Comedians are like taxis. Whenever you need one you can’t get one. On sunny days they are all over the place, welcoming you into their inner worlds with a smile while setting their laughter meters. On rainy days you can stand about for hours, getting soaked in vain.
In America there was surely never a time when comedy was more urgently required - even an official court jester. One visualises the ad: “Run-down Camelot managed by militarists with mission creep seeks entertainer with power to probe pretension, satirise presumption and restore reason and a balanced world view.”
That is the power Woody Allen once had - with the film-going world, at least. He fought woe with wit, pomposity with hilarity and perception. “I’ve seen life tragically long before this administration,” he says. “I’ve seen life tragically since I was a little boy.”
Allen is answering my question about whether the serious side of his new film, Melinda and Melinda - which tells the same story twice, once as comedy, once as tragedy - owes anything to living in the US now. For many, America is a nation that has lost the script, at least in terms of its old, admired role as a paradigm of freedom and enlightened democracy.
”The current political climate is certainly one of the worst I can remember in my lifetime, if not the worst, and maybe one of the worst of all time. The only good thing is that in four years we’ll get a chance to vote again,” he says.
”My view,” he adds, broadening the theme, “is that you either see life tragically or you see life so tragically, so horribly, that you feel ‘All I can do is laugh over it. Otherwise I’ll kill myself!’ Either way it’s tragic. Life becomes so painful at times that there’s a need to slip a barrier of comedy between you and it, or you can’t take it at all.”
Amplified by the cushioned acoustic of a hotel suite in Park Lane, London, Allen’s Manhattan drawl, seasoned with dismay, is in good working order. So is the trademark bug-eyed look behind thick-rimmed glasses (though his once reddish hair has modulated to grey). So are the gestures that weave away like some magisterial arthropod’s - at moments you expect more hands and arms to be revealed from inside the jacket - as he takes time and space to expand on modern existence.
It is a difficult time for liberal philosophers. Lost in an alien zeitgeist, Allen has spent the last years cranking out crowdpleasers that have not pleased too many crowds (The Curse of the Jade Scorpion, Hollywood Ending, Anything Else).
Once cinema’s greatest one-man show, the actor-writer-director of Annie Hall, Manhattan, Zelig and Hannah and Her Sisters, he has found himself busking to thin air. Some films, after failing at the US box office, have failed even to cross the Atlantic.
Worried fans have murmured, “Time to stop?” or “Time to go slower?” To which Allen says: “I’ve thought about that. But I couldn’t not work for a year and say, ‘Ah now it’s gonna come out good.’ It wouldn’t come out better if I worked longer. If there are shortcomings they are built into me, not into the films. If they fail, it’s because I don’t have the depth of soul or vision of a Eugene O’Neill.” “But you’re funnier,” I say. “Yes, I’m funnier,” he admits.
Then along comes Melinda and Melinda, which has won some renewed enthusiasm. The title heroine (Radha Mitchell) is a pretty, down-on-her-luck flibbertigibbet who turns up on an old friend’s doorstep one day and starts to make trouble in his life, his job, his marriage. Like Broadway Danny Rose, the story has a framing sequence, a group of pals in a restaurant who argue about whether life is tragic or comic. So the audience gets a twice-told tale, played in opposite styles with different sets of actors (save Mitchell).
Woody Allen doesn’t star in the film. But the main character in the comedy section, the droll and anxious husband played by Will Ferrell, is surely a Woody alter ego? In the same way that John Cusack was in Bullets over Broadway and Kenneth Branagh in Celebrity.
”What happens is, I write the male character as if I was playing it,” Allen says. “So if I was 30 years younger, yes, I’d have played the Will Ferrell character for sure. The difference is that if I had played it, because of my physical appearance I wouldn’t have been a big lovable teddy bear like Will. The audience would have taken me for a bookworm, an intellectual - which I’m not - and very New York and sophisticated.”
