours and Husbands and Wives, there is existential grit in the oyster, an undercurrent of real despair. Such films tell us that life is pretty awful, and we can only hope to get through it the best way we can. Morals are valued, but their efficacy is doubted. And yet Allen’s jokes don’t always believe in this troubled vision. For all that he is morose, he cannot be consistently bleak. He tried to be a philosopher, but cheerfulness kept breaking in; he tried to be a clown, but philosophy kept him doubting. Melinda and Melinda (2004) demonstrated his problem: the same story is told twice, once tragically, and once comically; while I can delightedly remember almost every aspect of Will Ferrell’s comic descent into suffering, the tragic part of the film is lost to me. Apparently lacking faith in the essen-

tially comic nature of life, Allen has nonetheless done his most valuable work in comedy. At his best, he tenders a contrary vision of art, as healing illusion, a step into a fantastic world that holds out an antidote to despair. He has deserved something of his reputation for angst, but there are as many films that celebrate the silly. He is a great praiser of things, a lover of cities and cinema. His films are often best understood as tributes to film. That sweet masterpiece, Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993), is Blue Velvet remade by Bob Hope, the dull couple launching themselves into hapless adventure. His great subject is the illusion offered by art. Watching films, and making films, have offered him – and us – a place of escape. In Hannah and Her Sisters, Woody Allen’s character, Micky Sachs, has his faith in life restored by a Marx Brothers movie; to paraphrase Kenneth Williams, if life is a joke, then we might as well make it a good joke. Yet the more recent film, You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, exposes the fatuity of our sustaining illusions – the beauty of the woman in the window opposite, the flattering promises of new age “spirituality”, the thought that death and old age might be evaded with a treadmill and Viagra. The delusions unravel, or not, but are seen through and sent up. In his loveliest films, The Purple Rose of Cairo or Midnight in Paris, there is a gentler unmasking. He acknowledges the glamour of the silver screen and the magnetism of the past. When the films return to the real, they do so honourably, knowing and accepting that, while sometimes disappointing, the best kind of life is the life that actually is.

Allen has never produced a single great masterpiece, no Godfather, no Raging Bull. Instead over the years, he has made a multitude of small things, comic novellas rather than great novels, pleasurable and rewarding works of art that, without trying to be great, have accumulated greatness, remaining tentative and loveable. No, it was quite accidental. I had given up writing prose completely and gone into television writing. I wanted to write for the theater and at the same time I was doing a cabaret act as a comedian. One day Playboy magazine asked me to write something for them, because I was an emerging comedian and I wrote this piece on chess. At that time I was almost married—but not quite yet—to Louise Lasser; she read it and said, Gee, I think this is good. You should really send this over to The New Yorker. To me, as to everyone else of my generation, The New Yorker was hallowed ground. Anyhow, on a lark I did. I was shocked when I got this phone call back saying that if I’d make a few changes, they’d print it. So I went over there and made the few changes, and they ran it. It was a big boost to my confidence. So I figured, Well, I think I’ll write something else for them. The second or third thing I sent to The New Yorker was very Perelmanesque in style. They printed it but comments were that it was dangerously derivative and I agreed. So both The New Yorker and I looked out for that in subsequent pieces that I sent over there. I did finally get further and further away from him. Perelman, of course, was as complex as could be—a very rich kind of humor. As I went on I tried to simplify. ◆

THE ART OF HUMOR NO. 1 Interviewed by Michiko Kakutani

“

I HATE WHEN ART BECOMES A RELIGION. I FEEL THE OPPOSITE. WHEN YOU START PUTTING A HIGHER VALUE ON WORKS OF ART THAN PEOPLE, YOU’RE FORFEITING YOUR HUMANITY.

”

