by Paul Fischer
by
Chuck Schwartz
This is the second
time we've sat down with Woody Allen (last year's
Small Time Crooks was 
the
first). As we've reported elsewhere, we usually sit with half a dozen or so other
writers to do these "roundtable" interviews. This time out, for some
reason, we found ourselves sitting with a group of non-American writers for non-American
outlets, which also meant that Allen and I were the only Jews (both of us nonobservant)
sitting in the room. This interview veered way off the movie mark towards its
end -- we've deleted some stuff that reeks of ignorance but kept some of the personal
remarks about religion and Jewish culture that got us back on the subject of comedy
and movies in general.
CrankyCritic: Over the last 30 years of movie making how
has your comedy style changed and where does The Curse of the Jade Scorpion
fit in in the overall oeuvre of Woody Allen movies
Woody Allen: I think I've gotten technically better over the years but
you'd have to be a fool not to. I've made so many movies that by sheer quantity
you get better at the technique. I still function the way I functioned when I
first started. The idea that I want to make at the time, I've been very blessed
to have backing. The idea that I want to make I make. If an idea like Interiors
occurs to me I make it. Small Time Crooks or a musical, I make them.
Next year I could make some kind of heavy tragic film I've been doing it the same
way for years. I make the film that strikes my fancy at the time. I don't think
my film style has changed. I'm doing the same kind of jokes I did when I was younger.
CrankyCritic: Is it out of consideration to work with a collaborator?
Woody Allen: Every five years or something believe it or not out of sheer
loneliness I work with a collaborator. I'll work by myself for years and then
I'll think it'll be fun to et one of my friends like Marshall Brickman
or Doug McGrath into a room and not be alone for the writing of the thing;
to have the pleasure of taking walks and get lunch together; its sort of a fun
process and then I do it and then I get back on my own for a while until I feel
the need to do it again.
CrankyCritic: And one of the things you seem to like is
the 1940s time period. Tell.
Woody Allen: One of the staples of the films then was a hostile relationship
between a man and a woman whether it was Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell
or Spencer Tracey and Katherine Hepburn or The Thin Man.
You always knew they would get together. You never knew exactly how, but you know
they would. They hated one another deeply and kept digging at one another and
this was a pleasurable kind of film for me to see when I was younger and you used
to see them all over the place. They were very popular films at the time and they
made them for years. In the early Forties, in my neighborhood, you could see two,
three of these a week.
CrankyCritic:
Helen Hunt's character is ambitious aggressive and unhappy. Charlize
Theron's character is beautiful heiress and ready to sleep with any guy. Why
these two types?
Woody Allen: Well, these are staples. You make films whether they're dramas
or comedies about neurotic people. Flawed people. Interesting personality traits.
To make them about calm, stable untroubled people isn't interesting. Helen is
an aggressive, fast talking office person who's really a wreck underneath in her
private life. Charlize is an heiress and I will say this. These are staples of
those 1940s types of comedies. These are not original inventions. When you saw
those films with Hepburn or Russell or Harlow, they were spoiled heiresses and
suit wearing acerbic office women. This is more of that.
CrankyCritic: Did you start with the idea and then go for specifics
or start with specifics?
Woody Allen: No. I had this idea. Sometimes idea come to me based on something
and sometimes they come spontaneously. Nothing seems to trigger it. I wrote it
out and threw it in the drawer. It was in the drawer with a lot of other ideas
of mine. A couple of years ago I went through some of these notes and I noticed
there were a number of comic ideas I'd accumulated and hadn't done. Small Time
Crooks was one. This was one. A film that I just finished entitled Hollywood
Ending is another one and I wanted to get these comic ideas up and out because
I didn't want them to just lay in the drawer. They were all funny ideas. I've
done all three of them now. What I'll do next, I don't know. I wanted to get some
of these up and running. The idea just came to me that it would be funny if I
was hypnotized and I were both criminal and the person pursuing the criminal.
Since I'd always wanted to do a fast bantering film the two came together easily.
CrankyCritic: And somehow we'd guess that hypnosis as a gimmick fit
a film based in the 1940s better than it would something in the 70s or 80s or
90s
Woody Allen: If you did it today it would have a million other connotations
to it whereas in the 40s it was still a very mysterious thing to people. It was
full of promise of post hypnotic suggestions and powers over other people. When
I grew up hypnosis was half comic and half sinister. Everything just conspired
to set it in the 1940s. Plus visually I've always liked the 20s 30s for film.
I do these because I like the music. I like the clothes. I like the way the women
and the guys look. There are soldiers and sailors and gangsters with the machine
guns in their violin cases. It's a very colorful era of New York, full of great
theater and great nightclubs and great jazz.
CrankyCritic:
It's also an opportunity to revisit the NY of your childhood . . .
