Hey folks, Harry here with a big work of transcription from Sheldrake of Woody Allen regarding his career, thoughts on filmmaking and his latest film MATCH POINT. It's quite long, so let's just hop into it...
WOODY ALLEN INTERVIEWED BY DOUGLAS MCGRATH (DIR, WRITER, EMMA, WRITER, BULLETS OVER BROADWAY)
DOUG: One of the things I was thinking about tonight, when you see this film which is so rich and dark and shattering, I think how impossible it is that this picture was directed by the same person who, on his first picture, directed that masterpiece of lunacy, TAKE THE MONEY AND RUN?
APPLAUSE
I feel that in American film, you can’t find—correct me if I’m wrong—but you can’t find a career that has that kind of depth and breadth and growth in it. So one of the things I want to talk to you about tonight was, where you started, and I want to end up with this picture tonight.
WOODY: Well, Billy Wilder comes to mind who, much more successfully than I have, shown a very, very wide spectrum ranging from the comedies of his that we undoubtedly like so much to some EXTREMELY dark things like, ACE IN THE HOLE. So, I know it exists
LAUGHTER
…beyond myself. And probably if I had time to think about it I could think of others.
DOUG: But not as many in every category. Let’s talk about how you began. Because, you know, you started a writer, first a joke writer –
(SHELDRAKE: Reportedly, Allen's first published joke was "I am two with Nature.")
--and then a sketch writer.
Your films have a very strong and distinctive, often beautiful but not always beautiful, visual style. I feel that when I’m watching TV, and I come across a movie, before I see you I can still tell it’s one of your movies because of the visual style. And I want to talk to you tonight about how you developed that style. Where did it come from? Because you had no training for it. So where did that strong eye come from.
WOODY: When I first started making films, I was interested in just getting laughs and anything I did I subordinated to getting the laugh. I felt I knew where the laugh was—I didn’t always know where it was, but I felt I knew where it was—and most of the time I was right. I guessed correctly most of the time, but there were times I struck out -- very badly. But I was only interested in getting laughs and I framed the shots and did everything to preserve the laugh and protect the laugh. Get the laugh and protect it. Over the years, I started to make films that were more complicated than that and that were more ambitious than that, and, as I say, some of them have worked, some of them have not worked, but the AMBITION was there, the good WILL was there when I made them—I mean, I tried to make the best film I could. The style was always dictated from the script of the film. The style became more complicated as the years went on because the films became more complicated—for better or worse. I’m not saying they were better films but they were more complicated films—so the style matched the films more, the characters were more complex or more neurotic, the ideas were more—at least from my point of view—ambitious, and so the shooting became more ambitious and reflected the content of the film.
DOUG: Can you talk a little bit about Gordon Willis. I remember you’ve told me many times over the years how you benefited from that partnership.
WOODY: Yes. Gordon Will is was, I think, the finest camera man the American Cinema has seen to date, was someone I ran into quite by accident on ANNIE HALL. He was available, I needed a camera man and I hired him and then we worked together after that for about ten years or so. And he is a very, very BRILLIANT cameraman who taught me an enormous amount. I was very lucky, because I got a chance. My first couple of films I was flying blind and going for the jokes as much as I could and then I found myself coping with more difficult technical situations. Gordon Willis was simple and direct and not fancy in any way, and an amazing technician. You know, people always think of his artistry, which was there, of course, all that beautiful lighting that he does in movies like THE GODFATHER, but he was also a real TECHNICAL wizard as well. He had an eNORmous amount of technique in his work.
DOUG: I remember you telling me over the years that your shooting style changed. And that when you first began you used a more traditional style of photographing the film—you’d do your master shot, then your medium shots and your close-ups. And then you changed to a different style.
WOODY: People always think I’m being facetious when I talk about this, but it’s really true. You know, when I first started making films, films were my priority. It was such a privilege to be able to direct a film, and I subordinated my entire life to filmmaking. All I knew was that they turned on the clock, and I had to work day and night around the clock to make the schedule, and I worked so hard…and then after a few years, you know, I thought to myself - this is CRAzy…
LAUGHTER
You know, you wanna have a life that’s - beyond film, so…I started to get - lazy.
TITTERS
And I started to not work as hard. And part of the not working as hard, was that -- I stopped doing coverage.
