"...comics are childlike and they are suing for the approval of the adults. Something goes on in a theater when you're fourteen years old and you want to get up onstage and make the audience laugh. You're always the supplicant, wanting to please and to get warm laughs. Then what happens to comics -- they make it and they become a thousand times more wealthy than their audience, more famous, more idolized, more traveled, more cultivated, more experienced, more sophisticated, and they're no longer the supplicant. They can buy and sell their audience, they know so much more than their audience, they have lived and traveled around the world a hundred times, they've dined at Buckingham Palace and the White House, they have chauffeured cars and they're rich and they've made love to the world's most beautiful women -- and suddenly it becomes difficult to play that loser character, because they don't feel it. Being a supplicant has become much harder to sell. If you're not careful, you can easily become less amusing, less funny. Many become pompous… A strange thing occurs: You go from court jester to king." Woody Allen
A Conversation with Eric Lax
What was the first Woody Allen film that you saw? When and where did you first meet Woody?
Take the Money and Run. I started laughing about 5 seconds into it. I thought it was brilliant. This the same effect as seeing my first Marx Brothers movie, but more so.
I met Woody in 1971, not long after Bananas came out, when The New York Times Magazine sent me to look into doing a piece about this stand-up comedian who was now making movies. I went to his managers’ office on West 57th Street, a couple of doors down from the Russian Tea Room. It was a terrible interview. I was new to journalism and nervous meeting someone whose work knocked me out, and he was shy. I had my questions listed on a legal pad and plowed through them without ever really engaging him in conversation. His shortest answer was, “No,” which was not so bad, but his longest answer was, “Yes.” I did another story. Six months later we met again, and have been talking since.
The Script
Talk about the influence of John Van Druten (Playwright at Work) on his creative process.
Woody is a life-long fan of the theater and hoped to write for it from an early age. As a young comedy
writer, he bought tickets for that season’s Broadway shows as soon as they were announced. Van Druten made the point that in concentrating on a script and thinking and rethinking every aspect of it, the story would come together and root in the writer’s mind. He argued that no outline was necessary. Woody has always followed that advice. His sometime collaborator Marshall Brickman has made the point that for Woody there are two parts to creating a script —the writing, in which nothing is put on paper while the story is worked through, and the writing it down, which follows once the weeks of thinking have led to a conclusion.
The Money
“Put two million dollars in a paper bag, give it to us, go away, and we’ll bring you a picture.” Charles Joffe and Jack Rollins to Palomar Pictures before making TAKE THE MONEY AND RUN. How were they able to realize that objective and continue to raise money for films that were never destined for big box office?
Two reasons. The budgets are low enough to almost always make a profit—sometimes small, sometimes large. Also, at the start of his career Woody was acknowledged as a special talent and studios were eager to have him, not only because of his work but also because his presence on their roster brought a
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certain cache. Arthur Krim at United Artists was an especially strong supporter and was happy to offer Woody total freedom. Krim once told me, “I came into the film business with Charlie Chaplin and I’m leaving it with Woody Allen.” Overall, Woody’s films earned UA a more than respectable amount of money. The Team His team has been in place almost since the outset, especially Juliet Taylor (casting,) and Santo Loquasto (Set and costume design.) How were they selected and what were their critical contributions to the process? Juliet Taylor worked for the highly regarded Marion Dougherty, who cast Woody’s early films. He likes working with people he knows and who do an excellent job. Juliet had the perfect eye for casting over 40 of his films before she retired last year, and he still seeks her opinion on new projects and the top of the cast. Santo Loquasto was already well known in theater and opera when he started as the costume designer for Woody. After Mel Bourne stepped down as production designer, Santo was the logical person to take over. He can discern what Woody wants for the look of his films and delivers it on a shoestring budget. Woody’s trust in him is such that Santo is known as “The Woody
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whisperer” for his ability to anticipate Woody’s needs, and he is often sent to deliver bad news, such as losing a location. Woody has stated that “Everything I learned about filmmaking I learned from (cinematographer) Gordon Willis (they did 8 films together) and film editor Ralph Rosenblum.” Describe their working relationships. Gordon Willis sat with Woody before filming started and asked him scene by scene how he envisioned shooting it. When Willis had a different idea or a suggestion, he would tell Woody and they would work it through. One of the first examples of this is the scene in Annie Hall with Alvy and Annie on their separate psychiatrist’s couch, talking about the other. Woody suggested a split screen that would combine two different shots. Willis said that was okay but why not build the set so the camera could pan between them? Woody says: “When I would line up a shot or suggest things, Gordon would say to me, ‘You don’t need that,’ or ‘There’s no reason to move the camera there so why are you moving it?’ or ‘The shot has too much head on it, you’re going to throw it away later.’ ‘Shoe leather,’ he would call it. He liked Kurosawa’s