As New Yorkers know, Woody Allen is one of its more ubiquitous citizens—at courtside in Madison Square Garden watching the Knicks, at Michael’s Pub on Monday evenings playing the clarinet, on occasion at Elaine’s Restaurant at his usual table. Yet he could hardly be considered outgoing: shy on acquaintance, he once expressed an intense desire to return to the womb— “anybody’s.” In fact, his career is one of prodigious effort in a number of disciplines—literature, the theater, and motion pictures. “I’m a compulsive worker,” he once said. “What I really like to do best is whatever I’m not doing at the moment.” Allen’s career in comedy began as a teenager when he submitted jokes to an advertising firm. In 1953, after what he called a “brief abortive year in college,” he left school to become a gag- writer for Garry Moore and Sid Caesar. In the early 1960s, his stand-up routines in the comedy clubs of Greenwich Village gained him considerable recognition, and eventually several television appearances. In 1965, shortly after he produced three successful comedy records, Allen made his debut as an actor and screenwriter in What’s New, Pussycat? His 1969 film, Take the Money and Run, was the first project that he not only wrote and starred in, but directed as well. Though many of his early films (Bananas, Sleeper, Love and Death) were critically acclaimed, it wasn’t until 1977 and the release of Annie Hall, which won four Academy Awards, that Allen was recognized as an extraordinary force in the American cinema. Fifteen of his motion pictures have appeared since, which works out at almost a movie a year. He has also written several Broadway plays, the most successful of them, Don’t Drink the Water and Play It Again, Sam, were also made into films. Allen has written three collections of short pieces, many of which first appeared in The New Yorker: Getting Even, Without Feathers, and Side Effects. The major portion of this interview, much of which was conducted by Michiko Kakutani over dinner at Elaine’s Restaurant, was completed in 1985. Since then, the editors—by correspondence and conversations with Mr. Allen over the phone—have brought it up to date.

Why did you start out writing comedy? I always enjoyed comedians when I was young. But when I started to read more seriously, I enjoyed more serious writers. I became less interested in comedy then, although I found I could write it. These days I’m not terribly interested in comedy. If I were to list my fifteen favorite films, there would probably be no comedies in there. True, there are some comic films that I think are wonderful. I certainly think that City Lights is great, a number of the Buster Keatons, several Marx Brothers movies. But those are a different kind of comedy—the comedy of comedians in film stands more as a record of the comedians’ work. The films may be weak or silly but the comics were geniuses. I like Keaton’s films better than Keaton and enjoy Chaplin and The Marx Brothers usually more than the films. But I’m an easy audience. I laugh easily. How about Bringing Up Baby? No, I never liked that. I never found that funny. Really? No, I liked Born Yesterday, even though it’s a play made into a film. Both The Shop Around the Corner and Trouble in Paradise are terrific. A wonderful talking comedy is The White Sheik by Fellini. What is it that keeps a lighthearted or comic film from being on your list? Nothing other than personal taste. Someone else might list ten comedies. It’s simply that I enjoy more serious films. When I have the option to see films, I’ll go and see Citizen Kane, The Bicycle Thief, The Grand Illusion, The Seventh Seal, and those kind of pictures. When you go to see the great classics over again, you go to see how they’re made, do you go for the impact that they have on you emotionally?

Usually, I go for enjoyment. Other people who work on my films see all the technical things happening, and I can’t see them. I still can’t notice the microphone shadow, or the cut that wasn’t good or something. I’m too engrossed in the film itself. Who have had the greatest influence on your film work? The biggest influences on me, I guess, have been Bergman and the Marx Brothers. I also have no compunction stealing from Strindberg, Chekhov, Perelman, Moss Hart, Jimmy Cannon,

It’s a wonderful thing to be able to create your own world whenever you want to. Writing is very pleasurable, very seductive, and very therapeutic. Fellini, and Bob Hope’s writers. Were you funny as a kid? Yes, I was an amusing youngster. Incidentally, people always relate that to being raised Jewish. It’s a myth. Many great funnymen were not Jewish: W. C. Fields, Jonathan Winters, Bob Hope, Buster Keaton . . . I never saw any connection between ethnicity or religion or race and humor. Were you asked to perform at school functions? I didn’t perform a lot, but I was amus-

ing in class, among friends and teachers. So it wasn’t the sort of humor that would upset the authorities? Sometimes it was, yes. My mother was called to school frequently because I was yelling out things in class, quips in class, and because I would hand in compositions that they thought were in poor taste, or too sexual. Many, many times she was called to school. Why do you think you started writing as a kid? I think it was just the sheer pleasure of it. It’s like playing with my band now. It’s fun to make music, and it’s fun to write. It’s fun to make stuff up. I would say that if I’d lived in the era before motion pictures, I would have been a writer. I saw Alfred Kazin on television. He was extolling the novel at the expense of film. But I didn’t agree. One is not comparable with the other. He had too much respect for the printed word. Good films are better than bad books, and when they’re both great, they’re great and worthwhile in different ways. Do you think the pleasures of writing are related to the sense of control art provides? It’s a wonderful thing to be able to create your own world whenever you want to. Writing is very pleasurable, very seductive, and very therapeutic. Time passes very fast when I’m writing—really fast. I’m puzzling over something, and time just flies by. It’s an exhilarating feeling. How bad can it be? It’s sitting alone with fictional characters. You’re escaping from the world in your own way and that’s fine. Why not? If you like that solitary aspect of writing, would you miss the collaborative aspect of film if you were to give it up? One deceptive appeal of being out