LOUD LAUGHTER
I was <> bored and overworked, shooting a, jeezus, a master shot and an overshot and a closeup and another and a single and then going around to the other side…and -- I just couldn’t TAKE it any more…
LOUDER LAUGHTER
So I started to design the shots so I could get the important stuff in a good place when I needed it. And I could knock it off in one shot with no coverage and <> and shoot six pages or four pages and five-thirty or six o’clock at night.
LOUD LAUGHTER CHEERS AND APPLAUSE
(remember, this was a crowd of people who work on movie sets)
So that’s the reason for what you’re seeing up there. I like to get home with my family now, and for years I had had seasons tickets to the Knicks games, which were at seven-thirty, and I wanted to get to the Garden, this was important to me, I wanted to get home and practice my clarinet…I didn’t want my life to be just a complete SHALLOW …
(ROARING LAUGHTER)
…beginning, just so you know.
DOUG: So you have an is-it-time-for-dinner based priority. So then, depending on how hungry you are, how do you decide you’re going to go for a close-up? You don’t do everything in a master...when do you make that decision.
WOODY: If I felt that I NEEDED a close-up, I would do it. But I try NOT to shoot close-ups, if I don’t have to. In a picture like MATCH POINT -- you need a few more because of the intensity of the picture. But most of the films I’ve done over the years were comedies, and even the ROMANTIC comedies I’ve done over the years, like HANNAH AND HER SISTERS, does not require close-ups. You get closER shots but it doesn’t require conventional close-ups or really extreme close-ups. And it’s only if I feel I’ve GOT to have it that I do it, otherwise I don’t do it.
DOUG: But is there a RISK in using those long masters. Do you find yourself later in the cutting room and you have no coverage to go to.
WOODY: Yes I have found myself in the cutting room, ahh it’s worth it.
LAUGHTER
Because what happens is, if you do long masters and I could always, shoot the scene again somehow. I was always good at that, of finagling a away to shoot the scene again if I blew the scene, if I saw it in dailies, even if I saw it in the cutting room I would go back and shoot it again if I really blew it. I take a lot of time NOT to blow it, to have a take that’s really good, and one little bad thing does ruin the whole take. But with all this precaution, I have still found myself in the cutting room with a long master and a weak spot in it—I mean a REALLY weak spot in it—and sometimes I’ve cut the master in some clumsy way
LAUGHTER
so that… you know, very picture begins with grandiose ideas, you always think when you’re gonna make a picture, this is going to be the greatest picture ever seen, it’s gonna be fabulous and by the time you’re down to the cutting stage…you’re…PUHHRAYING you won’t be -- HUMILIATED by it.
(LOUD LAUGHTER)
This is something I’ve felt many, many times, and so these WONderful masters sometimes, I would go in, in a NO way of repairing it, except to make SOME kind of cut in it. And somehow I would make the cut and grit my teeth and shoe the film that way and there would be a cut that would kill ME when I saw it but it wasn’t as brutal for the audience, because, you know, they’re just not aw aware of it, they’re caught up in the film, hopefully. But it has happened to me that I’ve been caught with a big master in the cutting room that way, still, all in all, overall it’s worth doing it that way for me.
DOUG: Can you say looking back over the thirty-five pictures there’ve been, what was the hardest one, that you wrestled with the most, what picture gave you the most trouble?
WOODY: Uhh, I had, uuuh, of course, a lot of trouble with…uh, heh heh, you know, it’s funny, I had lot trouble with MANY of them (laughing while he speaks), I spent a lot of time in the editing room humiliated by it. I was doing all I could, then I had a lot of trouble with…
I mean -- I could go on like this for a long time.
LAUGHTER
I’ve had a lot of trouble with many of my films. Very few, VERY few went smoothly.
DOUG: Did I remember you telling me that you were so upset with MANHATTAN at one point, you made an offer…?
