Woody Allen | Club Random

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Pessimistic view that I'm going to die and boost.

It's not so pessimistic.

You know, it's probably going to happen.

I could direct him now.

If he would let me direct him now that he's president,

I have returned, like MacArthur,

to find a great man.

A great man is in my home.

How are you?

I'm okay.

Everybody's been so nice to me.

What did you expect?

Oh, no.

To me, let me vomit my love for you right away.

Get it off the table.

You know, from the beginning with the stand-up through the early movies, the middle movies, the late movies, the New Yorker pieces, the books.

Were you part of the New York comics group, the Bitter End, or any of those places that you're doing?

Oh, no.

I was five when that was happening.

I mean, I started in the 80s.

It was the improv, the

Catch a Rising Star.

Do you remember that part?

In New York, though.

Yeah, yeah.

Are you from New York?

New Jersey.

Ah, okay.

So you played those same clubs in Manhattan that you were in?

Yeah, that was my era.

Was, you know,

the improv down on 44th and 9th, that started in like 62.

That was the earliest one.

That was the granddaddy of them all.

But by the 80s,

it had become a thing.

And by the late 80s, it was a phenomenon.

Mid-sized cities had five comedy clubs.

Right.

You know, and it just burnt itself out after a while.

It wasn't like, I mean, when you started, it was just the bitter.

That was, there was a few clubs and only a few comics.

When you started, there was like maybe one new comic every few years.

When I was doing it in the 80s, like their dentists were doing comics.

It was just terrible.

Right.

Did you play Dangerfields?

I lived nearby it

in someone's closet, basically.

I lived in the maid's room.

Yeah, I had a rent-free situation.

Don't even ask.

But

yeah, Danger Fields, I didn't play play it because that was I was too new and that was a headliner club.

I wasn't a headliner yet.

So when you came out here, did you play the Troubadour?

No, that was, I don't remember comics ever playing the Troubadour.

I remember comics getting in trouble for being in the audience at the Troubadour.

I don't know.

That was like, oh, you know, maybe the Smothers Brothers did play that.

Yeah, I think I played the Troubadour.

Okay.

Well, back then they were...

Now it's just music, I think.

I've never heard of a comic at the Troubadour.

wisdom.

I played that other place

in Hollywood.

It was at an upstairs and a downstairs.

What year?

The year that

Kennedy was assassinated.

Because

I was playing there when the day that Kennedy was assassinated.

When you won your Oscar, you had the same reaction as you did when Kennedy was assassinated.

I thought about it for a minute, and then I went back to work.

Yes, that's the guy.

I was writing

a script of what Snoopus had.

I was in a motel, like the Gene Autry Motel,

and

I was playing the place.

The crescendo

was

upstairs, or the crescendo was downstairs, and there was a place upstairs.

But why don't these things affect you more?

To most people, they're earth-shaking.

I was too stupid to grasp what happened.

I

was there, and someone said, it was the operator on the phone,

and she said, Mr.

Allen, the president's been shot.

And I said, oh, yeah, and I turned on the television, I looked for a minute or two, realized I couldn't do anything about it.

And then, you know, and then.

Well, that is true.

But okay, let me challenge you on this.

You say in this book, book, you have no lofty thoughts.

I have no what?

You say, I have no lofty thoughts.

No, right.

But you can't really believe that.

No, I don't have any love.

I've often said I'm mistaken for an intellectual.

And this is what I have to challenge.

Because answer me this then.

If you have no lofty thoughts.

Why didn't you just keep making the silly kind of movies you made at the beginning that were just gags?

I grant you, there are no lofty thoughts in bananas.

There's no lofty thoughts in Take the Money and Run.

But then you did interiors and movies that were like almost all lofty thoughts.

But I was riddled with ambition to be a serious filmmaker,

but I had nothing to contribute in terms of insights

or

you know why that is?

Because there are no lofty thoughts.

No, no, there's one.

There's one lofty thought, thought, I think.

You have it?

You do too.

It's your theme, too.

The quote I always think that encapsulates it, I think it's from Eugene O'Neill, but it may be not, or maybe somebody talking about Eugene O'Neal, or it could be Zubi Sales.

I don't remember.

But the quote is a great quote.

A life with illusions is unpardonable, and a life without illusions is unbearable.

Yes, I agree with that.

That's a big theme of yours.

It's a big theme because you do have to,

you know, you've got to delude yourself to get through.

Life is a terrible, painful, awful, tragic thing, and you've got to.

My solution to it was the coward's way to distract yourself.

There are people that

embrace life and

they confront it and they have all kinds of mature

you know perspectives on it, but I don't.

To me, I avoid it.

I watch baseball, I watch sports, I watch movies.

That's not relevant.

In the movies themselves, there are lofty thoughts, or at least, again,

maybe this better.

And I've heard them somewhere.

Right, well, we all have.

And then we confront them in our own life.

And that's really the one I see over and over again about illusions.

And there's only so many ways to say that.

And everything is just, to me, a variation, if it's lofty, on that theme said in an entertaining way.

You say it in an entertaining way.

You're a very entertaining fellow.

So

how do you deal with this?

I mean,

are you conscious that you are deluding yourself?

Or do you want to delude yourself?

But isn't that the theme you're that again you and and all of us to a degree are exploring is like it's the dichotomy it's the paradox we will never figure out you know no you'll never figure out that's why the quote is good a life with them is bad and a life without them is bad in a different way yeah so all you can do is kind of push it out of your mind and you know distract yourself from you know the novelist uh john irving he wrote world according to i know of him.

I haven't made his books.

Me neither.

Okay.

But I see all his Robin Williams movies.

He said

every

great novel would have better been called Great Expectations.

He said, every novelist wishes that title was still available.

Because life,

great expectations.

You know?

Yes, whenever you sit down to write a novel or

make a movie or to embark on some kind of artistic thing, you always,

or at least I always expect that it's going to be great.

I always, you know, when I sit down to make a movie, I think I'm going to make Citizen Kane.

And this, when people see this, they'll be stunned.

And then when I finally

finish shooting it, I'm in the editing room, I'm praying that I won't be embarrassed and I'm ready.

I'll change anything.

I'll put the end in in the beginning.

I'll put narration into it.

I'll do anything.

And all your great expectations go out the window.

I mean, I was talking more about the character's great expectations.

Uh-huh.

Yours, I mean,

I get that, that that's what any filmmaker does.

I think what you did early in your career was set down this marker that I can't be embarrassed because I'm an artist, I'm going to fail sometimes, and that's what's going to make you like me more.

I think that's

what you did, possibly not

by choice, it's just how you followed that idea.

You're not going to let anybody tell you what to do, how to do it.

You are either gaudy in your universe.

Right, that's true.

You have to do it yourself because it doesn't work any other way.

But you have to accept the fact that you're going to fail a certain amount of times.

The problem is, if you're in an art room, if you're a writer at home and you fail, you throw the paper away and you start over.

If you're a filmmaker, you have to constantly raise $15, $20, $30 million or something.

And then if you're an architect or a filmmaker, you've got to raise a fortune to ply your trade.

And so it gets dicey.

You can't afford, you know, you're resigned to the fact that you will fail, but you can't afford to fail too much because then

you can't get any more money.

Yeah.

I

read in the book that you talked about going to therapy

and said something like, you're waiting for the Godot that never comes.

Yes.

When I started...

This to me is great expectations.

Yeah.

You know, everything is just...

You wait.

Which I know you've never read because you say also

in your unconvincing defense of how you're not an intellectual

you say

you know that you never read Great Expectations you never read Ulysses you never read 1984 Catch 22 Don Quixote you mentioned that's right I've never read any of the ones you've just mentioned I've read them all you want to get the skinny on them

you want to you want to get the yeah you can you condense it well like Dickens 1850

I mean, for the time, but it's very, it's asking a lot of 1850 to be relevant today.

