Woody Allen, ca. 1969. Take the Money and Run

As New Yorkers know, Woody Allen is one of its more ubiquitous citizens—at courtside in Madison Square Garden watching the Knicks, at Michael’s Pub on Monday evenings playing the clarinet, on occasion at Elaine’s Restaurant at his usual table. Yet he could hardly be considered outgoing: shy on acquaintance, he once expressed an intense desire to return to the womb—“anybody’s.” In fact, his career is one of prodigious effort in a number of disciplines—literature, the theater, and motion pictures. “I’m a compulsive worker,” he once said. “What I really like to do best is whatever I’m not doing at the moment.”

Allen’s career in comedy began as a teenager when he submitted jokes to an advertising firm. In 1953, after what he called a “brief abortive year in college,” he left school to become a gag-writer for Garry Moore and Sid Caesar. In the early 1960s, his stand-up routines in the comedy clubs of Greenwich Village gained him considerable recognition, and eventually several television appearances. In 1965, shortly after he produced three successful comedy records, Allen made his debut as an actor and screenwriter in What’s New, Pussycat? His 1969 film, Take the Money and Run, was the first project that he not only wrote and starred in, but directed as well. Though many of his early films (Bananas, Sleeper, Love and Death) were critically acclaimed, it wasn’t until 1977 and the release of Annie Hall, which won four Academy Awards, that Allen was recognized as an extraordinary force in the American cinema. Fifteen of his motion pictures have appeared since, which works out at almost a movie a year. He has also written several Broadway plays, the most successful of them, Don’t Drink the Water and Play It Again, Sam, were also made into films.

Allen has written three collections of short pieces, many of which first appeared in The New Yorker: Getting Even, Without Feathers, and Side Effects.

The major portion of this interview, much of which was conducted by Michiko Kakutani over dinner at Elaine’s Restaurant, was completed in 1985. Since then, the editors—by correspondence and conversations with Mr. Allen over the phone—have brought it up to date.

INTERVIEWER

Do you think the humorist tends to look at the world in a slightly different way?

WOODY ALLEN

Yes. I think if you have a comic perspective, almost anything that happens you tend to put through a comic filter. It’s a way of coping in the short term, but has no long term effect and requires constant, endless renewal. Hence people talk of comics who are “always on.” It’s like constantly drugging your sensibility so you can get by with less pain.

INTERVIEWER

That’s very unique, don’t you think?

ALLEN

It’s one way of dealing with life. People think it’s very hard to be funny but it’s an interesting thing. If you can do it, it’s not hard at all. It would be like if I said to somebody who can draw very well, My God, I could take a pencil and paper all day long and never be able to draw that horse. I can’t do it, and you’ve done it so perfectly. And the other person feels, This is nothing. I’ve been doing this since I was four years old. That’s how you feel about comedy—if you can do it, you know, it’s really nothing. It’s not that the end product is nothing, but the process is simple. Of course, there are just some people that are authentically funny, and some people that are not. It’s a freak of nature.

INTERVIEWER

Who were the writers who made you first want to write?

ALLEN

I remember the first person I ever laughed at while reading was Max Shulman. I was fifteen. I have a couple of old books of his. The one that I found the funniest was The Zebra Derby . . . funny in a broad sort of way, though you have to appreciate the context within which it’s written, since it’s about veterans returning here after World War II, returning to the land of promise. Then I discovered Robert Benchley and S. J. Perelman, two other very funny writers who were truly great masters. I met Perelman at Elaine’s restaurant one night. I came in with Marshall Brickman and a waiter came over and gave me a card. On the back it said something like, Would love you to come over and join me for a celery tonic. I figured, Oh, it’s some out-of-town tourist, and I threw the card away. About an hour and a half later, someone said, You know, it’s from S. J. Perelman, so I retrieved the card from the floor. It said “S. J. Perelman,” and I raced around to where he was sitting around the corner and we joined him. I’d met him before and to me he was always warm and friendly. I’ve read he could be difficult, but I never saw that side of him.

INTERVIEWER

When did you start writing?

