Conversations with Woody Allen: His Films, the Movies, and Moviemaking by Lax Eric

Author:Lax, Eric [Lax, Eric]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Random House, Inc.
Published: 2010-01-07T05:00:00+00:00

February 2006

In all our conversations, I don’t recall Woody commenting on how he looks in a film, with three exceptions. He recently mentioned that he cut his nose while shaving the morning of the first day of filming on Take the Money and Run, a scene with him in a cell in San Quentin. He says the cut is evident on the screen, though I have never noticed it in the many times I’ve watched the picture. I tell this to Woody. He is surprised; perhaps it is visible only on a movie screen and not on a TV monitor. He then tells me of another injury.

WA: If you look at Play It Again, Sam, there is a place where I had my lower lip biopsied.

EL: I never noticed that, either. Only after you mentioned it and I looked carefully, could I see that your lip, from playing the clarinet right before shooting, is swollen in Curse of the Jade Scorpion. [There is always a bit of a bump on his lower lip from so many thousands of hours of gripping the reed and mouthpiece.]

WA: Yeah, I never did that again. It was terrible.

EL: I know Husbands and Wives is one of your favorite films, and it also was the last of thirteen films you did with Mia Farrow, many of which were in part tailored for her, for instance her pregnancy in Another Woman because of her real-life pregnancy.

WA: She is a wonderful actress. Any differences we had were personal. It was a pleasure to work with her. I found her very professional. I liked writing for her because I was aware that she could do things that she wasn’t getting a chance to do—like Danny Rose. No one would have hired her to do that because they wouldn’t have known she could do it and wanted to do it; I knew that because I had a personal relationship with her. She was always self-deprecating, telling me how bad she was going to be and then doing it much better than you had any right to expect.

EL: This goes back to something we discussed earlier. There were a couple of times when you wrote something special for Mia, but on the other occasions when you were writing did you think, What could she do in this? Or did you feel she could play almost anything you wrote?

WA: I thought she had a very good range, that she could play comedy, that she could play serious things. In Another Woman, a picture that was not overly lively, she was very good, very good. But because the picture suffered, she didn’t earn the acclaim she deserved. She could do anything I gave her. She was game to experiment, like in Radio Days, when neither of us had the faintest idea about her character when we started. She could sing a song if she had to and it would be pretty effective. And she was very pretty, of course.

EL: Were there parts

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