Woody Allen: “Infidelity is only good in fiction”

Woody Allen twice in Barcelona: the filmmaker has presented his new film, Luck, in the city, attending the preview at the Aribau cinema on Sunday, and today he offers the first of two concerts with his band (the second tomorrow, Tuesday) as the start of the 55th Voll Damm Barcelona Jazz Festival at the Teatre Tívoli. Stroke of Luck is a film about chance in life, part romantic comedy, part black comedy and thriller, and centered on an infidelity, that of the protagonist Fanny, married to Jean, a rich man of murky fortune, who By chance he meets a former high school classmate, Alain, on the street. His bohemian existence captivates her and they begin a relationship that unleashes an unforeseen series of situations until an end worthy of the ball that walks over the edge of the net in Match Point, a film with which Strike of Luck is related. “Infidelity is only good in fiction, not in real life: it always causes a lot of problems,” the filmmaker responds when asked about that theme of the film. “In literature, theater and cinema, infidelity is one of the great themes, one of the most exciting and interesting, but in reality it is always horrible and causes pain.”

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The filmmaker, who has left the door open to shoot another film, which would be his 51st, received the press this morning at the Me hotel, where he is staying right in front of the Tivoli. He has been friendly and communicative, and delighted to return to Barcelona, ​​a city for which he feels special affection (“one of the best cities in the world”, to which he will return “whenever they love me”). Although before starting the interviews he was warned that he would not answer questions about his personal life or Me Too. Dressed in high-waisted pants and a shirt, obviously older than his 87 years, but with the same perplexed expression that gave him so much play in his acting roles, whether he was the confused sperm in Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex or the dostoyevskian Russian clumsy of Boris Grushenko’s The Last Night, Woody Allen has spent the entire time with his famous beanie in his hand, squeezing it with those fingers that would have liked to be the reincarnation of Warren Beatty’s fingertips.

The director has said that it was not difficult for him to film Coup de Luck, originally Coup de Chance, in another language (French). “It’s not difficult, it seems that way, but it’s not at all. Furthermore, the actors spoke English and I could use it with them. It’s always the same, you show up in the morning, the actors have read the script, they know what they have to do, if they do something wrong I tell them. You can tell when an actor is acting well. Even in a Japanese movie. You can always tell that emotions are false if they are not doing it right. He has been no different than working on an American film.”

Allen does not agree that Europe has become a refuge for his cinema. “It’s not like that, I choose to do it in one place or another and my films are projected all over the world. For me, one place or another is the same.”

Woody Allen has explained how he became a film director: “It was by accident, just because he was a screenwriter and when you give your script to someone else to shoot it, it always seems to you that they haven’t done a good job, so you want to do it yourself. . Many years ago I wrote the script for Pussycat (1965) and they made a terrible, although very popular, movie out of it. “I have never written a script again unless I was the director.”

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He has said that, as in the plots of Luck or Match Point, he considers that luck has always been very important in his career. “A lot of what I have done is due to being lucky, being in the right place at the right time. Many things have happened to me luckily. It is also true that I have tried a lot. But you need to be lucky. As an athlete, training helps, but if you are unlucky… In life there are many things out of control. “I’ve had a lot of good luck.”

In his latest film, the protagonist’s husband is obsessed with electric trains and has a large model of the classic Märklin trains. They interest him? “No, I have never been interested, my father bought me an electric train, but I never saw the point of that, which went around and around.” Instead, she recognizes his fascination with rich people, which abounds in her films, such as Lucky Stroke. “I don’t know why I’m interested. The poor are just as interesting. In my family we were poor although not very poor, my father did small jobs, taxi driver, waiter. On the other hand, at school the people I met were upper class. But I discovered that they could be just as unhappy and dissatisfied. Being rich does not guarantee you happiness. The rich can suffer just the same.”

Allen has pointed out how fortunate he has been to have good cinematographers, most recently Vittorio Storaro. “My cinema has been blessed by them, I give them a lot of freedom to create like the actors and it makes a great contribution to the film. I like that the people who work with me feel very free. That’s my method. Let people do their jobs well.” The filmmaker has highlighted that his films “look good.”

When asked if he would eliminate anything from his films, he replied: “Let’s see, the problem is that I am always dissatisfied, I never watch them again and if by chance they show one on television when I am exercising, I turn it off. I think everything could have been done better. Among the few that I like are Match Point, Vicky Cristina Barcelona, ​​Midnight in Paris, The Purple Rose of Cairo… I have done 50 and maybe I like 10, the other 40, no.”

Will there be 51? “It’s possible. The truth is that making a film that lasts two weeks in theaters and then goes to the platforms doesn’t seem so charismatic or exciting to me, but if they tell me ‘here’s the money’, I always have ideas. I don’t like looking for financing, it’s the worst part, but if they make it easier for me…”

That soft varnish that your films have lately, that lightness despite the fact that dramatic things can happen, even murders, is it a thing of age, of having lived and relativizing? Woody Allen looks at his interlocutor and answers with the apparent dispassion of Nat Ackerman from How to End Culture Once and for All by challenging Death to play gin rummy. “It’s accidental, I have many ideas, some of beautiful things, others terrible, I have been able to turn them into stories, into prose, into books, into theater, into cinema. It’s a happy accident, something I know how to do and am good at. When I was young I made people laugh with my comical things. But it is not something premeditated, I am not responsible for doing it. It’s something I know how to do and that I’m lucky to be able to do. In other circumstances he would have been like my father, or a hotel bellman. “I am not a lawyer or a businessman, so being here has been a matter of luck.”

Woody Allen says he feels more responsibility now than earlier in his career. “Yes, much more, I feel that I owe something to my audience, at least the effort to do something different and better, not to continually repeat myself, and not to disappoint.” However, he has said not to fear failure. “You have to accept that sometimes you are going to fail, no one is good enough to be on top all the time. But failing is not so terrible, no one is going to come and shoot you for doing it. You recover and try again.”

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