And also, he was writing them on installment, you know, Dickens.

They would be knocking on the door because it had to go in the paper.

That's how that book was written.

That's how Dostoevsky wrote, too, for the money and

bit by bit.

And, you know, but I never had the patience to read any of them.

I was never a reader.

I never enjoyed reading as a kid.

It was not something I like to do, and to this day,

I don't enjoy it.

I've done it to a certain amount because you needed to do it to survive and to flourish as a writer.

But it's not.

I bet you you'd like Catch 22.

The other ones.

Yeah.

I might.

I read Catcher in the Rye, and I liked that.

Short.

I thought that was.

It's good when they're short.

That was, yeah, yeah.

I mean, you also say, I thought this was crazy, it was on the last page, that your big regret is you never, you say you think you never made a great movie.

That's right.

I think I've made some,

remember, I've made 50 movies.

I wrote and directed 50 movies.

Some of them I do think are good.

More, more than half of them are not, but I do think some of them are good.

But I never made, if you think a great movie is Rash Aman or the bicycle thief or the seventh seal or...

See, I've never seen those, just like you've never read the books.

Now, why haven't you seen those?

Because I'm just the young man in the 22nd row.

Like these art house movies that you

like,

I mean, you're right.

I haven't tested them enough.

You'd enjoy them, though, but the thing about them is they're not homework.

They're entertaining.

They're actually gripping and entertaining.

But I've heard people say that about other things that did not grip or entertain me.

Again.

That's interesting.

Yeah, but like, okay, I usually prepare nothing for this show.

I think that's obvious.

But I did want to ask you about movies because you...

Your taste in movies.

Like, I would not, I want to know if you've seen any of these movies.

Like, these are not the art house foreign director movies.

These are like the ones that the common people love.

But, you know, they're big, like Godfather.

I saw the Godfather 2, I thought, was great.

The period work.

Right.

I thought it was absolutely great.

The period work in Godfather 2, I did think was great.

Other than that, not really much.

Well, no.

I mean, I thought they were good pictures, definitely.

But the period work in Godfather 2 was great filmmaking.

Did you see Inora?

No, I haven't.

But my wife Sunyi saw it and loved it.

I have not seen it.

You have no interest?

Hooker with a hard interest.

Yeah, I do have marginal interest.

And that doesn't reflect on the film.

Oh, I know.

It reflects on my own, you know, smallness.

I mean, you know.

It doesn't make you small.

I'm sure.

I reject that theory that people are small because they don't like a certain thing.

You're

not to like it, I think.

I know, but we're all entitled to

enjoy what we want and enjoy our lives the most.

But I might enjoy it.

I don't give a damn.

I'm just saying.

Because I don't have.

You don't have to apologize for not watching Enora.

And I don't have to apologize for not watching the bicycle thief.

It's not that I didn't like it.

I know.

I just haven't seen it.

I might sacrifice the city.

And that's okay.

It's okay.

Okay.

And it's okay.

I don't watch the bicycle thief.

Although you're right.

I can't figure out why, though.

What's it about?

The bicycle is stolen and the picture is trying to retrieve it, and it's very crucial for you.

Are you sure this is not Pee-Wee's big adventure?

Because I think that's the same plot.

I didn't see that.

No, I didn't.

I knew she did.

Okay, James Bond movies.

No, I'm not a fan.

I'm not a fan.

But you wrote one that was a James Bond parody.

No, I never.

No.

Oh, you acted in that?

I had a small acting part.

Casino Royale, right?

I was in it, yeah.

It was a moronic enterprise,

and I was in it

in a small way.

I was just starting out, and at that point point in my life I had to do anything in film to get a foothold and so I was advised to be in it when they offered it to me.

But

none of I saw the first James Bond film and it was fine but I was never moved to see another one.

I'm not,

it doesn't interest me.

Well if you do I would not start with Roger Moore.

Anyway.

Hello, the lovely gentleman.

Okay.

Lawrence of Arabia.

Lawrence of Arabia,

you know, again, it's impressive filmmaking, but there was a lot in it that I didn't think it was.

I don't get it.

I didn't think it was.

I mean, like, what is it about?

It's so lauded, and yet I have watched it a couple of times, and I'm like.

Well, the filmmaking is impressive.

You know, technically impressive.

I thought a lot of the acting in it was cornball.

I mean, I did.

And

I went to like it because,

you know, I had heard so many wonderful things about it.

And look, I mean,

when I criticize these things, I couldn't make a film that impressive if I tried my whole life.

I'm just talking about...

You did not work on that scale.

I couldn't.

Right, it's not your choice.

It's just not your style.

I wouldn't be able to.

I don't have the ability.

So what?

You have this other ability that that they don't have.

The Graduate.

The Graduate I liked.

I saw it years after it came out, and I liked it, you know.

Again, I didn't think it was a great movie,

but I liked it, and the people in it were wonderful.

So I guess I should just forget about Twilight.

Which one?

Twilight.

I bet you your kids have seen it, about vampires in the high school?

No, I don't know it.

I don't know it.

I know.

Sunset Boulevard.

Sunset Boulevard is what my wife would call, and I would agree with her, fun junk.

You know, it's great fun,

but

it's a junky and silly movie.

No lofty thoughts.

But it's fun.

Okay, but there we're back to lofty thoughts.

I know the one you love is Streetcar.

Streetcar I love.

Yes, I think it's just, it's a perfect work of art.

A great, great play.

Every line in it is superb.

Every choice in it is superb.

They lucked out in every way.

They had a great director at the height of his powers.

They had Norland Brando at the height of his powers.

I mean, it was just superb in every way.

But you also said in the book, you relate

to Blanche, that you that's that's who you are.

Yes, and and that's going with what you were saying before.

You know, I really

don't want realism, I want magic.

And magic has appeared in many of my films.

Yes, and I think there's no way out of this terrible mess that we're all in without some kind of magical solution.

If without that,

nothing's going to happen.

See, I would

say that Purple Rose of Cairo might be a great movie because

the ending of it,

you're rooting for this happy ending that would please your heart, shall we say.

But it has a better ending.

It's the right ending.

It's the right ending.

It's the right ending.

And that's why it's a brave choice, which maybe makes it a great movie because,

well, it's been out 30 years.

Can I tell you that?

It's one of my better movies.

I wouldn't call it a great, but it is one of my better movies.

And they they did pressure me to change the ending.

Sure.

They had gone up to Boston to screen it.

Describe the plot.

And I know you say you relate also to that character that Mia Farrow played in that.

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Save her responsibly.

Yeah,

that's you.

Yeah.

Because the plot is that she's in a desperate, horrible, depression life, bad husband, poverty, the whole thing.

And so she goes to the movies and gets lost in the wonderful

as most of America America did in those years.

Right.

Right.

So the character, Jeff Daniels, handsome leading man, he comes off the screen.

Now, of course, this is under the category of buy the premise, buy the bit.

You got to buy the premise, and then you run with the bit.

So the character comes off the screen.

Right.

Right.

Okay.

So, and then romance is her.

I mean, legitimately, they fall in love.

And then

the actor,

the real actor, the real guy, is pissed off because this guy came off the screen and now he's like stealing his thunder.

There can't be two of them running around.

Right, he's hurting them.

Right.

So he comes to town to try to get that guy,

the one who came off the screen, to go back up on the screen.

Yes.

So

then he romances Mia Farrow.

And she falls for him.

And now she has to make a choice between the guy who came off the screen, Jeff Daniels, and the real actor.

