The Woody Allen Interview (Which He Won't Read)

With his 12th film at the festival, Cafe Society, set to open Cannes, the director reflects on his unreflective stance on aging (‘If you focus on mortality, the house always wins’), his movies (‘I would erase all but a few’), his personal life and his willful avoidance of his own press: ‘I scrupulously have avoided any self-preoccupation’

- Stephen Galloway

PEOPLE OFTEN HAVE SAID, ‘GEE, YOU LIVE IN A BUBBLE’ — AND MAYBE I DO,” admits Woody Allen as he settles into an armchair inside his private screening room on New York’s Upper East Side. A creature of habit, he has been watching movies (and taking meetings) in this somber little theater for the past 35 years. “I get up in the morning,” he says, “take the kids to school, then do the treadmill, then get into my room and work, have lunch, go back and work, practice the clarinet, see friends or go to a basketball game. It’s a bourgeois, middleclass worker’s life. But it’s enabled me to be productive over the years.”

Productive is putting it mildly. Allen has churned out a movie a year — from classic New York comedies (Manhattan, Hannah and Her Sisters) to Bergman-esque dramas (Interiors) to stylish London-set crime capers (Match Point) — since the 1980s, with combined grosses of nearly $600 million. He barely missed a beat even during the tumultuous 1990s, when his split from Mia Farrow threatened to blow up his reputation (accusations that Allen abused their then-7-year-old daughter Dylan were dismissed after an investigation, but the battle still rages, with a grown-up Dylan reasserting the claims two years ago in The New York Times).