Woody Allen has become an American icon — an unchanging cultural commodity with instant brand recognition like Hugh Hefner or Colonel Sanders. So the experience of interviewing Allen face to face is distinctly surreal. Like the characters in his 1985 The Purple Rose of Cairo, it feels as though one is interacting with the movie screen, talking to a persona rather than a person.
In his latest film, Hollywood Ending, Allen blurs the line between reality and fantasy even more, playing filmmaker Val Waxman, who’s been engaged to direct a movie about New York by a Hollywood studio, Galaxy Pictures.
Creative Loafing: Most directors are content to stand back and let the film fiction unfold without them, but you continually insert yourself into your films as a performer. Where do you think that impulse comes from?
Woody Allen: When I started, I was both a writer and a stand-up comedian. So I have no enormous impulse to act. If I never acted again it wouldn’t bother me. But I started that way and sort of habitually drifted along doing it. It wouldn’t bother me if I had a phone call tomorrow from Dustin Hoffman saying he would play all my roles from now on. I would be very happy.
Is that who you imagine playing you?
Well, I know he could play me better than I could play me.
Has there ever been anyone you really wanted in one of your films who wouldn’t participate?
I wanted to get Jack Nicholson in Hannah and Her Sisters. And he wanted to do it, but he had a commitment. So I had to resort to using an English actor, Michael Caine, who I love, but I just didn’t want to get an English actor really.
Is there some project that you’ve always wanted to do?
I always wanted to make a big jazz movie. I made Sweet and Lowdown but that was a small jazz movie. With big prices. But I’d like to make a big jazz movie, but the costs are so prohibitive, because you’re working with a lot of music, musicians, song rights and a lot of period work. The jazz story is very circuitous and so it would cost a fortune to make.
Do you think your relationship to Hollywood is as adversarial as it’s portrayed in Hollywood Ending?
It’s not adversarial because I never worked in Hollywood, and they don’t take me seriously in any way. They’ve been very nice to me, they’re not bad people, but I’m not someone they’re too interested in because I don’t bring in high profits… I love to tease them, because they have a completely different lifestyle than the East Coast and I could never live out there. Not that I hate it, or hate the people. I just don’t like that kind of weather. It would be tough for me to live in sunshine day after day and no change of seasons.
Do you find you are consistently looking for a shared quality in the women who star next to you, like Tea Leoni?
They all have a flair for being able to toss off sharp lines. You can find very good actors, actresses who are wonderful, but they don’t have any flair for dealing with those lines in a very off-handed, light way. A comic actor who could really do that — although you don’t know it from most of his movies because they were silly movies — was Bob Hope. And some of the older women, like Claudette Colbert, Rosalind Russell, Katharine Hepburn, Carole Lombard, in addition to being great actresses, could score with those one-liners.
Do you think there’s some common self-effacing quality that you look for in your performers?
I always respect people more — that’s what I always loved about Diane Keaton or Tea Leoni, they’re like the girls in school who were like, “I did so badly on that test,” and then the test marks come back and they’re always 100 or 99. That self-effacing quality is always appealing. It’s so much more appealing than ones who come on strong and sell themselves and push themselves.
Those are the moments I most responded to in Hollywood Ending, the slapstick elements, because you were physically self-effacing.
I have a tendency to be self-effacing, but I deserve it [laughs]. I always start off with such grand expectations and great hopes and they always come out so disappointing to me at the end. *
This article appears in May 15-21, 2002.