And the guy guy who came off the screen, you know, he's a little more true and honest, but the other guy, he's real.

So she, you know, as an audience member, you're like, okay, this is great.

She's going to get everything she wants.

She's going to get this great guy.

And now he's human.

So they have a future together.

But it means the other guy has to go back up on the screen.

So she does that.

She picks the real guy.

The other guy goes back up on the screen.

And then she's like, he said, we're going to, the real one's going to take her back to Hollywood.

and she's at the train station, and or whatever.

And of course, he didn't show up.

Of course, he was just using her.

Your heart wanted them to like have this fairy tale ending, but no,

but that's what ambitious actors do.

Yes, but you remember this:

the capsule,

excuse me, the capsule

meaning of the film is that we are all, in my opinion, forced to choose

between reality and fantasy.

And it's very pleasurable to choose fantasy, but in the end, that way lies madness.

So you have to choose reality.

And reality always kills you.

It always hurts you.

But you have no choice.

You can't choose

fantasy because

you go nuts.

So you have to choose real.

And the real is always heartbreaking because life is heartbreaking.

Is that the ending to the ones you love,

these

Seventh Seal and these types?

It's always the realistic ending.

Yes,

the

bicycle thief has an ending that will have you in tears, and the Seventh Seal won't have you in tears, but it's very powerful

film.

I mean, the movies that you talked about and that took people away, they were so anti-realistic.

I mean,

in the 30s and 40s and 50s, the audience had zero expectation of realism.

They're actually offended by it.

Like, if you got shot, you didn't, like, bleed out.

That's right.

And a kiss was very chaste.

Things were just indicated.

You were not allowed to open your mouth.

There were rules.

They had to sleep in double beds when they were married on the screen.

You never saw any of those married couples in the same bed.

They always had to have double beds.

They were very, very prudish and very strict about that.

You know, but those were escapist films.

And one could make the case that since

there's nothing you can really do about the tragic side of life, that maybe in the end the better thing to do is to make the films that are escapist and give people an hour and a half of respite from the terrible anxieties of life, let them enjoy themselves in an unrealistic manner for an hour and a half and go back, refresh them like a cold drink of water on a hot day, and they go back.

And all the confrontational films, the heavy films,

don't do anything except you know, reiterate the tragedy of life, which you already know about.

I have to tell you, like like when I was a 14-year-old with other wise-ass New Jersey boys, and

your early movies were out, and we loved them.

And

what you

thought about when you watched movies back then, and the people were in the apartment where the elevator opened right into the apartment

and every phone was white, and you said, people were always drinking, but no one ever vomited.

That's right.

Okay, what that was to you,

your shit was to us as 14-year-old boys, because like we read about your life, you know, eating dinner at Alain's every night and like all these women.

I mean, you were such a ladies' man.

Incredible.

That

I was able to have a life and to have been involved with a number of women that were quite beautiful and formidable, gifted and intelligent.

You had dated Diane Keaton and both her sisters.

I was, yes, I was a, I was an

unusually lucky guy when it came to

I've had some wonderful women in my life, very, very influential on me.

Oh, I know.

You said that like at some point you kind of were under the wing of Mel Brooks.

No, not under the wing.

I got on the Sid Cesar show.

I was very, I'm about 10 years younger than Mel and

he was very, very friendly with me.

Very nice to me.

But you said, when you, the book at least says you looked up to him in the sense that you were just amazed that this small Jew

could be...

Because

we'd walk home together from the show.

We lived in the same neighborhood.

And we'd walk home together after the show.

And he would regale me with stories about his love life.

And it was remarkable to me that, you know, these very beautiful women, he captivated them all.

And he did it all with his personality, with his brains, with his personality.

That's what we were saying about you.

Okay.

That's what my 14-year-old self was like, this small Jew is getting a lot of tale.

So there's got to be something to this comedy thing, you know?

Yes.

Well, it's interesting that you say that because when they interview women,

and I guess men too, actually, but when they interview, I notice more with women that they, when they ask them what's important to them, that sense of humor comes up almost more than anything else all the time.

They're lying.

It's just that when the good-looking guy says anything, they

That could be.

No, it's not.

They really do like us.

You know why they like a sense of humor?

Because what women crave more than anything is intimacy.

They never feel like you're quite intimate enough.

And like, there's nothing sexier, nothing wettens panties more than like a private joke that you have with a girl.

Because it says, oh, we're just, it's just us.

We're the only two that understand this.

And humor hits that note for them.

Yes, because

I can see it with Mel and I can see with myself that I was able to go out with women that I could have only dreamt of when I was younger and what they saw in the marriage.

I couldn't figure out.

The stuff about your first two marriages is so many funny lines.

I mean, there's so many LOL lines in here, but like when you said when you were Louise Lasser, who's like, we've all had the Louise Lasser, the one who's toxic in many ways, but too sexy you can't resist.

Right?

I mean, that's her for you.

Yeah,

that's a good discussion.

I mean, Sinatra had

Ava Gardner.

Yes,

that was, you know, his version.

We all have that girl where we shoot up Palm Springs and then we make up.

We all did it.

But,

you know,

the line that I loved was,

I think, one of your first dates, and you said,

I was so exhausted when I got home from being charming, I felt like I'd run a marathon.

Yes, I was working.

Oh, I remember that age when you are just working hard.

Yeah, yeah, you're selling.

Because you have to sell yourself.

The lovely girl, the beautiful girl, the charming girl, the brilliant girl,

says,

this is what I bring to the table.

Now, Now, what do you have?

And you look at him, what do I have?

Gee,

I'm not,

you know,

Montgomery Clift, and

I'm not brilliant, and I'm not,

you know, so you've got to work and sell yourself, and you try very hard to impress the girl.

Well, people would think you're brilliant, but we won't have that argument again.

Well, I would not want to give the impression in this conversation that I was some kind of romantic ladies' man who scored all the time and was successful.

That was not the situation.

Most of the time, I struck out.

It was the few times that I succeeded.

I happened to be lucky.

I succeeded with some very lovely women.

They were brilliant.

They were creative.

They were beautiful.

They were.

Yeah.

And as they say, very influential on my life.

I learned a lot from all of them.

Yeah, they.

And this is the kind of thing you talk about in therapy.

Are you still in therapy?

No, no, I haven't been for a long time.

Thank God.

You said I still have the same issues and problems and neuroses I had when I was 17.

Yeah, this is true.

Then why, I don't never understand this about therapy.

Doesn't that say it's not working?

Why keep doing it?

Of course,

for me, I can only speak for myself because other people have told me that it worked remarkably with them.

For me, it worked a little bit.

It was a little helpful, not as much as I hoped.

I thought I was going to go in and come out, you know, a new man and just in control of everything.

But that didn't happen.

But I made a tiny bit of progress, and

so that was the best I could do.

How could a stranger

know you better than you?

Aren't you always to some degree like telling another human being things that you know even deeper, but you're not saying?

No, but if you just go in, if you go in and talk about your deepest feelings and you keep talking about them uninhibitedly over and over and over, you yourself start to realize certain things.

I never had

a Perry Mason moment, a Eureka moment.

I mean, I never

Della would rush into the courtroom with new evidence about your psyche.

No, I didn't.

And I, you know, I never wept.

I never broke down.

You know, but

gradually, I mean, even as phlegmatic a person as me.

Were you

funny in therapy?

I bet you the therapists you had, what a lucky job to get entertained by you twice a week.

One of them said to me.

I only had a few.

One of them said to me, I thought it was going to be so interesting doing

therapy with you, but it's like, you know, with an accountant or a businessman.

Because we're,

you know,

yeah, I was,

I'm not exciting in person.