there with other people is that it gets you away from the job of writing. It’s less lonely. But I like to stay home and write. I’ve always felt that if they told me tomorrow I couldn’t make any more films, that they wouldn’t give me any more money, I would be happy writing for the theater; and if they wouldn’t produce my plays, I’d be happy just writing prose; and if they wouldn’t publish me, I’d still be happy writing and leaving it for future generations. Because if there’s anything of value there, it will live; and if there’s not, better it shouldn’t. That’s one of the nice things about writing, or any art; if the thing’s real, it just lives. All the attendant hoopla about it, the success over it or the critical rejection— none of that really matters. In the end, the thing will survive or not on its own merits. Not that immortality via art is any big deal. Truffaut died, and we all felt awful about it, and there were the appropriate eulogies, and his wonderful films live on. But it’s not much help to Truffaut. So you think to yourself, My work will live on. As I’ve said many times, rather than live on in the hearts and minds of my fellow man, I would rather live on in my apartment. Still, some artists put such an emphasis on their work, on creating something that will last, that they put it before everything else. That line by Faulkner—“The ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ is worth any number of old ladies.” I hate when art becomes a religion. I feel the opposite. When you start putting a higher value on works of art than people, you’re forfeiting your humanity. There’s a tendency to feel the artist has special privileges, and that anything’s okay if it’s in the service of art. I tried to get into that in Interiors. I always feel the artist is much too revered—it’s not fair and it’s cruel. It’s a nice but fortuitous gift—like a nice

voice or being left-handed. That you can create is a kind of nice accident. It happens to have high value in society, but it’s not as noble an attribute as courage. I find funny and silly the pompous kind of self-important talk about the artist who takes risks. Artistic risks are like show-business risks—laughable. Like casting against type, wow, what danger! Risks are where your life is on the line. The people who took risks against the Nazis or some of the Russian poets who stood up against the state—those people are courageous and brave, and that’s really an achievement. To be an artist is also an achievement, but you have to keep it in perspective. I’m not trying to undersell art. I think it’s valuable, but I think it’s overly revered. It is a valuable thing, but no more valuable than being a good schoolteacher, or being a good doctor. The problem is that being creative has glamour. People in the business end of film always say, I want to be a producer, but a creative producer. Or a woman I went to school with who said, Oh yes, I married this guy. He’s a plumber but he’s very creative. It’s very important for people to have that credential. Like if he wasn’t creative, he was less. When you’re writing, do you think about your audience? Updike, for instance, once said that he liked to think of a young kid in a small Midwestern town finding one of his books on a shelf at a public library. I’ve always felt that I try to aim as high as I can at the time, not to reach everybody, because I know that I can’t do that, but always to try to stretch myself. I’d like to feel, when I’ve finished a film, that intelligent adults, whether they’re scientists or philosophers, could go in and see it and not come out and feel that it was a total waste of time. That they wouldn’t say, Jesus, what did you get me into? If I went in

to see Rambo, I’d say, Oh, God, and then after a few minutes I’d leave. Size of audience is irrelevant to me. The more the better, but not if I have to change my ideas to seduce them. Film’s not the easiest art form in which to do that; it involves a lot of people, requires a lot of money. There are certain places like Sweden, where you’re partially state subsidized. But in the United States, everything’s so damned expensive. It’s not like painting or writing. With

I’ve never written anything in my life or done any project that wasn’t what I wanted to do at the time.

a film I have to get millions of dollars—to make even a cheap film. So attached to that is a sense that you can’t get along without a big audience. Therefore it’s a bit of a struggle, but I’ve been lucky—I’ve always had freedom. I’ve been blessed. I’ve had a dream life in film—from my first picture on. It’s been absolute, total freedom down the line. Don’t ask me why. If I decided tomorrow to do a black-and- white film on sixteenth-century religion, I could do it.