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camera work, where the actors move the camera with their action rather than the camera move arbitrarily. He showed me how simply you can shoot. I thought he was going to use all kinds of long lenses and tricks yet he practically always shot every picture with a 40 millimeter, the most unromantic lens there is. Shot by shot I would say, ‘Gee, do I have the nerve to do that?’ And he would answer, ‘Yes, we should’: people talking off-camera [Woody and Diane Keaton walking in and out of the frame in Annie Hall] or things being so dark you don’t see their faces [the pair walking through the moonscape at the Museum of Natural History in Manhattan]; people far away, the camera not moving until they walked closer; making sure that in his head the next cut will be to what we were shooting. He made sure—this is a simplistic example—if two people were across town making phone calls, that Keaton was on the right of frame and when you cut to me I was on the left. But before that I might have been on the right and cut to Keaton and cut back to me. And it would work—it’s a phone call, we’re across town—but it didn’t look as pretty. He showed me how to light romantically when that was the mood. And he understood the script. He was with me on it and knew what I wanted. After a couple of pictures with him I became a know-it-all.” Ralph Rosenblum was brought in to re-edit Take the Money and Run when it was clear audiences were having trouble appreciating the film. Woody says that it was 80 percent fine but the other 20 percent killed the effect. In particular, Ralph showed Woody the
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importance of using appropriate music to enhance a scene. In the film’s first cut, an antic scene was accompanied by dirge-like music. Rosenblum paired a piece of Eubie Blake jazz with it and the scene came to life—and laughs came with it. Rosenblum also found ways to use bits of shots from virtually every angle Woody made. It would seem that a Woody Allen film, despite his huge imprimatur, is a collaborative process, reinforced by familiarity. Would you agree and are there specific anecdotes that illustrate that premise? Certainly Woody’s films are a collaborative effort but his talented collaborators are expert at fulfilling his vision. Woody doesn’t presume to be an expert on f stops or lighting but he knows how he wants a shot to look and he relies on the artistic talents of his cinematographer to put that on film. For instance, in recent years Woody has made five films with Darius Khondji. It takes them very little time to delineate what the picture at hand should look like, whether it should be in more common aspect of 1.85 unit of width to 1 tall or in broader anamorphic 2.39:1 (Cinemascope or Panavision) to give the scenes a
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wider frame. Woody finds that despite its seeming contradiction, a wider film offers more intimacy— Manhattan, for example, is anamorphic, as is Blue Jasmine. When he and Willis first discussed using anamorphic in the 1970s, it was generally used for war and cowboy movies. Woody says they decided to use it with Manhattan because the tension between the intimacy of the story and the panoramic screen would make the picture visually more interesting—and they were right. Also being Jewish from Brooklyn and going to Andries Hudde Junior High School near Woody’s Midwood HS I found that his description of the weekly menu, including Chinese, on Sunday could have been ripped off the kitchen wall at my house. And his comment comparing sex unfavorably to baseball (as an adolescent) resonated loudly to me and my generation of Brooklyn baby boomers. It would seem to me though, that the rich Jewish culture that imbued his work, most notably in RADIO DAYS, is a fading memory and incomprehensible to the current generation, even if they are Jewish. Do you agree and if so how is at affecting his work. Radio Days romantically captures Woody’s childhood in a Jewish family and predominantly Jewish
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| neighborhood. But over time cultures assimilate, and then time brings its own changes. So the childhood of every current generation is very different from that of two or three before it. Yet, like any artist, Woody is influenced by what he knows and that cannot help but surface in his work. His past and influences remain clear to him and he draws on them as he sees fit without retrofitting them to the present. |
A bit of disagreement with part of your question: While Woody now says that if he could relive a day in his life it would not be for sex or movies but rather to play baseball as he did at his zenith when he was a teenager, he and his friends went to see their first Bergman movie (Summer With Monika) at age 17 because they heard there was a naked woman in it.
Fifty years from today will film scholars be discussing Woody Allen as they discussed Lubitsch, Hitchcock, Wilder, Bergman and Howard Hawks? Why?
Yes. Unique artistic vision transcends time.
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