Woody Allen

Summary

Tetragrammaton with Rick Rubin: Woody Allen

Release Date: October 29, 2025
Guest: Woody Allen
Host: Rick Rubin

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Episode Overview

In this in-depth conversation on Tetragrammaton, Woody Allen sits down with Rick Rubin for an expansive, candid dialogue. They talk about the origins and mystery of jokes, Allen’s filmography, creative process, philosophy on success, and the nature of comedy and art. The episode offers listeners a unique window into how Allen perceives his own work and life, mixing humor with honesty and introspection.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Mystery of Jokes and God

• Woody ponders the origin of long, intricate jokes, suggesting their mysterious existence could be “proof of God,” since no commercial writer writes them, yet they circulate.
  • “They seem to appear on Earth, but there's no percentage in writing them ... you can't use them in films, on television, on radio and nightclubs ... So where do they come from? ... one could make a case that it's God's way of telling us that he's up there and he's spending a lot of time doing these jokes and sending them down.” (00:02–02:31)
• Woody admits his atheism while marveling at how these “story jokes” persist in the world, outside any economic context.
• Memorable quote:
  • “Brilliant, funny jokes appear all the time on the earth. So where do they come from?” — Woody Allen [01:51]

2. Joke Structure & Rhythm

• Allen contrasts the immediate pacing of nightclub one-liners—like Henny Youngman or Rodney Dangerfield—with elaborate story jokes, noting the lack of writers for the latter.
  • “Nobody sits down to make up a joke: there are two rabbis in Jerusalem... it goes on for a little bit and then it comes to a very funny punchline. That joke doesn't serve any commercial purpose anywhere.” [02:52]
• He comments on how some comedians—like Myron Cohn—tell long stories, but these are usually absorbed from oral tradition, not written.

3. Moviemaking: Sleeper, Annie Hall, Manhattan

• “Sleeper”:
  • Originated as a two-part film set in contemporary NYC and the future, but the concept proved unwieldy and was condensed to only the future plot.
  • “We decided to forget the two-part movie and we just did a guy who woke up in the future. And then we did, you know, the best we could with futuristic jokes...” [04:32–06:08]
• Annie Hall:
  • Allen remarks that it was completely his inspiration, aiming to “face the audience and talk to them...bring them into my free association.” [07:05]
  • The creative approach required extensive reworking in the editing room.
• Manhattan:
  • Conceived to subvert Panavision’s association with spectacle by making an intimate, relationship-focused film in black and white.
  • The iconic fireworks opening was completely unplanned—a fortuitous piece of luck.
    • “That was just completely unplanned.” — Woody Allen [09:03]

4. Directing, Ad Libbing, and Working with Actors

• Allen encourages improvisation on set, telling actors to depart from his script if it suits the scene, though many revert to scripted lines out of habit.
  • “I'm always saying, you don't have to do any of the lines in the script if you don't want ... just get the job done ... sometimes I can get them to, but I encourage ad libbing.” [09:52]
• Allows actors flexibility in lines, costumes, and more, but intervenes if improvised changes are unsuccessful.

5. Writing Process and Inspiration

• Often visualizes actors or archetypes—sometimes even deceased ones—as he writes characters.
• Describes the automatic process by which films become autobiographical:
  • “You can't help that.” [12:07]

6. Stardust Memories and Audience Perception

• Discusses the misunderstood intent behind Stardust Memories:
  • Allen insists it wasn’t disdain but a reflection on the human condition.
  • “If I had contempt, I actually did not have contempt. But if I had contempt, I was too smart to show it.” [14:30]
  • “The mistake is rarely in the audience. The mistake is almost always in the artist.” [15:29]
• Rick Rubin as audience:
  • “I felt like it expanded my mind...” — Rick Rubin [16:05]

7. The Reality of Success

• Allen reflects on success, stating the personal perks (tables at restaurants, tickets), but that it is not as transformative as one imagines.
  • “On balance, it's better than not. It's not what you think it is, it's not what it's cracked up to be. But it's a little better than not being.” [17:54]

8. Art vs. Entertainment

• Believes that entertainment is a fundamental artistic obligation—citing Bergman, Fellini, and Kurosawa as entertainers as well as artists.
  • “I think the obligation of the artist first is to entertain.” [19:07]

