Perhaps he feels uncomfortable at having revealed this detail of his life though it’s just as likely that he’s merely bored
Perhaps he feels uncomfortable at having revealed this detail of his life, though it’s just as likely that he’s merely bored.Whatever. There’s no doubt about it – my interview with Woody Allen is definitely history.’Anything Else’ opens next month. “It just seemed clear to me that his name would have to be Dobel when I wrote the script.”I arch my eyebrow and wait, and finally he relents: “Well, that’s the whole basis of psychoanalysis, that things slip out.” It may be fleeting, but it’s a glimpse of the Woody Allen behind the rehearsed shtick, and I rush to try to capture a little more. If one were to consider his work alongside his life these days, what could one infer? That requiring individual production deals leaves him feeling out of control (Hollywood Ending)? Or, in the case of Anything Else, that his dismay at the world around him makes him want to pick up a gun and shoot someone?Is it a coincidence, I wonder, that the name Dobel is so close to “double”? Allen smiles: “I didn’t think of that,” he says. Allen wrote films for the women in his life and was happily identified with his heroes’ neuroses. It’s just at random – there’s no rhyme or reason.”There’s something more than a little tactical about Allen’s argument: not least as it conveniently removes the prospect of discussing his films as autobiography – surely not an unreasonable expectation for a writer/director who also generally plays the leading role.In the early days, there was safer ground.
“Many things are read into my films because I make so many of them,” he suggests. “But when I finish a film, I go on to make whatever idea I have at that time.”So, when I finished Deconstructing Harry, I had accumulated in my drawer ideas for some comic films – Small Time Crooks, Curse of the Jade Scorpion, Hollywood Ending – that I thought I’d like to make because they were funny ideas So I took them out and made them, then I went on to this But it’s just coincidence. Nobody survives, but that’s the story.”He may be considered an auteur, but Allen resists completely the notion that there is any thematic progression to his films, insisting that they are nothing more than a succession of funny tales. “So maybe the audience will come in the first week, but they’ll be appalled.
But it’s me they’ll be angry with, me they’ll hate for tricking them.” He may be right, though it’s just as likely that their fury will be directed at an overlong, badly structured, underdeveloped script.Much of the problem with Anything Else – and a good deal of the rest of Allen’s recent work – is its misanthropy. Take the female characters in the latest film, Amanda and her mother Paula (Stockard Channing): they are entirely manipulative, dislikeable creatures. Allen’s characters have always been beset by neuroses, but they were still recognisable as people and we used to care about them. These two have no redeeming features whatsoever.”Yes,” Allen nods belligerently “And that’s fine – if they haven’t, they haven’t I’m not obliged to make all the characters likeable.