WOODY: Yes, I was finished with MANHATTAN. I was COMPLETELY finished, after the rewrites…You know you lose your objectivity – I didn’t FEEL I’d lost my objectivity, but commercially I had lost my objectivity, because I saw the film and, I saw it many times, and I just felt, God, it just didn’t work out, this is TERRIBLE, and I went to United Artists, and I said, if you don’t release this film, I’ll make a FREE film for you,
LAUGHTER
I’ll write it, I’ll direct it, I’ll be in it, or not be in it, whatever you want, you know, I’ll do it for nothing, just PLEEASE don’t…and they, of course, thought I was nuts. They liked the film, and they had an investment in it and they were paying interest on their loan to make the film and they were not about to just dump it and they said, you know, you’re crazy, we’re gonna put this picture out, and we certainly can’t afford to just table it because you’re unhappy with it. And then it came out and was enormously successful at the time, it got a tremendous amount of attention, and what you do under those circumstances is, you keep quiet…
LAUGHTER
And think that you -- got away with something..
LAUGHTER
DOUG: (to audience) When I was first getting to know Woody I asked him what he thought his most successful and least successful picture was, and he had a great definition of what he thought was, for him, a successful picture.
WOODY: I’m sure you realize this, when you’re sitting home and you get an idea for a film, and you put it together, and it seems like a great idea, and you envision it in your mind’s eye, and then you write it, and then comes the part where you have to execute it. You have to leave your office or your bedroom or your office or wherever you write, and you have to make it into a reality. And suddenly it’s a whole other ballgame because, as my friend Marshall Brickman says, the truck starts pulling up every day with -- fresh compromises.
LAUGHTER
And, that’s really what happens. You have to make compromises because -- you don’t get the actors you want, you don’t get the locations you want, the writing you thought was so wonderful is often not so wonderful, in your mind’s eye the person glides across the room and picks up the woman and kisses her, but when you actually SHOOT it, it doesn’t work that way.. The actor walks across the room and takes him a LONG time to get across the room, and the kiss isn’t so great, and the moment’s not as electrifying as you thought—
LAUGHTER
And -- so when you finish, I had such a great idea, what HAPPENED to it, where did it go? And you get ten percent of the idea on film, or ninety percent, or fifty percent.
And so for me a successful film is when I get an idea, and I execute the idea and then I look at the film, like I did with PURPLE ROSE OF CAIRO, I thought, my God, I got it on film, this was just what I conceived, and I see it up there, and I’m very, very happy. That at all, no joyous experience. So, the films of mine that I’ve liked, have been those FEW that I’ve felt I really GOT the juice out of, and, as I say, there really have not been too many of those.
DOUG: Do you mind telling us what they were for you?
WOODY: PURPLE ROSE, HUSBANDS AND WIVES…I feel the film I just did, MATCH POINT, came out very well…but not a lot more of them. Those were REALLY pleasurable for me.
MATCH POINT is a separate case, because, the film is about luck, and I was very lucky with the film—I don’t think I could do this again very easily. EVERYTHING that I needed for MATCH POINT -- fell in for me. It was like I was blessed. I needed Scarlett Johansson? She was available. I needed Jonathan Rhys-Meyers? He was available.
(NOTE: NOT Jonathan Rhys-Davies. OK, true believers? – Ever lovin’ Shel)
I needed it to rain? It rained! Sunshine? It was sunny! WHATEVER, any little thing—I couldn’t -- SCREW the picture up no matter HOW hard I tried!
LAUGHTER
Everything just worked for me. So I felt the picture came out good, and gave me some pleasure. But, I’ve made a lot of pictures and really GOOD feeling from many of them. I haven’t.
DOUG: Let’s talk about MATCH POINT for a second. MATCH POINT was originally written to be shot in New York?
WOODY: Yes, I originally wrote it, I was gonna shoot it in New York. I had a tennis pro that was working in the Hamptons, and the family had a house in Palm Beach. And I couldn’t raise the money in the United States, not based on the script—
I have an idiosyncratic way of working, I don’t let anybody read the script, the film companies, I don’t let them tell me who to cast, I don’t let them see dailies or anything.
And they don’t LIKE that…
LAUGHTER
..and they don’t want to put their money up for it, which I can understand because my pictures terribly here…and they showed me and I changed it. And the two cities are comparable, two sophisticated, cosmopolitan cities, and they both have class structures. And so the film worked just fine there. I could have done it in, err, Paris…Barcelona…
DOUG: From what you’re saying – it sounds like everything broke your way on this. It was one of the easiest…
WOODY: It was a very pleasant one to work on, because you know I’m used to working in New York in the summertime, it’s very hot and very humid and very sunny and here in London it’s cool, the weather was gray every day, which was very good for the photography, everything just fell into place. The cast was so talented, and every member in the cast contributed so much, they made their parts, they fleshed them out beyond anything I could’ve directed them into. So it was a very pleasant experience for me.
