The upshot has been that Allen’s stature as an important filmmaker (unlike his personal reputation) has proved surprisingly sturdy—despite the withering self-assessments he offers every so often. In an interview during the filming of Match Point, he described himself as “functioning within the parameters of my mediocrity,” and went on to note that if he were ever to make another great film, it would be “by accident.” False modesty? Some, no doubt. But we would do best to take his words at face value.

For years the evidence has accumulated: Allen is an astonishingly lazy director. Often this fact gets a positive spin, as when he is described as “an actor’s director”—code for the reality that he offers his performers little or no guidance and tries to complete every scene in as few takes as possible. Here, again, Allen is bluntly honest. “I’m lazy and an imperfectionist,” he explained in a 2015 NPR interview. “Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese will work on the details until midnight and sweat it out, whereas for me, come 6 o’clock, I want to go home, I want to have dinner, I want to watch the ballgame. Filmmaking is not [the] end-all be-all of my existence.”

The most recent grist for this assessment comes from Eric Lax, an Allen acolyte, whose fourth book on the director, Start to Finish: Woody Allen and the Art of Moviemaking, is essentially an indictment framed as an encomium. Focused on the making of 2015’s Irrational Man, a film seen by few and liked by fewer, it functions as a third-person diary of a directorial indifference so extreme that one would expect it to have eroded the Allen brand by now. So how and why does Allen still enjoy his current level of prestige? Lax’s otherwise tedious account is a good occasion to explore that mystery, the key to which is something of a paradox: Allen’s reputation depends in no small part on the very indolence that undermines so many of his films.

Despite the art in his title, Lax reveals Allen’s moviemaking technique as something more akin to an assembly line. From beginning to end, the enterprise is designed to maximize efficiency, all but inevitably at the cost of quality. Screenwriting, casting, shooting—at almost every stage of the process, Allen performs, to judge from Lax’s account, a fraction of the labor customarily expected of a director. How else could he keep up a filmmaking pace that smacks more of neurotic obsession than of intensive dedication? (When the character he plays in To Rome With Love is told, “You equate retirement with death,” the line lands close to home.)

Allen’s oft-quoted dictum that “80 percent of success is showing up” seems to apply to almost every aspect of the endeavor. This lassitude is enabled by an arrangement that is virtually unique among major directors: Allen is answerable to no one on his films. Though they are distributed by major studios (most recently Amazon Studios), those studios play no role in their production. Allen arranges his own financing, and investors sign on with barely any idea of what they’re investing in. (As he explains, “I’ve never given anybody who’s done one of my films more than three or four lines” of description.) Allen’s longtime producer (and sister) Letty Aronson, and his editor, Alisa Lepselter, offer advice throughout, as do the cinematographer and others on set. But that advice is always Allen’s to take or leave.