Woody Allen: The Rolling Stone Interview

I don’t know, Woody Allen seems sane to me. Maybe I’ve been in New York too long. But it goes further than that: Woody Allen is one of the most well adjusted people I’ve met in New York.

Could this be one of the seven warning signs that New Yorkers are even more deranged than had previously been imagined? And should the governor place the National Guard on full yellow?

It could also mean that characterizations of Woody Allen have been somewhat extreme over the years. Or maybe Woody Allen has changed some.

On the way to the interview in his film-editing studio in a Park Avenue hotel, I passed a door marked “Service Entrance” and almost went in. I was feeling humble and nervous, about to encounter a man described as a comic genius, a modern existential hero and a filmmaker on the level of Bergman and Fellini.

But Woody Allen put me at ease. He answered the door himself, dressed in a garage-sale-style sweater and a wrinkled shirt. His hair was unmanaged. And he was nice — very casual, not at all condescending, and self-unimportant. He wasn’t cynical. He didn’t even try to be funny, although his brutal honesty and extraordinary seriousness about the smallest of things made me laugh a lot. He insisted that he was not obsessing over the essential nothingness of the universe at the moment and invited me to sit down. He sat down too, and not at all in the fetal position. It was Saturday. He was working. His newest film, the nostalgic Radio Days, was about to open. He had finished shooting another film just the day before and had begun work on yet another.

For a man often depicted as a tormented neurotic, Woody Allen appeared remarkably relaxed, “centered and directed,” as pop psychologists say, honest and sincere. And also quite rich. In addition to fortune, he has fame but somehow doesn’t get bothered much by fans, while always getting a good table at Elaine’s.

True, he is troubled by morbid introspection (he sees the concentration camp as a metaphor for life, a thought you’ll never see on a greeting card) and by an inordinate fear of bushes and wood-chucks. Yet he does have a blond movie star for a girlfriend.

He loves New York, where he seems to lead a charmed life. In his only brush with crime, burglars broke into his apartment, were scared off before they took anything and left a TV set from a previous break-in.

Born Allen Stewart Konigsberg in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn and raised in a home where, he says, the basic values were “God and carpeting,” he is now fifty-one. His appearance hasn’t changed in twenty years. Ours has.

He is also more amusing than we are. He began writing jokes for gossip columns at the age of sixteen and barely managed to graduate from high school.

He is at once remarkably productive — he’s written and directed fifteen films since 1965 and written or acted in five more — and the only person I have met in New York with Leisure Time. Time for walking around, watching the Knicks, seeing friends and browsing — remember browsing? — in bookstores. He also plays clarinet at Michael’s Pub, where he plans to be on Academy Award night, even though his film Hannah and Her Sisters has been nominated for seven Oscars.

He has the joy of children – Mia Farrow, the aforementioned star, has eight (five of them adopted) — but he lives across Central Park from her and doesn’t have to change diapers. Unlike most New Yorkers, he recognizes his neuroses, obsessions, phobias (could be the three decades, off and on, of psychoanalysis), and seems to be living comfortably with them now in a large duplex apartment overlooking Central Park.

On this day, Woody Allen seems almost . . . happy.