Of course, if I went in and said, “I’m going to do a film about monads,” they’d say, “Well, we’ll give you this much money to work with.” Whereas if I say, “I’m going to do a big, broad comedy,”

Whatever was wrong with it, the problem is not that it lacks humor. There’s not much humor in Othello or Persona. If I could write a couple of plays or films that had a serious tone, I would

they’ll give me more money. What sort of development do you see in your own work over the years? I hope for growth, of course. If you look at my first films, they were very broad and sometimes funny. I’ve gotten more human with the stories and sacrificed a tremendous amount of

much prefer to do that than have the comedy hit of the year. Because that would give me personal pleasure—in the same sense that I prefer to play New Orleans jazz than to play Mozart. I adore Mozart but I prefer to play New Orleans jazz. Just my preference. But when you’re writing a script and

You think you have something funny in a joke or a scene, and it turns out not to be funny, and you’re surprised. And you’re stuck with it. Or you throw it away. On the other hand, once in a great while you get a pleasant surprise, and something that you never thought was going to be amusing, the audience laughs at or howls at, and it’s a wonderful thing. Can you give an example of that? When I first made Bananas years ago, I was going over to the dictator’s house—I was invited for dinner there in this Latin American country. I brought with me some cake in a box, a string cake from one of the bakery shops. I didn’t think much of it at all, but it consistently always got the biggest howls from the audience. What they were laughing over was the fact that my character was foolish enough to bring some pastries to a state dinner. To me it was incidental on the way to the real funny stuff— to the audience it was the funniest thing. It seems as though when an artist becomes established, other people — critics, their followers—expect them

humor, of laughter, for other values that I personally feel are worth making that sacrifice for. So, a film like The Purple Rose of Cairo or Manhattan will not have as many laughs. But I think they’re more enjoyable. At least to me they are. I would love to continue that— and still try to make some serious things. Was it Interiors that if anybody laughed during its making you took that part out? Was that so? Oh no, no, not true. Good story but totally untrue. No, there are never any colorful stories connected with my pictures. I mean, we go in there and

Each person has his own obsessions. In Bergman films you find the same things over and over, but they’re usually presented with great freshness.

to keep on doing the same thing, instead of evolving in their own way. That’s why you must never take what’s written about you seriously. I’ve never written anything in my life or done any project that wasn’t what I wanted to do at the time. You really have to forget about what they call “career moves.” You just do what you want to do for your own sense of your creative life. If no one else wants to see it, that’s fine. Otherwise, you’re in the business to please other people. When we did Stardust Memories, all of us knew there would be a lot of flack. But it wouldn’t for a second stop me. I never thought,

work in a kind of grim, businesslike atmosphere and do the films, whether they’re comedies or dramas. Some people criticized Interiors, saying that it had no humor at all. I felt that this was a completely irrelevant criticism.

humor surfaces you grasp it with pleasure, no? Yes, it’s always a pleasure. Usually what happens is that there are a number of surprises in films, and usually the surprises are the negative ones.

I better not do this because people will be upset. It’d be sheer death not to go through with a project you feel like going through with at the time. Look at someone like Strindberg— another person I’ve always loved—and you see

the reaction he got on certain things . . . just brutalized. When I made Annie Hall, there were a lot of suggestions that I make “Annie Hall II.” It would never occur to me in a million years to do that. I was planning to do Interiors after that, and that’s what I did. I don’t think you can survive any other way. To me, the trick is never to try to appeal to a large number of people, but to do the finest possible work I can conceive of, and I hope if the work is indeed good, people will come to see it. The artists I’ve loved, most did not have large publics. The important thing is the doing of it. And what happens afterward—you just hope you get lucky. Even in a popular art form like film, in the U.S. most people haven’t seen The Bicycle Thief or The Grand Illusion or Persona. Most people go through their whole lives without seeing any of them. Most of the younger generation supporting the films that are around now in such abundance don’t care about Buñuel or Bergman. They’re not aware of the highest achievements of the art form. Once in a great while something comes together by pure accident of time and place and chance. Charlie Chaplin came along at the right time. If he’d come along today, he’d have had major problems. Don’t you think that as serious writers mature they simply continue to develop and expand the themes already established? Each person has his own obsessions. In Bergman films you find the same things over and over, but they’re usually presented with great freshness.