The audience would have played other games of hunt-the-author too, looking for signs of the life in the art. Ever since Annie Hall, the sight of Woody Allen tussling with work, love, sex and the meaning of existence has seemed irresistibly self-referential. Coming out of one man’s head as these comedies do - with the head itself bobbing about on screen (most times), issuing the wisecracks - they are bound to look like bits of Allen reality lightly disguised as fiction.
”No, they’re made-up stories,” he insists. “People think Annie Hall and Manhattan were all about my life, but they were entirely made up. What makes my films seem autobiographical, I think, is that where comedians like Chaplin, Groucho Marx and W.C. Fields had a different persona from their real selves on screen, and had costumes and makeup, I look like this.” He gestures at the plaid shirt, the casual trousers. “And I sound like this. Also I’m not much of an actor. So I cast myself in a limited range and people think, ‘Well, this is what he sounds and looks like, so it must be him.’
”But if I were to put my own life on screen, 99 per cent of it would be incredibly dull! [laughter] All I do is get up in the morning, do my treadmill, do my work, practise the clarinet, take a walk with my wife. Nothing exciting happens at all.” With exceptions, of course. Once upon a time that life was spread all over the world’s front pages. People seeking the prurient catnip of confessional cinema were sure that Husbands and Wives, for instance, that brilliant, cauterising comedy of marital break-up starring Allen and Mia Farrow (in her last role for him), was inspired by the most famous episode in their private life: their acrimonious, exhaustively reported split-up.
Allen denies it instantly. “That film was done before I had any conflict with Mia. It was a totally made-up story.” Nor will he discuss that legal and personal ordeal today, though I ask if he still watches the films he once made with Farrow (11 of them). “No, I don’t watch any of my films again. The truth is, I always had and still have enormous respect for her as an actress. I always thought she was totally underrated. Because she grew up in Hollywood and her mother was an actress and her father was a director, she was never given her due. But she was a wonderful actress for me, she played comedy well, drama well, romantic scenes well. My conflict with her was a purely personal one.”
I have to pick up that first point again. He doesn’t watch any of his films again? “No. I made my first film in 1969, Take the Money and Run, and I’ve never seen it since. Once I’ve finished them I say goodbye to them. I know if I saw any of them on screen I’d think, ‘Oh what did I do, this is so terrible! If only I could shoot that over again!’”
Perfectionism and high productivity are strange bedfellows. But Allen can be stupendously pernickety. He once shot an entire film over again with a different cast, though it still flopped with critics and audiences. It was the Chekhovian September. “Yes, I remade that. And years ago I tried to make a deal with United Artists that if they agreed not to release Manhattan I would make a free film for them.”
He didn’t like Manhattan? One of his canonic works? “I was so disappointed with it that I said, ‘Look, don’t put this out. I know it will cost you money, but I will make a picture free.’ The studio said, ‘You’re crazy. We can’t not put it out. First of all, we like it. Then we have an investment, we’ve borrowed money from the bank and we’re paying interest. We’re not just gonna bury it.’ And it came out, and it was a big hit.”
More, it was one of those Woodyworks by which we judge all others. As well as funny it was incomparably candid about male desire and its devious pathways - the fortyish hero’s girlfriend was a nymphet-aged Mariel Hemingway - and sweetly improvisational about the tastes and traits of a culture vulture. No one forgets the Allen character’s wistful monologue, listing his loves in art, cinema and, above all, jazz.
(Above all, definitely jazz. When I ask Allen late in the interview what artwork he would take to a desert island, he says “an album of jazz”. “Not the Sistine Chapel?” I ask. “War and Peace?” “No. How many times can you read War and Peace? And the Sistine Chapel is worth a look, then it’s over. But music enters you through different openings, it’s so purely pleasurable. I’ve listened to some albums over and over, literally hundreds of times, with tears in my eyes.”)
Manhattan, 1979, was a great place and a great year. Allen was at his peak as a poet of lyrical dyspepsia, delivering those to-die-for gags that would sound like misanthropy on any other lips. But what made him a great comic commentator - not just a clown with grievances - was that the jokes implied a value system.
