Jennie Tabroff has a fascinating profile of Woody Allen in a recent issue of Newsweek. He’s still superstitious, he’s still terrified by death, and he’s still a depressing person.
But go to meet the director in hopes of a “Tuesdays With Woody”-style affirmation of late-life contentment, and you will be quickly disabused of that illusion. At 72, he says he still lies awake at night, terrified of the void. He cannot reconcile his strident atheism with his superstition about the banana, but he knows why he makes movies: not because he has any grand statement to offer, but simply to take his mind off the existential horror of being alive. Movies are a great diversion, he says, “because it’s much more pleasant to be obsessed over how the hero gets out of his predicament than it is over how I get out of mine.”
Despite his depression, he seems to get along fine. He doesn’t dwell on such things with his family as he tries to spare them from his depressing view of the world, and he manages to keep making films. Not that he enjoys it very much.
“I can’t really come up with a good argument to choose life over death,” he says. “Except that I’m too scared.” Making films offers no reward beyond distracting him from his plight. He claims the payoff is in the process—”I need to be focused on something so I don’t see the big picture”—and he is indifferent to reviews. “I was never bothered if a film was not well received,” he says, admitting that some, such as “The Curse of the Jade Scorpion,” are not great. “But the converse of that is that I never get a lot of pleasure out of it if it is. So it isn’t like you can say, ‘He’s an uncompromising artist.’ That’s not true. I’m a compromising person, definitely. It’s that I don’t get much from either side.”
Very strange.