Woody Allen: Yes. I was born the last month of 1935 so, in 1940, I was
just turning 5 years old and being taken to the movies. For those of us who were
not old enough to understand the horror of war it was a very romantic era because
these guys were kissing their wives and girlfriends goodbye and going off to fight
and become heroes. The country was very much together. Not fragmented at all but
against a common enemy and, you know, I could turn on my radio in the morning
when I was getting dressed for school and hear Frank Sinatra and Duke
Ellington and Benny Goodman and think this is the music. Now that music
is art. Ellington is art. At that time it was just what you heard on the radio.
Cole Porter was just a guy who wrote pretty songs and Billie Holliday
would sing them.
CrankyCritic: What kind of child were you?
Woody Allen: A perfectly nice child [laughter] I didn't have a miserable
childhood. My parents loved me and I was a very bad student at school but I was
not unpopular. I was a good athlete. I was the first one picked, not the last
one. I was not a good student. I didn't like school at all. I lived in a nice
neighborhood, Flatbush in Brooklyn. At the time it was a nice neighborhood and
safe. You could play ball on the streets all day long. The only thing I regret
-- but I regret it only in fantasy because I don't know what it would have been
like -- I wish my parents had raised me in Manhattan because I think it's the
greatest thing you can do for a kid is to raise them in New York City. I can see
this with my own children. Within a radius of 20 blocks of the house there is
theater and museums and opera and, you know, everything, stores. It's a great,
exciting place. Brooklyn was not that. It was much more suburban but still very
nice.
CrankyCritic: Was there much religion in your home and are you raising
your children with religion?
Woody Allen: I was raised in a religious home. It was unreasonable enforced
religion that turned me off it. It was a joyless, unpleasant, stupid, barbaric
thing when I was a child and I've never gotten over that feeling. If you're talking
about religion it's one thing; I don't hold Jewish religion with any more seriousness
than I would any other. Culturally speaking, I was raised in a Jewish household.
In addition to the religious side of it, I was taught respect for books and learning
and the higher professions like medicine and law and teaching. The Jewish culture
-- people that are Jewish have a certain cultural habit that they've formed and
one of those habits is an appreciation of theater and music -- these are cultural
things one does associate with values that are promulgated by Jewish families.
I think that's a good thing.
CrankyCritic: The self-deprecating brand of humor is particularly Jewish
in its roots, isn't it?
Woody Allen: Uh, it may be. I don't know. You hear that all the time and
it may be true. I don't know. Self deprecating humor is all around. It's a staple
of comedians. Buster Keaton wasn't Jewish. He was deadpan and made fun
of himself and was self deprecating. Bob Hope is a coward's coward and
a cheap womanizer and makes fun of himself. It seems to me to be a staple of comedians
in general, and not just a Jewish trait. It may be that you get taught by your
parents and grandparents certain things and they come out in your work. You're
put on your guard all the time and taught that you're a persecuted minority and
that you've got to watch out all the time and keep your eyes open and this translates
into anything you do whether you're a doctor or a lawyer. If you're a comedian
it translates into the content of your work as a comedian. This is possible. I
don't know. It could be one of those things that if somebody did a big study on
it, we'd suddenly find out that there are a lot of fallacies we've all been believing
all the years.
CrankyCritic: A lot of your humor is tied to your appearance. If you
could change your looks and be conventional Hollywood muscular type of guy would
you do it?
Woody Allen: I wouldn't necessarily want to be a big muscular guy. It's
nice to be gorgeous whether you're male or female assuming you don't lose whatever
else you have. This is also a big staple of comedians. If you see Jackie Gleason
always making the fat jokes and Jack Benny with the cheap jokes (though
that isn't physical humor) WC Fields doing jokes about his big red nose
and Bob Hope about his nose. The physical part of it is part of the whole package
that you joke about.
CrankyCritic: And in Jade Scorpion, it seems that happiness, for
your character, is possible only in dreams or under hypnosis!
Woody Allen: Well this is a personal kvetch of mine. I feel that way. I
always feel, I guess being a product of the movies of the 40s where movies were
the greatest things and screens were big and palaces were palaces and stars were
larger than life that reality was so much inferior to what we felt was conceivably
possible from what we had seen in the movies. You saw the way people lived in
the movies and then you saw your own life and it always seemed to me, this has
been an incessant theme of mine, Purple Rose of Cairo is a perfect example,
that reality is unpleasant and difficult and tragic and awful for everybody and
the fantasy world is much more seductive.
CrankyCritic: You're a happy guy never the less.
Woody Allen: Happy within the limitations one could be happy. If I could
change the structure of existence I would do it. I could see a better way to live
for everybody. Within the drab limitations that we're all saddled with, yes, I'm
very lucky.