I'm not, you know, I'm not scintillating or,

you know, I'm okay, pleasant.

I mean,

you.

I think you have.

I always thought you had what I call New York syndrome, which is like people who just can't be happy unless they're a little unhappy.

Like your thing with

you're obsessed with the universe ending.

You must know that's so crazy.

Like what is, is the universe expanding or is it what how why is it going to end?

Something with the universe.

It's going to end.

It's coming apart.

It's coming apart.

Flying apart.

But not like by flying.

It's going to be very fast speed, increasing speed.

I know, but okay, so it's coming apart, but not for millions of years.

You do see how crazy it is to worry about something that's not going to happen for millions of years.

Well,

but the overall theme is, I mean,

I will come apart long before the universe.

I mean, you know,

at the end of this year, in December, I'll be 90.

I know.

And

I plan on dying in the next few years.

AI could stop that.

Would you live forever if AI let you?

You mean, what would they do?

Insert a little mechanism in my head and I would never be experiencing

I don't have the blueprints but AI is doing amazing things and no, I mean keep you,

just reverse the deterioration of cell damage, which is what kills us.

I mean they they

it's not unreasonable that they could come up with something where you could literally be immortal.

Yeah, yes, but right now they they have nothing and I'm not.

I know but I must tell you that like there are some people who are like unrecognizable from 29 to 89.

Like you look at a picture, like sometimes they capture like a guy who was a prison guard at a concentration camp, you know, and they show a picture of you when he was like 25 as the guard at Treblinka.

Right.

And then now he's, you know, he's been an autoworker for 50 years in Ohio.

And he's,

you know, what you're saying, and he's like, I wasn't this guy.

And you kind of know he was, but you look at the pictures, like, I just, he just looks so different.

You look exactly like Woody Allen.

I mean, obviously, older, but like completely recognizable.

Well, yeah,

I look recognizable, but that can change overnight.

You know, yes, it can.

You suddenly

hit that number, and

then I come in here, you know, with osteoporosis.

Okay,

I feel like you're a hypochondriac who actually is never sick.

I've been very lucky.

I mean, lucky my parents had longevity.

Right.

You know, and so, and I've been blessed so far, so far, without, but you know, I've spoken to people who I'm saying, you know, it's remarkable, you're 95 years old, you look so great, you're so vigorous, and everything is great.

And, you know, the next year they're dead.

Look,

I'm about to be 70, which I'm sure to you you is like, oh, if I was only 70.

70 is a pledge, would be a plethora.

Exactly.

And I know, I feel the hot breath of,

you know, who with the scythe, you know, you can't not.

Even though we feel fine right now, we know the thing is chasing us in a way it wasn't chasing us when we were.

That's right.

It's closer to us.

Yeah, it's coming up.

But again, we don't know.

with AI and things like that.

And I mean, does...

Yeah, I don't put much faith in it.

I still think that I'm 90, people are going to be dead soon.

And the AI and AI, you know, what can they do?

They can only

put metal, you know, mechanical things in your head or your heart.

And we don't know what AI can do.

That's the whole point, is that they're smarter than us by now.

We don't know what.

First of all, they're plotting against us.

You know this, right?

I mean, the robots are going to take over, but they also might keep us alive.

or they might kill all of us because we misgendered somebody.

I don't think they're going to keep us alive.

I mean, I don't think necessarily they're going to kill us, but I don't think you're ever going to get to that.

I mean,

they can increase longevity with advanced medical, you know,

knowledge, but

it doesn't look good.

There's no way out of this.

California, can't thank you enough for coming here.

Get some sun.

I know you hate the sun.

You know we're solar creatures.

We need sun.

I hate the sun.

But I'm telling you, this is science.

We already know.

We don't even need AI to know this.

We need sun.

We're solar people.

We need it to convert vitamin D.

I mean, look.

A little of it, yeah, but basically it's carcinogenic.

It's not basically.

It's carcinogenic when there's too much of it.

Yes, it can be.

And it's unpleasant.

How can sunlight be unpleasant?

It's like the ultimate.

It's not an ugly.

I know, but it's like the ultimate metaphor in song and poetry for happy and good.

Like the sun came out.

It's a metaphor for.

I don't see it that way.

When I get up in the morning and open the blinds, if it's a gray, misty day in Manhattan, it's beautiful.

And if it's sunny and glaring,

it's not so nice.

I can't get used to it.

Well, I mean, we see those things kind of differently.

Can I say that I wrote a novel?

Yeah.

Because I wrote a book

that will come out in September.

This is a memoir.

Right.

And it's nonfiction.

It's your life.

It's my life.

It's fantastic.

It is.

You're such a great

prose stylist.

I mean, besides being LOL throughout the book and just being so honest, It's you're just a great writer as far as like

writing is just a series of sentences, and sentences can be good and they can be bad.

I know they say if they put a monkey in front of a typewriter for long enough, he'd come out with Shakespeare.

That's bullshit.

He never would.

But the rest of us are choosing from the 400,000 or so words in the English language, and you choose great ones.

Well, thank you.

It's true.

I

decided finally to write a work of fiction.

And

I wrote a novel,

the title escapes me at the moment, called What's With Baum?

Like What's With Woody or

What's With Baum?

And it comes out in September of this year.

And I have no idea how people will respond to it.

I'm hoping it will entertain them, but you know, I don't know.

I had fun writing it.

Does not mean for a second anyone will have fun reading it.

No, I find your writing always.

I mean, you've written a lot of stuff.

I mean, I remember the Without Feathers book that I had when I was a kid, Without Feathers.

Yeah, New York

Accumulation.

Yes, I mean,

and I feel like you, in your writing, you are

completely precise, a perfectionist, in a way that, by your own admission, you are not in filmmaking.

I mean, you're the first one to say, like,

when it's five o'clock,

if I could make the movie better with another take of that shot, but the nick game is starting, you go to the nick game.

Yes, I'm not a perfectionist.

I don't have the dedication that my peers and colleagues have.

If you look at these other filmmakers that I came along with, Koppola and Scorsese and Spielberg,

they're perfectionists and they're great.

I am not a perfectionist.

I'm careless.

But when you write a book, it's much easier to be a perfectionist because, you know, you're home and it's not that much.

But that's your style.

Like,

yes, there is something to be said, a lot to be said, for the way those filmmakers do what they do, and their perfectionism is noted and appreciated.

But you just have a different style, which people have come to expect in a Woody Allen movie.

You say it yourself.

I don't do coverage.

You did that movie where you lent yourself out as an actor to Paul Mazurski?

Yes.

Is it the

scenes from the mole movie?

Oh, the mole movie with Bette Midler.

Now, I didn't see it, but I did it strictly.

I saw it, it was okay.

I had respect for Mazurski, so I did it.

But again, I remember you saying, like,

this guy works not like I do.

He rehearses, and this is how most directors work.

They rehearse, they have a storyboard, they plan things.

They care if the actors say the words on the page.

You don't do any of that.

And that's your style, and it's fine because

a lot of show business is people wasting time and money doing shit that nobody would notice.

I think what you're saying is true.

There's a lot of waste and a lot of time waste.

You know, I'm careless about that.

I don't care about it.

Mazurski, a very fine director, was meticulous and he plotted things out and put tape on the floor and we went to the locations first.

And that made him comfortable.

And he was able to do very nice movies when he worked.

But I don't have the patience.

I don't have the concentration to do it.

I was not a good student.

I can't concentrate.

I didn't like homework.

I didn't like homework from when I in all the years I made films, I never took a sheet home with me.

What do you call it?

A call sheet.

A call sheet.

A what?

A call sheet.

I never took a call sheet home with me.

I never got one.