What about your own work? The same things come up time after time. They’re the things that are on my mind, and one is always feeling for new ways to express them. It’s hard to think of going out and saying, Gee, I have to find something new to express. What sort of things recur? For me, certainly the seductiveness of fantasy and the cruelty of reality. As a creative person, I’ve never been interested in politics or any of the solvable things. What interested me were always the unsolvable problems: the finiteness of life and the sense of meaninglessness and despair and the inability to communicate. The difficulty in falling in love and maintaining it. Those things are much more interesting to me than . . . I don’t know, the Voting Rights Act. In life, I do follow politics a certain amount—I do find it interesting as a citizen but I’d never think of writing about it. A word about this interview. It was hard for me because I don’t like to aggrandize my work by discussing its influences or my themes or that kind of thing. That kind of talk is more applicable to works of greater stature. I say this with no false modesty—that I feel I have done no really significant work,

whatsoever, in any medium. I feel that unequivocally. I feel that what I have done so far in my life is sort of the ballast that is waiting to be uplifted by two or three really fine works that may hopefully come. We’ve been sitting and talking about Faulkner, say, and Updike and Bergman—I mean, I obviously can’t talk about myself in the same way at all. I feel that what I’ve done so far is the . . . the bed of lettuce the hamburger must rest on. I feel that if I could do, in the rest of my life, two or three really fine works—perhaps make a terrific film or write a fine play or something—then everything prior to that point would be interesting as developmental works. I feel that’s the status of my works—they’re a setting waiting for a jewel. But there’s no jewel there at the moment. So I’m starting to feel my interview is pompous. I need some heavy gems in there somewhere. But I hope I’ve come to a point in my life where within the next ten or fifteen years I can do two or three things that lend credence to all the stuff I’ve done already . . . Let’s hope. ◆

Woody Allen Annie Hall (1997)

BIOGRAPHY

Woody Allen was born on December 1, 1935 in Brooklyn, New York. As a young boy he became intrigued with magic tricks and playing the clarinet, two hobbies that he continues today. He broke into show business at 15 years when he started writing jokes for a local paper, receiving $200 a week. He later moved on to write jokes for talk shows but felt that his jokes were being wasted. His agents, Charles Joffe and Jack Rollins, convinced him to start doing stand-up and telling his own jokes. Reluctantly he agreed and, although he initially performed with such fear of the audience that he would cover his ears when they applauded his jokes, he eventually became very successful at stand-up. After performing on stage for a few years, he was approached to write a script for Warren Beatty to star in: “What’s New Pussycat?” and would also have a moderate role as a character in the film. During production, Woody gave himself more and better lines and left Beatty with less compelling dialogue. Beatty inevitably quit the project and was replaced by Peter Sellers, who demanded all the best lines and more screen-time. It was from this experience that Woody realized that he could not work on a film without complete control over its production. Woody’s theoretical direwctorial debut was in “What’s Up, Tiger Lily?”; a Japanese spy flick that he dubbed over with his own comedic dialogue about spies searching for the secret recipe for egg salad. His real directorial debut came the next year in the mockumentary “Take the Money and Run.” He has written, directed and, more often than not, starred in about a film a year ever since, while simultaneously writing more than a dozen plays and several books of comedy. While best known for his romantic comedies Annie Hall (1977) and Manhattan (1979), Woody has made many transitions in his films throughout the years, transitioning from his “early, funny ones” of “Bananas,” “Love and Death” and “Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sex But Were Afraid To Ask;” to his more storied and romantic comedies of “Annie Hall,” “Manhattan” and “Hannah and Her Sisters;” to the Bergmanesque films of “Stardust Memories” and “Interiors;” and then on to the more recent, but varied works of “Crimes and Misdemeanors,” “Husbands and Wives,” “Mighty Aphrodite,” “Celebrity” and “Deconstructing Harry;” and finally to his film of the last decade, which vary from the light comedy of “Scoop,” to the self-destructive darkness of “Match Point” and, most recently, to the cinematically beautiful tale of “Vicky Cristina Barcelona.” IMDb Mini Biography By: Michael Castrignano

7.3 IMDB rating

SLEEPER 1973

M12 89 min | Comedy | Sci-Fi

A nerdish store owner is revived out of cryostasis into a future world to fight an oppressive government.