9. Technical Innovation: Zelig & Purple Rose

• Allen explains his passion for documentary-style comedy (Take the Money and Run), and that technological freedom in later years enabled more ambitious films like Zelig.
• Purple Rose of Cairo was a concept that took months to resolve. The crucial idea (the actor stepping off screen) came via inspiration after creative blockage.
  • “And then one day it occurred to me, the actor playing the actor who steps off the screen comes to town and there's the two of them. And it gave me the whole second half of the picture.” [22:04]

10. The Demands of Stand-Up Comedy

• Contrasts the relentless requirements of stand-up with the different pacing of movie writing.
  • “Stand up is the very essence. You've got to have almost an hour of one laugh after another. [23:36]”
• Finds stand-up more difficult and regards himself as a “decent comic, but not a great one.” [24:08–68:44]

11. Perspective on His Own Work

• Allen personally favors Midnight in Paris, Match Point, Bullets Over Broadway, Purple Rose of Cairo, Zelig, and Broadway Danny Rose.
• He struggles to enjoy his own films and envies directors like Sidney Lumet who take pleasure in their work:
  • “All I got was, I really wrecked this ... I'd love to do this movie over if I had $10 million or something. But ... I don't ever see my movies after I do them.” [25:37–28:10]

12. The Moviegoing Experience

• Laments the loss of the communal movie theater, arguing that the experience with a crowd elevates a film beyond what’s possible at home.
  • “I like to go into the movie and a lot of people around me, we all see it together ... it's a different enjoyment...” [28:10–29:12]
• Watching his own film with an audience is “like a cold shower.” [29:18]

13. Career Retrospective & Pathways

• If given the chance to advise his younger self, Allen says he’d aim for profundity over laughs, aspiring to be more like Kurosawa or De Sica. [30:25]

14. New Novel: What's With Baumgarth

• Allen talks about his foray into novel-writing, describing his latest book as a light, short, amusing work in the spirit of literary “foreplay.”
  • “I tried one maybe 30 years ago...I said, okay, then I don't want anybody else to see it ... And I put it in my drawer and I never took it out again.” [56:12]
• The novel took about a year, written “sporadically, in small doses.” [54:45]

15. Writing Habits and Knowing the Ending

• Only in his later films did Allen reliably know the ending before starting the script; Match Point was the first.
  • “In the later films, I know...I knew all the endings.” [59:01]

16. Early Influences and Stand-Up Origins

• Woody’s writing journey began as a teenager submitting jokes to newspaper columnists; his career gained traction via radio shows, advertising, and eventually, television.
• The critical turning point into stand-up comedy came from seeing Mort Sahl perform:
  • “I went down there and I was knocked for a loop. I'd never seen anything like that. I mean, it just changed my life in one second.” [62:52]
• His manager, Jack Rollins, encouraged him to perform, leading to more visibility and considerably more writing offers.

17. Persona vs. Material in Comedy

• Credits Mort Sahl’s persona as the transformative element in stand-up, a unique quality no one else could imitate:
  • “It's the human being. That's what they're responding to. You're responding to the Persona of Mort Saul. Yes, his jokes are brilliant ... but it's him.” [70:03–74:14]
• Notes that all great comedians—Groucho, Bob Hope, Jonathan Winters—possess an unquantifiable “thing” in their delivery.
  • “That's the part that the AIs are never going to duplicate … but they're never going to get that impossible to capture thing...” [75:51]

18. Meeting Icons

• Allen shares anecdotes about meeting and befriending Groucho Marx; describes Groucho’s wit as both unstoppable and deliberate. [76:18–77:03]
• He met Bob Hope briefly, and observes that new comedians often emulate their heroes, as Allen did with Mort Sahl before developing his own style. [77:51–79:24]

19. Making Comedy for Audiences

• Asserts that experienced comedians instinctively know which material will work—even without audience feedback. [79:36]
  • “If you're a professional, that's a gift that you have...” [79:36]
• The writing process is a blend of intellect and inspiration:
  • “You have no part in the inspiration—that proceeds from inside you.” [81:27]