I never knew what I was shooting.

You are always on the call sheet.

You're the director.

I'm the director, and I don't care what I'm shooting the night before.

It's whether you were on the sheet as an actor.

See, to me, there's two kinds of Woody Allen movies, and they're both can be great.

I mean,

but the ones you're in

are just different, you know?

Like, you're just a charismatic person.

It's impossible to explain.

Like, your appeal is so universal all over the world.

And yet, what you're doing often is so idiosyncratic, you know, like so,

you know, you once, I think, did an Albert Shanker joke in one of your movies.

I did, yes.

And it didn't matter to me that people wouldn't know who Albert Shanker was.

They get some things by osmosis.

They get it, but yes, yeah.

And so like

yeah you when you're in the movie i mean you know do i like a lot mickey christina yes and match point and i love midnight in paris but like i like deconstructing harry more because you're harry you know because it's just a different kind of movie

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You know, it's interesting.

One of the things that I remember

that you would not agree with me on for sure was

I know you took issue with my adoration of Bob Hope.

No,

no, not as a not in the way

I don't know who told you that.

I saw you.

I mean,

I saw you on television and

I don't remember the quote, but you seemed to feel that

it was hard for you to understand

the level of adoration I had for him.

But you know what that is?

That's because I saw my parents, who are World War II veterans, both of them.

My father was in Patton's Army, my mother was an Army nurse.

They met up over there.

In the era when Bob Hope was every GI's hero.

And I watched them become so disillusioned when he became a right-wing, cheap, phoned-in, whoremongering douchebag.

Okay.

So I'm not that far off

that you have criticism.

No, but he was great

when you loved him.

And I can totally separate the artist from the schmuck.

I mean, I will listen to an R.

Kelly record tonight if I want to.

I don't care.

And yes, he was great in those early movies, but he did become this asshole who would never do a second take.

I remember when his specials would come on and my mother used to be, you know, Bill, his monologue is starting.

You know, they would gather around the TV.

This is the World War II guy.

And then at some point he was just stumbling through the cue cards.

And I remember working with him once on something.

And I've heard this from other people, would never do a second take.

Even when you stumble over a line or something.

And he went,

I mean more runway jokes he just became something different and I saw that hurt my parents so I did have a little bit of venom for him

that's interesting because I agree with you that

his later work was not comparable to some of those movies but if you see the great love of

some of those pictures

I love the road movies

I love Bob Hope is a coward and I know you were doing Bob Hope.

Oh, I did them all the time.

Yeah, and that's good.

You steal from the best.

You know,

I used to do them when I, before I go out on a date with a girl, I wasn't thinking, gee, I'm going to be Alan Ladd or Gary.

I'm going to be Bob Hope.

And

I, that's, I, that's who I was.

That was my idol.

And you can see him, me doing them in movies sometimes shamelessly.

It's really, I mean, I'm really

putting on his suit, as Jack Growlins would say.

When you're being arrested for backing out badly in any hall and you're saying to the cop,

this is not necessary.

I don't mean to be facetious or didactic.

That's Bob Hope threw Woody Allen.

And of course, it's unrecognizable to most people.

That's the great thing about being a bad impressionist.

When you steal, nobody even knows.

Nobody knows that you're stealing, yeah.

But But I stole from him.

I did a little documentary film honoring him for Lincoln Center once.

Dick Cabot and I put together a thing.

And

I did...

I put in a scene next to his deliberately to show the audience how I was stealing from him.

And it was a scene from my movie Love and Death.

And I put it next to one of his scenes.

And you could see it there because I highlighted it.

And you could see the, you know, the same.

you know,

he was just a great, great influence on me, both in life, before I'd go out for an evening with a young woman, I would put on, and of course I was never myself.

So what they must have been thinking, who this idiot is that I'm out with tonight,

who's cracking these one-liner jokes constantly.

But it's better when someone gets to, I mean, he'd lived to 97, as I recall.

He did, yeah.

It's better when someone in their later years doesn't become something that makes you go,

you didn't, despite what the idiots who witch-hunted you want to make people believe.

You didn't.

You're the same guy.

Yes.

You didn't become Bob Holt.

I'm hoping in the second half of my life I live up to that.

Now, Groucho was...

was a guy who aged and didn't lose his

Groucho.

Let me ask you this.

If If you think you've never made a great movie, how come all your idols, the people you idolized, were your fans?

I'm talking about Groucho Marx, S.J.

Perlman, Tennessee Williams,

Fellini, Bergman, all these people who are your idols.

They all were your fans.

It's in the book.

Yes,

how could you not make a great movie if they all liked you?

They were fans, but I think if we got down to specifics with them, they would say, yes, I liked him.

He was very good.

He He did this and this.

But no, I wouldn't say he

any movie he made equaled the City Lights or Corazawa's movies or Bergman's movies or Florida.

So it has to be right at the tippy, tippy top of the movies that I may never see.

That was for the moment.

I'm going to watch them.

I'm going to watch them.

That's the big surprise with this conversation to me, that you,

because you would enjoy them.

They'd be meaningful to you in terms of content and intellect, and you would love the actual movie.

Let's just say I saved it for my 70s.

I saved something in my life.

Isn't that good?

Well, yes, you can look for, yeah, you

look forward to them.

Yes.

You can look forward to those movies.

I will definitely look forward.

I mean, I wish I could see.

I know.

I know you probably are never going to appear in another movie.

You're certainly too old to play the Anjano.

Yeah, that was the directory.

When I stopped being young enough to play the love interest,

well, men get a bigger break on that than women.

I mean, how old were you when you made Deconstructing Harry?

I don't know.

I don't know how old.

Okay, but

it was not something that made people go, oh, that's ridiculous.

You didn't throw up.

You didn't throw up.

Exactly.

And what greater benchmark can we have than that for filmmaking?

You didn't throw up.

Yeah, that's the quote we used for the picture to sell it.

But I love that one because it's dirty.

Like, you say fuck and cunt.

And I never saw you do that before so much.

Did I?

Was I dirty or something?

I loved it.

It was very,

not very, but like, no, but yeah, there was that character said some dirty things.

Yeah, I'm surprised because

I was always very careful about that.

That's why I loved it.

Because you weren't.

You also had those jump cuts.

Remember that?

In dirt deconstructing Harry?

I don't remember the picture, no.

I mean, I remember some things in it, but I don't remember.

You don't remember doing those jump cuts?

Where it's like.

I don't.

Because I've done jump cuts in some movies.

No,

I don't remember.

Well, anyway.

I was always very

clean in my movies, and not because of any

prudish impulses, but I always felt it was, you know, unless you needed to do something

what they called dirty, it wasn't dirty, but that's how they referred to it,

that you didn't need it.

I never showed too much violence in my movies.

Not because I hate, I love violence.

I mean, in Bonnie and Clyde, I think it's brilliant, but it's all those things are used so

to substitute for good drama.

People think that it's very dramatic, or it's very funny or outrageous because it's dirty, or it's.

Yeah, no, no, you're not.

I mean, you are the farthest thing from dirty.

When I read that Ed Sullivan and Jack Parr both accused you of being dirty,

I thought.

Well, in those days, you know.

But what was it?

What was it that got their panties in a bunch?

The slightest kind of sexual reference, mild, mild,

so mild it would be ridiculous.

You wouldn't consider it dirty or we and at all.

But they were you know, they were brutish about their shows and their audiences.

And uh you you could still be in the movie.

Just not the love interest.

Unless the woman's eighty.

Uh yeah, it's hard to be in a you know, it's hard.

I want to do I don't want to do a g a geyser movie, a geyser movie.

No, but like no, but what you could do is just not not be the lead character.