DOUG: For a man who’s famous for writing good dialogue, I know you’re also very open to the idea of improvisation on the set, but what are your controls for it?
WOODY: For me it’s just common sense. As soon as I hire actors, I tell them freely, all the time. And many actors say oh, this is great, I love that, thank God, a director who let’s me improvise…
…and then when the time comes they go rrrrIGHT to the script and perform it verbatim. And then there’s actors who say, I would never want to tamper with your wonderful words. Well, my wonderful words are never as good as an actor’s wonderful words, and I’ve written them on a bed in a closed room, and when the actors does it, they make it live they make it real, and so I always encourage them, and I only correct them if they do something terrible. I say truthful, and you know, then, that’s worked very well for me.
DOUG: Let’s talk a little about your work with actors. I did a random loose incorrect count in my head—which means no research—I counted five actors that I know that have won Oscars in your films. The quality acting in your films is always top notch. And your films have a quality that’s really wonderful, in that people sound so much more natural and so much less written for, and I just wonder if could you talk a little bi thow you work with actors, particularly what you do with someone who may not feel at ease or may not be getting the part because I know over the years you’ve had to replace some people.
WOODY: Well, you know, this is gonna sound facetious again, but: I hire very good people, and I don’t discussions about their characters, I don’t have rehearsals, I never rehearse anything, I never ask their OPINIONS on anything…
LAUGHTER
…you know, I block the scene with the cameraman, I get it ready, I bring them to the set, tell them where to stand—if they say to me, “I don’t feel natural doing this,” I say, fine! Well—go where you feel natural! We’ll…make an adjustment. And I give them a lot of freedom, and so they do sound natural when they speak. Now, if I get an actor who just doesn’t -- make it—sometimes I’ll cast an actor who was very good at a reading, or seemed very good, but just doesn’t get it—I try the little psychology that I know. I’m very encouraging—I’m not nasty—I’m very supportive. For awhile.
LAUGHTER
No, but I never get unpleasant—then, I go to them and say, I try and TELL them how to do it. And after that doesn’t work, I’ll take the script and I’ll make believe that I’m talking about some other problem with the script, and I’ll act the scene out for them and read it, ‘Oh, Hello, Doris! I’m home!” and I’ll do the line the way I’d like to hear it, you know, misdirecting them, focusing on some other little problem in the script. And then I give it back to then once in a GREAT while, they do; but sometimes they don’t. And I’ve never been a director that was skillful enough to get a great performance from a bad actor, or a child that can’t act. I’m always amazed to see directors who work with young kids and get drop-dead great performances from them or, you know, an actor who’s never been good and suddenly gives a beautiful performance—I don’t know how the director does it. I’ve never been able to do it. The final thing is, if the person can’t get it after all of this—I get rid of them. And I say, you know, I don’t know what else to do, I mean, because I’m at my wit’s end. I’ve talked to them a little bit, I’ve tried to show them what to do, I’ve tried to explain what to do, I’ve tried to surreptitiously let them mimic me doing it. And it just reaches a point where nothing has worked, so I get a different actor.
DOUG: Is there anyone you haven’t worked with that you’d like to work with.
WOODY: Well, I’d like to work with Cate Blanchett. She’s really great and she can be very, very funny, and brilliant, and, I’ve never met her or anything, but she is someone that I would certainly like to work with. But, I don’t have a LOT of people that way, because I usually write the story, and who’s ever good for the story—I’m essentially a WRITER to begin with, so, I’m always protecting the story, and I don’t think in directorial terms a lot.
* * *
The rest of the questions are responses to QA from the audience. I couldn’t hear a lot of the questions, so screw it. We really just want to hear Woody talk some more don’t we? Everything heard below is Woody talking.
--Hard Pipe Hittin’ Transcribin’ Shel
* * *
I’m hard of hearing. It’s my one flaw.
When Scarlett Johansson and Jonathon Rhys-Meyers got together onscreen, it wasn’t chemistry it was -- physics.