DIRECTOR: WOODY ALLEN WRITERS: WOODY ALLEN, MARSHALL BRICKMAN STARS: WOODY ALLEN, DIANE KEATON, JOHN BECK

Miles Monroe (Woody Allen), a jazz musician and owner of the ‘Happy Carrot’ Health-Food store in 1973, is subjected to cryopreservation without his consent, and not revived for 200 years.[2] The scientists who revive him are members of a rebellion: 22nd-century America seems to be a police state ruled by a dictator about to implement a secret plan known as the “Aires Project”. The rebels hope to use Miles as a spy to infiltrate the Aires Project, because he is the only member of this society without a known biometric identity. The authorities discover the scientists’ project, and arrest them. Miles escapes by disguising himself as a robot, and goes to work as a butler in the house of socialite Luna Schlosser (Diane Keaton). When Luna decides to have his head replaced with something more “aesthetically pleasing,” Miles reveals his true identity to her; whereupon Luna threatens to give Miles to the authorities. In response, he kidnaps her and goes on the run, searching for the Aires Project.

DIRECTOR: WOODY ALLEN WRITER: WOODY ALLEN STARS: OWEN WILSON, RACHEL MCADAMS, KATHY BATES

7.7

IMDB rating

Gil (Owen Wilson), a successful but distracted Hollywood screenwriter, and his fiancée, Inez (Rachel McAdams), are in Paris, vacationing with Inez’s wealthy, conservative parents (Mimi Kennedy, Kurt Fuller). Gil is struggling to finish his first novel, which is about a man who works in a nostalgia shop, but Inez and her parents are critical and dismissive of Gil’s desire to give up his lucrative Hollywood career to write it. While Gil is considering moving to the city, Inez is intent on living in Malibu. By chance, they are joined by Inez’s friend Paul (Michael Sheen), a pseudo-intellectual who speaks with great authority but little actual accuracy on the history and art of the city. Inez idolizes him, but Gil, who is an ardent admirer of the Lost Generation, finds him insufferable.

MIDNIGHT IN PARIS 2011 M12 94 min | Comedy | Fantasy | Romance

While on a trip to Paris with his fiancée’s family, a nostalgic screenwriter finds himself mysteriously going back to the 1920s every day at midnight.

7.5 IMDB rating

0 8 9 1 S E I R O M E M ST

STARDU M12

y | Dra

d | Come 89 min

DIRECTOR: WOODY ALLEN WRITERS: WOODY ALLEN STARS: WOODY ALLEN, CHARLOTTE RAMPLING, JESSICA HARPER

While attending a retrospect of his work, a filmmaker recalls his life and his loves: the inspirations for his films.

The film follows famous filmmaker Sandy Bates, who is plagued by fans who prefer his “earlier, funnier movies” to his more recent artistic efforts, while he tries to reconcile his conflicting attraction to two very different women: the earnest, intellectual Daisy and the more maternal Isobel. Meanwhile, he is also haunted by memories of his ex-girlfriend, the unstable Dorrie.

7.5 IMDB rating

Neurotic New York comedian Alvy Singer falls in love with the ditsy Annie Hall.

ANNIE HALL 1997

M12 94 min | Comedy | Drama | Romance

DIRECTOR: WOODY ALLEN WRITERS: WOODY ALLEN, MARSHALL BRICKMAN STARS: WOODY ALLEN, DIANE KEATON, TONY ROBERTS

Annie Hall is a film about a comedian, Alvy Singer (Woody Allen), who falls in love with Annie Hall (Diane Keaton). Both of the characters are completely different but both strikingly entertaining and unusual. Alvy is an extreme pessimist that obsesses over the subject of death and has very sarcastic and cynical views about the world and the people around him. Annie is a ditsy and clumsy talented singer and photographer. When Alvy and Annie meet for the first time they are instantly attracted to each other and as a result their conversations are awkward but never the less adorable. The film takes you through the coupleâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s love lives, before and after their relationship. Alvy often comes out of the scene he is in to talk directly to the audience about his views on whatever situation he is in.

LOVE AND DEATH 1975

M12 85 min | Comedy | War

DIRECTOR: WOODY ALLEN WRITERS: WOODY ALLEN STARS: WOODY ALLEN, DIANE KEATON, GEORGES ADET

When Napoleon (James Tolkan) invades Austria during the Napoleonic Wars, Boris Grushenko (Woody Allen), a coward and pacifist scholar, is forced to enlist in the Russian Army. Desperate and disappointed after hearing the news that Sonja (Diane Keaton), his cousin twice removed, is to wed a herring merchant, he inadvertently becomes a war hero. He returns and marries the recently widowed Sonja, who does not want to marry Boris, but promises him that she will when she thinks that he is about to be killed in a duel. Their marriage is filled with philosophical debates, and no money. Their life together is interrupted when Napoleon invades the Russian Empire. Boris wants to flee but his wife, angered that the invasion will interfere with their plans to start a family that year, conceives a plot to assassinate Napoleon at his headquarters in Moscow. Boris and Sonja debate the matter with some degree of philosophical double-talk, and Boris reluctantly goes along with it. They fail to kill Napoleon and Sonja escapes arrest while Boris is executed, despite being told by a vision that he will be pardoned.