That's almost better.

You know, just be

an older, a 90-year-old person who's in the story.

Because we like it when you're in the movie.

Yeah.

And you look the same.

But I like to get the girl.

I like to sit opposite the girl over candlelight.

Oh, you can't.

No, I can't.

I know.

I can't.

What do I want?

No, no, no, no, no.

You can't.

But you have to come to terms with, I mean, mortality.

I mean,

you ever like, I mean, you seem to have this pessimistic view that I'm going to die and blah, blah, blah, which I guess was.

It's not so pessimistic.

You know, it's probably going to happen.

Okay.

It's probably going to happen.

But, I mean, does that give you any second thoughts?

Do you ever hedge your bets about, no, I don't know if you call yourself an atheist.

I think we're both very much on the same page with that.

I proudly say the word,

but I don't know if you do.

But we both look at bait.

I mean, you've said in the book, religion's a a hustle.

You think God is a crass bungler.

This sounds exactly like what I think.

But does it make you ever go, whoa, maybe I should like start believing just in last-minute chaos?

I think you either have that gift or you don't.

I don't.

So I couldn't.

But, you know, I always envy people who actually believe in God.

It's a great, great.

Tremendous.

You know, a great thing, the gift.

People who put their head on the pillow at night and say, I know that if I die in my sleep, I'll go to a better place.

And believe it, not because they're not doing it for any other reason.

I was not blessed with that.

No.

I mean, when you think about the

changes just from one generation, I mean, what year was your father born?

1900.

1900.

My father was born in 1921.

That's a guy.

We're 20 years apart, about the same thing.

I mean, when you, that's just, that's just one generation.

We have, I mean, just the smartphone, forget about AI.

If they rip and winkle their way back to life, your father or my father, coming from a time, your father before radio,

radio.

I mean, it's just mind-boggling how much change takes place

in a single generation.

Really does.

Yeah, yeah.

If you think back, if I think back to my grandfather, I mean, I think back to Lincoln.

You know.

Abraham Lincoln.

Abraham Lincoln.

Same guy, right?

There was a Phil Lincoln.

Gay.

No, I think of Abraham.

Yeah, I know.

I know.

And yeah.

But your father, interesting the way you write about him.

You know, one of the funniest things, the gag and radio days that killed me was, you know, your father was kind of a wily, Odysseus kind of character, right?

You know,

he was

shifty.

Shifty, right.

And so the kid, you know, is acting up at the table and the mother's always like, stop it.

Your father works so hard.

And the kid keeps saying, at what?

That's right.

You never knew in my family.

Okay, I accept he works hard.

Doing what?

Well, you knew your father's job, right?

I did, yes.

You did.

You had

a stable home.

I did.

I was very lucky.

Well, you did, too.

Yes, yes,

it was very loving.

I have no excuses.

I had loving parents and friends, and

that was nice to me, and I grew up

misanthropic and

depressed for 70 years.

My parents.

Yeah.

I mean, that's as long as I've been.

Out of spite.

What?

Out of spite.

You know,

that's a great line.

Out of spite.

Yeah.

They stayed together.

But I had a

very nice childhood.

All my relatives loved me.

Yeah.

Everything was great.

I should have been a very happy,

sweet, nice, good-natured person.

But I turned out to be misanthropic, neurotic, hypochondriacal, depressed.

I don't know why.

I'm not bad to other humans.

No, no one.

I mean, a misanthrope

doesn't trust them, doesn't like them.

But I'm not bad to them.

I'm not cruel or anything.

I'm nice to people.

But I, you know, I don't like them.

I don't like them.

Right.

You say in the book, you don't like meeting new people.

No, I don't.

And you don't like to be wherever you are.

Right.

I'm welcome.

I'm chronically unhappy.

Chronically dissatisfied.

Chronically unhappy.

You know.

Yeah.

New Yorker syndrome.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I wonder, maybe it is.

Maybe, you know, someone standing outside looking at New York would say, you know, there's millions of people that live here and a good portion of them have that syndrome.

But you also have wondrous things in your life.

I mean,

okay, your parents had a marriage that was out of spite, but the way you describe your marriage, completely idyllic.

It is.

It's great.

I love it out.

Right.

Lucked out completely.

Okay.

I mean, you say, you know, you eat every meal together.

Yeah.

I mean, and this has been going on for 30 years, basically.

We've been married for about 30 years.

Yeah.

I mean, that's, it's just,

it's a crazy world.

It is, it is amazing, though, the way the media gets stuff.

very often not just wrong, but like diametrically wrong.

Like, and I know from things they've written about me, when you read about yourself, it's what you say to yourself is, wait, this is the one subject I know really well.

Me.

I know what I said.

I know what I do.

So like, if I'm reading about me and it has no relation to reality, how can I trust what you're saying about anything?

Iran, plastics, fucking.

I've asked that question at times in in show business uh that that uh I would see things that his movie is based on this or he's done he's doing a book about this and it's completely untrue and I think to myself okay these are trivial things I'm not doing a movie about that I didn't get the idea for this movie from that

So what must be going on in a,

you know, when they talk about wars and taxes and the government?

And I asked a journalist that once, and he said, well, it's different.

They're not as scrupulous on the show business stories.

He said, when it comes to the serious things,

they are more accurate and they do try harder.

When it comes to the

show business stories,

they don't have the same level of...

And I'm not sure I have your confidence in that part of it either.

I mean,

you're a lot calmer than I would be if I had been in your situation with, I mean, you say you're disillusioned with liberals.

I'll bet.

But, you know, like the last 10 pages, you kind of finally ride.

It's awesome.

You kind of, but even then, you know, it's done in such a particular and

professional way.

It never gets nasty.

It just sticks to what you can prove, basically.

Yeah, I'm not nasty by nature.

No, but you actually.

But the disillusion.

I mean, look, you did a movie.

You, again, lent yourself out as an actor, which you don't do a lot for the blacklist.

I mean, the front.

Okay.

Well, you must have, I know you did, notice

the sort of recapitulation of the witch hunt.

I mean, obviously that was about witch hunting communists, to then what happened to you.

And I mean,

I'm hardly been the first one to notice that, you know, the kind of moralizing that we used to hate from the right, you know, the Jerry Falwells of the world,

then it came from the left.

I mean, I've had it happen to me on a much lesser scale than you, but it is, I find it a bitter pill.

It comes from both sides.

It does.

It comes from the right and the left.

Mostly what happened to you came from the left.

You were a victim of...

over-excesses of the Me Too movement and wokeness and

a lot of inconsistencies there, but

yeah, I mean but I was lucky because you know that that could be ruinous depending.

I was when when everything happened,

I was much older, I had done 45 movies already, I was I had made enough money so I could retire for life comfortably.

I, you know, I was thinking even I only want to make a few more movies and then I would like to start to write books and plays.

And so it happened to me at a time when it was

no problem.

If it happened when I was 25 or so, the first wave of it happened.

You know,

first wave of it happened in 1993 when you were first with Sunyi.

That was a giant scandal.

But, you know, what people forget maybe is that for years after that,

you were golden.

I didn't have any real problems.

practical problems.

Any A-list star, if they got a call,

Woody Allen wants you in his movie, they would all do it.

For very little money, you know,

it was just a super prestigious thing that then went to the, I mean, you have a great line about, like, it became the thing to do, not to work with me the way, you know, suddenly people wanted Kale.

Yes.

But it amused me because

it didn't have any, as a practical thing,

it was not hurtful to me.

Oh, come on.

Yes, it was.

Well, I mean, no, no, it wasn't.

As I'm talking about, as a practical matter,

you know,

I was, as I say, I was in my 80s and I...