ON IMPROVISATION
I do improvise when I write. If I’m writing a comedy, I’ll be in my house, and I’ll laugh very often when I come up with a joke, because the jokes, the funny lines, come from the unconscious, and they’re as big a surprise to me as they are to the audience. It’s not that I think of a joke and formulate it! I’m talking, I’m improvising the scene, and I say something and it’s quite amusing sometimes!
(Loud LAUGHTER)
And lately—I’ve gotten into a bad habit—that’s the correct way to do it, I feel, I was taught to do it that way, and if you do it that way, you KNOW when you hand in your script that the script plays, because you played it, and you acted it yourSELF, and if you have to do it you can do the scene and it will play. But I’ve gotten into a lazier habit, fairly recently, of writing without improvising, without ACTING it live myself, and depending on my EAR. And so I don’t do as well with that. I mean, I make more mistakes that way. If I have the energy to act out the whole thing in the room, as I have done for years before, I can do better. It’s a better way to write.
CRIME AND PUNISHMENT
(this question was so bizarre I decided to include it)
In AMERICAN TRAGEDY BY THEODORE DREISER the protagonist doesn’t get away with the deed. In your movie, he does. So what has changed in the world that your protagonist gets away with it?
WOODY: Well, you know, that’s DREISER!
LAUGHTER
I’m SO much more cynical than Dreiser. My view of the world is (shrugs) very dark. It’s not DELIBERATELY dark. I don’t know if it’s genetic, I had a very nice childhood and you know, two loving parents and a sister and a good family and no terrible traumas or anything, and yet I always had a very, very dark view of the world. So, to me, the world, even in Dreiser’s time, was full of dreadful, dreadful cruelty and meaningless, awful deeds and mutual inhumanity and people paid no penalty for these IF THEY WERE NOT CAUGHT BY THE LAW. If, as in CRIMES AND MISDEMEANORS, another movie of mine, if your own conscience doesn’t bother you, and you do something terrible, and you’re not caught, then fine. The world is full of examples every day of horrible deeds that go completely unpunished, there’s nobody out there that’s going to punish us, no spiritual punishment or anything, you’re your own decision-maker. And so I have a much darker view then Dreiser. As a matter of fact, in the it doesn’t make me HAPPY. But I don’t know what to do about it.
WHAT DOES HE THINK HIS BEST FILM IS?
That’s a tough question…I don’t know if I can really answer that…I don’t know. If you look at my comedies, there’s a melancholy strain in them, I mean in the romantic movies, the loves don’t work out too much and consequently people have always accused me of being, quote-unquote “neurotic”. I’m not really. I’m very UN-neurotic. I’ve played the PART of a neurotic, well, I thought, over the years, so that people think that I am. But I’m very middle class, simple, you know I work, I have good habits, I’m not a thief or a dope-addict.
LAUGHTER
I‘m very disciplined , I keep a good work schedule, I’m NOT really neurotic. There’s a strain in the movies of melancholy, of romances that don’t work, where there’s—PURPLE ROSE, it doesn’t work, and in HANNAH AND HER SISTERS it doesn’t work, and in ANNIE HALL it doesn’t work, and I mean it’s just one after the other, so even the comedies have got a—an undertone of melancholy, which I don’t do on PURPOSE, or anything, I just notice it myself, I just step back and look and observe it myself. And people say that, people who are in comedy suffer the MOST , have got the most painful view of life, and this may be true. The comics I’ve known in life all have been GREAT sufferers in their private lives.
Q. So are the tragedians just chuckling it up?
Oh, who knows, there’s been ten billion things written about it. Nietzche said, when he was looking at a clown, once, being funny, he said My God, when I think of how he must have suffered, to behave like this. And you know I think that’s true. I’ve known a lot of comedians in my life, and they have suffered, and there is about all of them a…an unhappy component. (smiles at his own choice of words).
HOW DO YOUR WRITE THESE HERE STORIES, ANYWAY?
I was taught to begin at the beginning. No, I mean, actually to start—not everybody did that. I remember years ago talking with Paddy Chayevsky, he was a terrific writer, and he would write a scene here and write a scene there, and a scene there, and out of sequence, and put it together. I can’t do that. I start at Page One and, and… chronological.
ANY YOUNG FILMMAKER’S YOU LIKE?