ALLEN

Before I could read. I’d always wanted to write. Before that—I made up tales. I was always creating stories for class. For the most part, I was never as much a fan of comic writers as serious writers. But I found myself able to write in a comic mode, at first directly imitative of Shulman or sometimes of Perelman. In my brief abortive year in college I’d hand in my papers, all of them written in a bad (or good) derivation of Shulman. I had no sense of myself at all.

INTERVIEWER

How did you discover your own voice? Did it happen gradually?

ALLEN

No, it was quite accidental. I had given up writing prose completely and gone into television writing. I wanted to write for the theater and at the same time I was doing a cabaret act as a comedian. One day Playboy magazine asked me to write something for them, because I was an emerging comedian and I wrote this piece on chess. At that time I was almost married—but not quite yet—to Louise Lasser; she read it and said, Gee, I think this is good. You should really send this over to The New Yorker. To me, as to everyone else of my generation, The New Yorker was hallowed ground. Anyhow, on a lark I did. I was shocked when I got this phone call back saying that if I’d make a few changes, they’d print it. So I went over there and made the few changes, and they ran it. It was a big boost to my confidence. So I figured, Well, I think I’ll write something else for them. The second or third thing I sent to The New Yorker was very Perelmanesque in style. They printed it but comments were that it was dangerously derivative and I agreed. So both The New Yorker and I looked out for that in subsequent pieces that I sent over there. I did finally get further and further away from him. Perelman, of course, was as complex as could be—a very rich kind of humor. As I went on I tried to simplify.

INTERVIEWER

Was this a parallel development to what you were trying to do in your films?

ALLEN

I don’t think of them as parallel. My experience has been that writing for the different mediums are very separate undertakings. Writing for the stage is completely different from writing for film and both are completely different from writing prose. The most demanding is writing prose, I think, because when you’re finished, it’s the end product. You can’t change it. In a play, it’s far from the end product. The script serves as a vehicle for the actors and director to develop characters. With films, I just scribble a couple of notes for a scene. You don’t have to do any writing at all, you just have your notes for the scene, which are written with the actors and the camera in mind. The actual script is a necessity for casting and budgeting, but the end product often doesn’t bear much resemblance to the script—at least in my case.

INTERVIEWER

So you would have much more control over something like a novel.

ALLEN

That’s one of its appeals—that you have the control over it. Another great appeal is that when you’re finished you can tear it up and throw it away. Whereas, when you make a movie, you can’t do that. You have to put it out there even if you don’t like it. I might add, the hours are better if you’re a prose writer. It’s much more fun to wake up in the morning, just drift into the next room and be alone and write, than it is to wake up in the morning and have to go shoot a film. Movies are a big demand. It’s a physical job. You’ve got to be someplace, on schedule, on time. And you are dependent on people. I know Norman Mailer said that if he had started his career today he might be in film rather than a novelist. I think films are a younger man’s enterprise. For the most part it’s strenuous. Beyond a certain point, I don’t think I want that exertion; I mean I don’t want to feel that my whole life I’m going to have to wake up at six in the morning, be out of the house at seven so I can be out on some freezing street or some dull meadow shooting. That’s not all that thrilling. It’s fun to putter around the house, stay home. Tennessee Williams said the annoying thing about plays is that you have to produce them—you can’t just write them and throw them in the drawer. That’s because when you finish writing a script, you’ve transcended it and you want to move on. With a book, you can. So the impulse seems always to be a novelist. It’s a very desirable thing. One thinks about Colette sitting in her Parisian apartment, looking out the window and writing. It’s a very seductive life. Actually, I wrote a first draft of a novel in Paris when I was doing Love and Death. I have it at home, all handwritten, lying in my drawer on graph paper—I’ve had it that way for years. I’ve sort of been saving it for when I’m energyless and not able to film anymore. I don’t want to do it while I still have enough vigor to get out there early in the morning and film. It’s a good thing to look forward to a novel. I know one day they’ll either pull the plug on me for filming and say, We don’t want you to do this anymore, or I’ll get tired of doing it. I hope the novel’s all right. I mean, it’s no great shakes, but it’s a novel, a story that could only be told that way. I’ve thought at times of taking the idea and making it into a play or a film, but oddly it doesn’t work that way. If it works at all, it’s a novel. It happens in the prose.