I had made so many movies and I,

you know, it didn't matter.

It didn't hurt me.

If I was 30 or 40, it would have been career ending.

But disillusionment.

But it wasn't.

My career was

disillusionment is disillusionment at any age.

I mean, you must, I know you said in the book you were disillusioned at the justice system.

I thought that was fascinating.

Well, that's different.

I was so naive.

I thought there was a penalty for perjury.

Yeah,

you're shocked because most people don't find themselves in a situation in a courtroom, and you're in a courtroom, and people are

perjuring themselves one after the other, and you think, well,

isn't this against the law?

But it you find out that it isn't exactly what you think.

That yes, it's against the law technically, but nobody does anything about it.

It was a very interesting experience.

I found the whole thing an interesting and amusing experience in many ways, and only because

I had already, as I said, done so many movies and

had accumulated enough personal financial resources so that

I wasn't hurt by it.

But if I was 40 or 50 or 30 or something, it would have been very, very painful.

But

at the point that it happened,

it just wasn't there.

You're still

not nasty.

I mean, I remember once I got a DUI,

which is not nearly what you went through.

But, you know, they make a go through a 14-week program and go to AA meetings.

And, like, you are entrapped into the criminal justice system, again, at a very low level.

But even at that level, I was like, whoa, this is awful.

I mean, first of all, there's a lot of people who love it that they just have complete power over you and whatever you do, because now you're in the system, this system.

It gives you a great insight into what it must be like

for black Americans to

justice system for their whole existence.

Yes, but I was lucky because I was saying that

it gives you an insight.

When you see the justice system up close,

it's sobering.

Right, but fortunately, I was never really in the

system because I was

charged with.

Of course you were.

There were two police investigations.

yes but it was I was never charged with anything I was found I know but you know when they were found that nothing ever happened I know both investigations so so I never really suffered as much as you might think

but but I will say

it was fortunate it came at a fortunate time in my life because I didn't have to worry about money and I didn't have to worry about making films.

I made them and I, you know.

Well, you were much younger when those two police investigations were going on.

I would be shitting in my pants if the police were investigating me.

Not if you're you don't if you're innocent.

Yeah, except innocent people sometimes don't get I mean humans are making these judgment calls and we know what we think of humans.

I don't think much of humans, but I I do have great great faith in evidence.

So

I never for a second had

a bad moment because

I felt it was kind of amusing to turn on the television set and see people talking about it when I knew what the situation was.

So you have no bitterness toward the people who renounced you?

I mean, there are some people who defended you, like Scarlett Johansson and well, me, but I'm not in movies, Alec Baldwin,

all your

ex-lovers.

No, I'm not sure.

Diane Keeney.

These are people that

just made a mistake.

I'm not criticizing them.

The renouncers?

They think or thought,

whatever the occasion was, that they were doing the right thing, but they were not cowards.

No, they didn't.

They're cowards.

Are you kidding me?

Timothy Chalamet.

Look, he's a great actor.

I'm not trying to pick a fight with him.

Not that he would care.

But, you know, I saw him on his campaign for the Dylan movie, which he was incredible in.

But this boy wants an Oscar more than his next breath.

He'd throw his mother under the bus.

Okay, so I can't quite sit back as well as you can with this equanimity and say, oh, that, or Greta Gerwig, who renounced you.

And, oh, I'm so sorry I worked with him.

Okay.

You know, she's a big movie director.

They're making a mistake.

First of all, I've had a good time working with both of them, and

they think that they're doing something honorable or helpful, but they're not.

They're just, they guessed wrong.

They made a wrong decision on that.

Someday, maybe they'll realize it.

Maybe it will be clear to them for whatever reason.

Maybe it never will be.

But that's all that they've done,

is

made a mistake.

I mean,

it's so

cheap.

You know, it's like, look, the press loves to anoint people.

You were anointed for a long time.

You were the most anointed person.

I mean, the New York Times was always, I mean, you were the greatest thing ever, and you were making great movies.

The issue was it never resonated with me.

I just worked and did my movies, and the marriage was great.

And, you know, I mean,

it hasn't had a practical

impact on me.

You've made a movie recently.

You know,

is that it?

Well, well, I've written a novel recently.

People see television more.

When you do a movie and it goes right to streaming, who cares?

Who cares if you make them go to the movie theater?

If they see it in their home, isn't it more important?

I don't know.

I grew up in making movies and they went into movie theaters and it was

a different phenomenon.

I'm not happy with them going to

screenings.

And I just don't.

streaming I'm sorry

it just doesn't interest me that much so I I I don't care

you know I I but people see it pe more people will see it yeah more people see it but that's not how I wanted to present it I want to present it in a movie theater on a screen the way I grew up watching movies and if I can't I don't think I want to make movies I want to write novels or plays because it's because you think the communal experience of a theater is important.

Yeah, the whole gestalt of the thing, the whole, you know, waiting online and going in with a lot of people and sitting down with 500 people or 400 people and watching it together.

And then, yeah,

they're not isolated.

Everybody isolated watching a movie at home.

But, you know,

you know, this is a civilization gone with the wind.

Right?

I mean, that civilization.

That's what I think.

Yeah, yeah.

And so I'm happy to, you know, I mean,

make a movie maybe, but not thrilled with it.

The excitement is gone.

So

that's why I wrote this novel.

It was fun for me to write a novel, and it would be fun for me to write a couple of plays.

I have a play that's in Europe that's going to come to the United States.

You know, it's more interesting to me to stand in the back of a theater and watch.

Do your kids ever argue with you about about stuff like this?

Your kids are like grown now, right?

Yeah, but they're young and daughter.

They're 26.

They're what?

They're 26.

I have two daughters who are 26.

Okay.

Do they argue with you about stuff like this?

Do they, you know, do they, is it the typical

dad, you're

trying to get a lot of people?

No, no,

they don't.

They don't.

I didn't raise them as,

you know, show business kids or movie kids.

I didn't show them my movies.

You know, eventually they caught up with a couple of them, but no, they're they're,

you know, no, they don't argue with me.

They argue with me about it, a lot of things, but not that.

Not that.

What movies of yours do they like?

Don't say that again.

What movies of yours do they like?

Yeah, I don't know.

Really?

That didn't come up with your own kids?

No, because I don't know which one.

They've seen some of my movies, but I don't know which ones they've seen.

I've never, you know, I never visited that on them.

They're two New York kids.

They've gone to school in New York, and

one works

in the art world, the art gallery, and another one works

in

Emily in Paris.

But

I never pushed them in any way.

I have a very, you know, nice, warm, loving relationship with them.

And they,

they, uh, I never wanted inflict, oh, you got to watch your father's movies.

Actually, the only movie I really ever inflicted on them, and it's not an infliction, it's a treat, was The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.

I want them to see it, because I find that to be a great American movie.

And I showed that to them, and

they liked it.

Well, I will put that on my list with the bicycle thief.

You never saw that?

I may have seen that.

Is that Humphrey Bogart?

Yeah, yeah.

Okay.

And Casablanca, do we like that one?

You know,

I'm not nuts about Casablanca.

I mean.

But you wrote the movie that's apparently.

I know, but see, people always associate these things with my life.

I wrote because I thought I get jokes for it, the same way in Manhattan.

I thought I'd get jokes with the older guy and the younger woman.

And I thought in the Play It Against Sam, I would get laughs doing stuff bouncing off Casablanca.

But I, you know, the lady who used to write for the New York Times wrote a book about Casablanca.

She was a critic for the New York Times or feature writer.

And she wrote a book about Casablanca.

And she called me.

And I said, you know, I've never really sat through the whole picture.

I don't know.

And she couldn't believe it.

And I, you know, I

what part made you drop off?