Well, I’ve seen films by young filmmakers I’ve felt were very good films. Recently there a film that I saw by Alexander Payne. I thought Sideways was a wonderful film—Alexander Payne and Jim Taylor, there films they’ve made are quite good. The good films ARE the films that seem to be coming from more independent sources. It’s hard to think of a lot of films from the studios that have been terribly original or interesting. Most of them HAVE come from young filmmakers who’ve been making these kind of interesting offbeat movies.
TWO DEAD WOMEN, HAMLET-STYLE. THAT’S A LITTLE WEIRD.
Well, yes. The reason for it was just that, he was sitting home, and I was curious what was going through his mind. after that happened, and was he suffering at all, what was he thinking about, how would he address the moral issues of it. And I thought it would be interesting cinematically to have him at home working on his computer and to confront this for a moment if only psychologically, to hear how he felt about it, when confronted by the two victims. And I thought that would be interesting in the movie. So that was my idea about it. How it affects members of the audience, I don’t know. So, you found it weird. It may be.
SO YOUR HERO”S READING DOSTOEVESY’S CRIME AND PUNISHMENT
It was a deliberate decision, because I thought, he’d be reading something, and in crime and punishment it was interesting to me because the character kills someone then kills someone else in committing his first murder, and the origin of this movie for me is that I was sitting home and thinking it would be interesting to have somebody, to do a murder story where the person commits a different murder so that the real murder seems like a kind of en passant thing, just as he was running out he met somebody and killed her, but that was the real joke to myself.
THAT WOODY ALLEN MUSIC. IT’S OPERA THIS TIME!
The music in my movies is generally, for me, the most fun to do, because I like to do it myself. After a film is edited, to take my recordings and recordings. So in this movie I knew I couldn’t use the music I usually use—‘cause I generally use Cole Porter and Irving Berlin and George Gershwin, and here that was really inappropriate for the movie, and I was testing thing, and I thought: I should really test an opera piece, because at least there’s a connection in the movie—in the movie the family goes to the opera. And I tried it, and the <> second I put the opera piece in, it looked…GOOD. And so I started using opera for the entire movie. I do it AFTER I’ve shot. The story is operatic. There’s all this blood and intensity in the story, so I used opera. The only time I can think of when I actually did some music first was in MANHATTAN, someone had given me Michael Tilsen Thomas’s recording of the George Gershwin overtures, and I would play them when I would take a shower every day, and I’d think God I could do a great scene to THIS music, and a great scene to THAT music, and I shot scenes for MANHATTAN that I knew were going to be put to music, because I had the music first. That was the only time though.
DO YOU PLOT BEFORE YOU WRITE? OR WHAT?
I have the plot in my mind. I don’t write the plot down in an outline, but I THINK about it a lot before I actually start laying on the bed writing, I’ve spent a lot of unpleasant, agonizing time by myself in a room, and walking the streets, and standing in the shower, and thinking and thinking, and plotting and plotting. So when I sit down and write I pretty much know the plot of the movie. THEN when you do sit down and write, you do find there are any number of surprises that come up, some very positive ones, some negative ones, but---I have the plot. There’s a terrible fear that all writers have that, they’re gonna hit forty or fifty pages, and be over. And you’re out. And you’ve got no place to go. And the story had a great beginning and a great idea and a great character, and now you’re fifty pages into it and there’s no place to go. You’re dead. And that happened to me years ago, and I never wanted it to happen again because you put a LOT of work into it, and your heart goes into it, and then if you don’t have an outline where you know where you’re going, it can be very, very distressful.
FINALLY, LUCK.
Yes, I put that in so the film would have body.
DISBELIEVING LAUGHTER. IT INFORMS THE ENTIRE MOVIE, BUT HE’S SAYING THAT THAT IDEA CAME AFTER THE STORY!
I did. It was a -- SHALLOW murder mystery at first, and I didn’t want to do that, and I thought, theres’s GOT to be a philosophical POINT here someplace, floating around that I can cash in on and look good!
RAUCOUS LAUGHTER
And I thought—wait a minute! I can make a point here that would make it <> seem like I know something!
LAUGHTER
It’s about luck! And I’ll push that a little bit and so I threw it in here, and I threw a little bit in there, and it worked, because it just happened to fit into the story. And that was good luck for me! But originally I just started with the murder premise and whatever intellectual content the film has, if it has any, was added. It was put in to jazz up the film.
And that was all the interview there was. There’s wasn’t any more.