It wasn’t enough to be intelligent. You had to know what to be intelligent about. Pretension, smugness and high-society smartness were prime Woody Allen targets, though for some areas of human bad faith there was sympathy and indulgence. What could be more tragicomic than the pageant of love, that ritual that requires human beings to spend priceless mental resources (storehouses of ingenuity, pantechnicons of paranoid manoeuvring) on pursuing the opposite sex. To present these themes - of the ways we use and abuse the gifts of enlightenment - was one thing. To make them funny, over and over, was another.
”It’s like people who can draw,” Allen responds. “You say, ‘My God, how can you draw that horse or that rabbit?’ They say, ‘It’s nothing.’ I could draw a horse or rabbit all night and it would never come close. It would look terrible. So being funny is no big thing for me, it comes naturally. It’s not like Horowitz learning the piano. Believe me, I’ve never done anything in life that came hard to me!”
How does the idea for a new film come? Is it like a lightbulb going on? “Yes, it’s like a lightbulb. I could be walking down the street, or having a conversation over dinner. Or I’ll read something in the paper and mark it down and put it in my desk. When I finish making a picture, I take out all these scraps of paper - napkins and notes and things - and some ideas hold up well, others I think, ‘My God! What was I thinking of? That isn’t funny at all,’ and I’ll throw it away.”
The profusion of ideas and the ease of their coming may be what gives him the strength to shrug off criticism - and that no less dangerous commodity, praise. Famous for avoiding Oscar night, and for summing up the ethic of awards in an Annie Hall one-liner (”Best Fascist Dictator, Adolf Hitler”), he insists that what other people say about his work doesn’t change a thing.
”I found that out years ago. I had come home after people said, ‘Oh this movie is so brilliant.’ And I’d still be at home lonely, and still obsessed that I think I have a brain tumour, or that I’m unable to get a date with a girl. And equally when I’d come out with a movie and everyone said, ‘It’s terrible, it’s a failure,’ it didn’t mean a thing. Next morning I’ll be out on the street and nobody said, ‘You can’t come over to my house!’ If you’re doing something for six months at a stretch like making a film, the work has to be fun for its own sake. If it isn’t, you’d better re-examine your life.”
Even so it can’t be fun when a whole epoch seems to think that Woody Allen’s heyday is over. Here is a comedian and social commentator whose glory time was the 1970s, with its perfect match between a questioning era and an artist whose entire oeuvre was a question mark. What else is the Woody Allen act at its best but a giant shrug of querulous inquiry, about life, death, society and politics, about what on earth we have done to deserve any of them.
He clearly feels perplexed, even a little betrayed, by America’s desertion of that golden age of quizzical liberalism for the gonzo certitudes of Bushite Republicanism. “Usually the difference between Democrats and Republicans in the United States doesn’t make a big difference. It’s one form of ineptitude over another. But in this particular case it does, because there has been such a threat to our traditional way of life.” Allen means the threat of intellectual closedown, not terrorism. And he thinks that trend started before Bush came to power. “Even during a liberal or pseudo-liberal administration such as Clinton’s, the culture was changing. In filmgoing, the taste of the audience was becoming, not more rightwing or neo-conservative, but coarser and more simplistic. Sophistication ebbed away from the works of culture, or at least from popular arts, and they became more gross and clownlike, less interesting.
”It didn’t have to do with an administration, because millions of people who are supporting the kinds of films that are antithetical to the more interesting films of the 1970s are young Democrats and liberals who go to Harvard and Yale. For some reason, the taste of young people in art and culture and cinema is not as sophisticated as it was. I’m sure it’s cyclical. I’m sure that it’s transitory and that it will come back the other way at some point.”
He doesn’t look very sure. But then, not looking sure is what we cherish Woody Allen and his cinema for. In an age of certainty, dogma and fundamentalism, the king of the doubters is still with us, even if we have to strain a little more to catch his voice.
”Melinda and Melinda” goes on general release in the UK on March 25.
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