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Cannes — It isn’t every filmmaker who gets asked to explain why life is worth living, but Woody Allen is a special case. And at the Cannes film festival presenting his newest existential comedy-drama Irrational Man, he gave it a shot.

“No matter how much the philosophers talk to you or the priests or the psychiatrists, the bottom line … is life has its own agenda and it runs right over you while you’re prattling,” he said. “We’re all going to wind up in a very bad position some day. The same position, but a bad one.”

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The function of art, as he sees it, is to convince people otherwise. “But you can’t really do that without conning them,” he said. “Because in the end it has no meaning. We live in a random universe and you’re living a meaningless life, and everything you create in your life or do is going to vanish, and the Earth will vanish and the sun will burn out and the universe will be gone.”

The only way around that, he concluded, is “if you turn on a baseball game or you watch a Fred Astaire movie or you do something that distracts you.”