In czarist Russia, a neurotic soldier and his distant cousin formulate a plot to assassinate Napoleon.

7.8 IMDB rating

DIRECTOR: WOODY ALLEN WRITERS: WOODY ALLEN, MICKEY ROSE STARS: WOODY ALLEN, JANET MARGOLIN, MARCEL HILLAIRE

Virgil Starkwell (Woody Allen) enters a life of crime at a young age. The “plot” traces his crime spree, his first prison term and eventual escape, the birth and growth of his family, as well as his eventual capture at the hands of the FBI. His multiple crimes include stealing a pane of glass from a jewelry store, robbing a pet store and carving bars of soap into guns to escape from jail. He also robs a man who turns out to be his former friend who reveals he is now a cop, and the movie ends with Woody admitting he got 800 years in prison, but “with good behavior, can get that cut in half”. Starkwell grew up in New Jersey, and played the cello (badly) in his town’s marching band.

TAKE THE MONEY AND RUN 1969 M12 85 min | Comedy | Crime

The life and times of Virgil Starkwell, inept bank robber.

7.5 IMDB rating

BROADWAY DANNY ROSE 1984 M12 84 min | Comedy

In his attempts to reconcile a lounge singer with his mistress, a hapless talent agent is mistaken as her lover by a jealous gangster. DIRECTOR: WOODY ALLEN WRITERS: WOODY ALLEN, MICKEY ROSE STARS: WOODY ALLEN, MIA FARROW, NICK APOLLO FORTE

A hapless talent manager named Danny Rose, by helping a client, gets dragged into a love triangle involving the mob. His story is told in flashback, an anecdote shared amongst a group of comedians over lunch at New York’s Carnegie Deli. Rose’s oneman talent agency represents countless untalented entertainers, including washed-up lounge singer Lou Canova (Nick Apollo Forte), whose career is on the rebound. Lou, who has a wife and three kids, is having an affair with a woman, Tina (Mia Farrow), who had previously dated a gangster. Lou wants her to accompany him to his big gig at the Waldorf Astoria, where he will perform in front of Milton Berle, who could potentially hire him for even bigger things. At the singer’s insistence, Danny Rose acts as a “beard,” masquerading as Tina’s boyfriend to divert attention from the affair. Tina’s ex-boyfriend is extremely jealous, and believing Tina’s relationship with Danny to be real, he orders a hit on Danny, who finds himself in danger of losing both his client and his life.

7.7

IMDB rating

At a turning point in his life, a former tennis pro falls for a femme-fatal type who happens to be dating his friend and soon-to-be brother-inlaw.

DIRECTOR: WOODY ALLEN WRITERS: WOODY ALLEN STARS: SCARLETT JOHANSSON, JONATHAN RHYS MEYERS, EMILY MORTIMER

Chris Wilton (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) is an ambitious tennis player who can’t be bothered to work hard to succeed, although he could have been a real pro. To make ends meet and have the opportunity of meeting wealthy people, he works as a tennis trainer in a high-end London tennis club. He teaches Tom Hewett (Matthew Goode), and becomes quite friendly with him. That’s where he starts dating Chloe Hewett, Tom’s sister (Emily Mortimer), a boring but willing wealthy girl who falls for him. She’s immediately seduced by his witty charm. During some of the family occasions he has to attend to while going out with Chloe, Chris comes to talk to and appreciate blonde American Nola Rice (Scarlett Johansson), a struggling actress who has a cocky and selfish confidence when out of stage but who seems to mess it up every time she is in for an audition. Nola is the girlfriend of Chloe’s only brother Tom, and his parents Alec and Eleanor (Brian Cox and Penelope Wilton) disapprove of her. Nola acknowledges that, but she knows that the Hewett parents are keen on.

