Conversations with Woody Allen
His Films, the Movies, and Moviemaking
IntroductionA book of conversations usually collects interviews done over weeks or months and so, regardless of the time span covered, the result is a snapshot that reflects the attitudes and feelings of the subject at a given point in life. This book, however, is an album assembled over half of Woody Allen’s life, beginning in 1971, and like time-lapse photography, it offers a clear view of his transformation from novice to one of the world’s most acclaimed filmmakers, and what he learned along the way.
For thirty-six years I’ve had the pleasure of watching an artist’s evolution from close range, but I wouldn’t have laid money on the chances of that after our first meeting. In the spring of 1971 an editor at the New York Times Magazine sent me to investigate three ideas for a possible story. One of them was a profile of Allen, a thirty-five-year-old comic who had written two Broadway plays (Don’t Drink the Water and Play It Again, Sam), whose prose was now often in The New Yorker, and who had recently begun to act ...
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