I lost interest.

I lost interest in it.

And I'm a great Humphrey Bogart fan.

I mean, I really crazy.

Except for his movies?

Except for his movies?

No, no, no, no.

So, okay, what other bogey movie do you like?

I mean, oh, I loved High Sierra, and I loved

T.

Largo, and I loved

Tain Mutiny.

And

I just,

and

there's something really New York-y about him.

I mean, he's really clever.

He came from New York theater.

I mean, he was that first generation of actors who had come from the theater, but most of them failed because they were theater actors.

And Bogey understood the medium, you know?

Yeah, he just had it.

You can see, you know,

you see him in scenes.

I saw him in a scene, I can't remember who it was, just last week in some movie on Turner Classic Movies.

And the guy with him, oh, oh, it was

The Harder They Fall.

And Rod Steiger was acting with him.

They were nose-to-nose acting.

And Steiger was acting up a storm.

And Bogart wasn't doing anything.

And he was just great.

He was just, you know, there was no acting at all.

He was just coasting on his personality and talking.

And it was just magnetic and just wonderful.

The other guy's doing stuff,

stuff that nobody in life ever does.

Nobody talks like that.

Nobody carries on like that.

So your advice to kids getting into the business is coast on your personality?

It's do less.

If I've given one direction more than any other in my whole life to actors, it's do less.

Don't do that.

When you did decide to have a surrogate, shall we call that, play you.

Because there are parts you could have played.

Oh, yeah, sure.

And you chose John Cusack, or you chose Kenneth Branau, or you chose Mia.

Why?

Like, why did you, some of the times, say, I'm going to do it, and then some of the time say, I'm going to have a surrogate deliver this baby?

I don't think I ever had a surrogate when I could have done it.

I mean, I don't think I could have,

I don't think I could have played,

you know, these are great actors you're talking about.

Cusack's wonderful and Kenneth Branner's wonderful.

And they were much younger than me.

I couldn't have, if I could have done it, I would have done it.

I always would do the part that I could do.

But I aged out of it.

You know,

I just,

when I started to realize that I was not going to be the love interest anymore, then

I started to think, ah, do I do.

You're the love interest in your life.

With all the craziness and the Kafka-esque nonsense you went through, and I don't defend you because I'm a fan, although I plainly am, although you've also made some turkeys, that's true.

But you could be the worst filmmaker.

I defend you because I don't like witch hunts.

They're bad for society.

They're bad for people.

They're wrong.

They're immoral.

That's why I do it.

Not because I'm a fan.

I'm sure.

You know, your

persona is

much more socially engaged, much more politically engaged.

So an issue,

you would engage the issue on the merits of the issue.

Yes, and I see a connection between a lot of where the left went that I did not not like in recent years and this kind of case, this kind of moralizing, this kind of bullshit, standing apart from the facts, just wanting to look like we're the good people and we shun this person and this person is canceled and that kind of stuff.

I don't like it in any of its dimensions.

Look, I always say about these cases,

if you're not in the room, just don't say to me, I know.

You don't know.

I don't know about you.

Nobody knows except you.

I would just say that of all those those kind of cases, the preponderance of evidence on the one side makes it just very unlikely that you were guilty of this.

It just, none of it makes sense.

You know, I want to make one other point

on what you were saying a moment ago.

There's a difference between the Me Too movement and cancel culture.

I mean, the Me Too movement, for whatever value it had in terms of advancing women's rights is a valuable thing.

Cancel culture is a totally different phenomenon.

It may be related to it, it may have been utilized by it, or by various, it's been utilized by various people.

Cancel culture is a pernicious thing

and,

you know,

it's quite a bad thing.

But in terms of

I always feel if you're going to be canceled by a culture, this is the culture to be canceled by.

Yes, you know, I mean,

this is not a culture that

we have to be proud of.

But there is a big difference.

The Me Too movement may have helped women in many ways,

and that's to the good.

To the good.

But

the concept of canceling people

is not a good thing.

But, I mean, it went too far.

It's not a good thing in any any area.

Forget about

women, or you know,

in terms of politics, in terms of,

you know, the McCarthy era.

Cancellation is a

way to deal with

issues.

It doesn't serve any purpose.

But all of this has not turned you into a Trumper.

Into a prophet?

A Trumper.

A Trumper?

No, I'm not a Trumper.

I'm one of the few people who can say he directed Trump.

I directed Trump in a movie.

No.

Celebrity?

In celebrity.

And he was,

you know, he was a pleasure to work with and a very good actor.

He was very polite.

And he hit his mark and did everything correctly and had a real flair for show business.

If you think you were canceled before.

I could direct him now.

If he would let me direct him now that he's president, I think I could do wonders.

But he was very easy to work with.

He's different in person.

And when you say that, people who are just purely emotional get very upset, even though it's just the truth.

We're just saying the truth.

You know, I

am a Democrat.

I voted for Kamala Harris.

Me too.

And I

take issue with him

on 95% of the things,

maybe 99%.

But as an actor,

he was very good.

He was very convincing and very,

you know, he has a charismatic

quality as an actor.

And I'm surprised he wanted to go into politics.

Politics is nothing but headaches and critical decisions and agony.

And this was a guy I used to see at the Nick games, and he liked to play golf, and he liked to judge beauty contests, and he liked to do things that were enjoyable and relaxing.

And why anyone would want to suddenly have to deal with the issues of politics is beyond me.

But

apparently he doesn't mind.

But you don't think that going into politics is the ultimate acting job?

I mean, that's the whole point about him being so different off stage.

They got mad at me for saying this,

is that it's an acting job, and they all do it to a degree.

He just took it to a, like with everything with him, to the nth degree.

But it is the ultimate acting job.

Well, but that doesn't bother me.

They all have to put on a certain

patina for the public and all that.

I disagree with many of,

I would say,

almost all, not all, but almost all of his politics, of his policies.

But in terms, I can only judge

what I know from directing him in the film.

And

he was pleasant to work with and very professional, very polite to everyone, and very,

you know, but

as I say, I would like to direct him now that he's president and

have him let me make the decisions.

Well, I'm going to happen.

I'll make a call.

I can't tell you how much I appreciate you coming here to California, even though we have sun, horrible, terrible, wicked sun.

Yeah, the sun doesn't,

well, it does kill me, actually.

It won't.

It will actually help you if you just get a little sun.

I don't need that much vitamin D.

Yu you do.

You absolutely do need vitamin D.

Then I'd take it in a supplement, a little pill, I'll pop it in my orange juice.

Yeah, I don't think that can make up for all of what the sun itself has to do.

The sun converts the vitamin D.

So no matter how much you take, it has to be converted.

I mean, this is the way it was designed by Jesus, Woody.

And this is the world we live in.

I didn't make it.

I'm just trying to tell you, you need a little son.

Let's do a little tanning.

Just a little son in a ton.

Just stay a day later.

We'll go out and we'll do a little tanning.

And then we'll go to Palm Springs and pick up some girls like Bob Hope.

Put on the lotion and lay back in

the chair.

All right.

Well, thank you.

Ellen, you're a treasure for a reason, like I say in the book.

Thank you very much.

She's out in paperback, right?

Apropos of nothing.

Isn't that why we're here?

It must be.

No, we were here because

I have a novel coming out.

A novel.

A novel coming out in September called What's With Baum.

And

I was really here to promote the novel,

but we never got to it.

Let's get to it.

No, no, no, no, no, no.

I forced it in clumsily,

but that's okay because it's not going to sell anyhow.

So why

waste your time?

I'm going to read it.

No, it'll sell.

You're Woody Allen.

You can sell a book.

you've been very very

thankful

he rose

his muscles played

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