MATCH POINT 2005 M12 124 min | Drama | Romance

6.8 IMDB rating

EVERYTHING YOU ALWAYS WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT SEX, BUT WERE AFRAID TO ASK 1972 M12 88 min | Comedy

DIRECTOR: WOODY ALLEN WRITERS: DAVID REUBEN , WOODY ALLEN STARS: WOODY ALLEN, GENE WILDER, LOUISE LASSER

Seven segments related to one another only in that they all purport to be based on sections of the book by David Reuben. The segments range from “Do Aphrodisiacs Work?” in which a court jester gives an aphrodisiac to the Queen and is, in the end, beheaded to “What Happens During Ejaculation?” in which we watch ‘control central’ during a successful seduction.

Seven segments related to one another only in that they all purport to be based on sections of the book by David Reuben.

8.0 IMDB rating

Between two Thanksgivings, Hannah’s husband falls in love with her sister Lee, while her hypochondriac ex-husband rekindles his relationship with her sister Holly.

DIRECTOR: WOODY ALLEN WRITERS: WOODY ALLEN STARS: MIA FARROW, DIANNE WIEST, MICHAEL CAINE

Elliot becomes infatuated with one of Hannah’s sisters, Lee (Barbara Hershey), and eventually begins an affair with her. Elliot attributes his behavior to his discontent with his wife’s self-sufficiency and resentment of her emotional strength. Lee has lived for five years with a reclusive artist, Frederick (Max von Sydow), who is much older. She finds her relationship with Frederick no longer intellectually or sexually stimulating, in spite of (or maybe because of) Frederick’s professed interest in continuing to teach her. She leaves Frederick after he discovers her affair with Elliot. For the remainder of the year between the first and second Thanksgiving gatherings, Elliot and Lee carry on their affair despite Elliot’s inability to end his marriage to Hannah. Lee finally ends the affair during the second Thanksgiving, explaining that she is finished waiting for him to commit and that she has started dating someone.

HANNAH AND HER SISTERS 1986 M12 103 min| Comedy | Drama

7.2 IMDB rating

Two girlfriends on a summer holiday in Spain become enamored with the same painter, unaware that his ex-wife, with whom he has a tempestuous relationship, is about to re-enter the picture.

8 0 0 2 A N O L E C NA BAR

I T S I R C VICKY ma | n | Dra

6 mi M12 9

nce

Roma

DIRECTOR: WOODY ALLEN WRITERS: WOODY ALLEN STARS: REBECCA HALL, SCARLETT JOHANSSON, JAVIER BARDEM

Vicky (Rebecca Hall) and Cristina (Scarlett Johansson) visit Barcelona for the summer, staying with Vickyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s distant relative Judy (Patricia Clarkson) and her husband Mark (Kevin Dunn). While the two are great friends, Vicky is practical and traditional in her approach to love and commitment and is engaged to the reliable Doug (Chris Messina), whereas Cristina imagines herself to be a nonconformist, spontaneous but unsure of what she wants from life or love. At an art exhibition, Cristina is intrigued by artist Juan Antonio (Javier Bardem), who Judy says has suffered a violent relationship with his ex-wife. Later, he brazenly approaches the two women to invite them to join him right away for the weekend in the city of Oviedo, in a small plane he flies himself, for sight-seeing, fine eating and drinking, and hopefully, love-making. Cristina is won over by the offer almost at once, but Vicky is unimpressed and reluctant; she however eventually decides to accompany her friend anyway, mainly to watch over her.

MANHATTAN 1979

8.0 IMDB rating

M12 96 min | Comedy | Drama | Romance

DIRECTOR: WOODY ALLEN WRITERS: WOODY ALLEN, MARSHALL BRICKMAN STARS: WOODY ALLEN, DIANE KEATON, MARIEL HEMINGWAY

The life of a divorced television writer dating a teenage girl is further complicated when he falls in love with his best friend’s mistress.

The film opens with a montage of images of Manhattan accompanied by George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue. Isaac Davis (Woody Allen) is introduced as a man writing a book about his love for New York City. He is a twice-divorced, 42-year-old television comedy writer dealing with the women in his life who quits his unfulfilling job. He is dating Tracy (Mariel Hemingway), a 17-year-old girl attending the Dalton School. His best friend, college professor Yale Pollack (Michael Murphy), married to Emily (Anne Byrne), is having an affair with Mary Wilkie (Diane Keaton). Mary’s ex-husband and former teacher, Jeremiah (Wallace Shawn), also appears. Isaac’s exwife Jill Davis (Meryl Streep) is writing a confessional book about their marriage. Jill has also since come out of the closet and lives with her partner, Connie (Karen Ludwig).