20. Life, Fantasy, and Cinema

• Allen discusses the fantasy vs. reality of Manhattan as shaped by Hollywood films, and how much of life is spent striving for those cinematic ideals:
  • “The Manhattan that I was crazy about was the Manhattan that I had seen in movies … only existed up on the screen.” [32:44–35:04]
• Fantasy, magic realism, and escapism run throughout Allen’s films, reflecting his own desire for “more fantasy, less real.” [37:04–37:25]

21. The Comedy Writers’ Room & Sid Caesar

• Describes the Sid Caesar writers’ room as “probably the funniest group,” populated by not just funny men but expert craftsmen.
  • “They knew when a joke would be holding up. The progress of the skit.” [83:23]
• Regarding Sid Caesar:
  • “He was large, generous, very brilliant, hilariously funny ... he really was a genius.” [85:50]

22. Legacy & Aspirations

• The episode touches on Allen’s recurring artistic ambition to pursue projects beyond his perceived limits, even into his late career:
  • “I was always ambitious and I always wanted to do it ... I was always punching upward, failing artistically, but being saved by my luck.” [48:28]
• His resolve to chase creative vitality is illustrated by directing his last film in French, a language he doesn’t speak, simply to challenge himself. [49:00]

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Notable Quotes & Timestamps

• On the mystery of story jokes:
  • “Brilliant, funny jokes appear all the time on the earth. So where do they come from?” — Woody Allen [01:51]
• Success and reality:
  • “I imagined it better. I thought...I would be succeed in show business and be socially adept and go to glamorous parties...It wasn't. I still got toothaches and I still had the same problems everybody had, but I could get a better table at a restaurant.” [17:54]
• On artistic responsibility:
  • “The obligation of the artist first is to entertain. If he doesn't entertain, then it's a bore…” [19:07]
• The elusive magic of comedic persona:
  • “That's the part that the AIs are never going to duplicate ... they're never going to get that impossible to capture thing ...” [75:51]
• Allen’s view of his own work:
  • “To me, my work is, 'oh, I screwed up here. I failed here. Look how terrible this is … I'd love to do this movie over if I had $10 million or something.'” [25:37–28:10]

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Selected Timestamps for Major Segments

• On God and jokes: 00:02–02:31
• On ad libbing and working with actors: 09:44–11:18
• Manhattan and the iconic fireworks scene: 07:41–09:39
• Reflections on Stardust Memories: 12:27–16:12
• Success and its meaning: 17:46–19:03
• On art versus entertainment: 19:03–19:55
• Purple Rose of Cairo and creative luck: 21:12–22:17
• On starting as a writer and moving to stand-up: 41:42–68:44
• Observing Mort Sahl’s genius: 62:52–74:43
• Meeting Groucho Marx: 76:18–77:03
• Perspectives on inspiration in writing: 80:40–81:57

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Tone and Language

The conversation is reflective, self-deprecating, and frequently humorous. Allen is candid about his anxieties, artistic ambitions, and lifelong admiration for masterful artists and comedians. There are frequent moments of humility and philosophical musing, tempered by stories rooted in the realities of show business.

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Episode Takeaways

• Woody Allen’s blend of humor and introspection frames his creative life, with his success feeling as accidental as it is deliberate.
• The real substance of comedy, according to Allen, lies not in the jokes, but in the uniqueness of the performer’s persona—something ineffable and endlessly mysterious.
• Art exists to entertain, but great art can also challenge and expand minds.
• Allen’s career is marked by risk, reinvention, and a relentless pursuit of creative growth—balanced by a persistent sense of self-critique and humility.

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Anyone interested in comedy, filmmaking, or the nature of creative inspiration will find this episode rich with wisdom, humor, and rare candor from one of cinema’s enduring icons.

Transcript

[Woody Allen]

Tetragrammaton. The big question is, this was my theory about belief in God. Proof of God would lie in jokes. Not quality of jokes or anything. But we all know there are one liners, they're for the nightclub acts. And we know what's written for the television shows and the sitcoms and the dialogue and all that. But then there are those jokes that are long jokes. And some of them are quite funny and quite brilliant, but they take, you know, a long story. A guy walks in here and then he comes back two weeks later. Now the guru is doing this and he goes and he goes out and then finally the punchline is very funny. And you think, who writes those jokes? They seem to appear on Earth, but there's no percentage in writing them. They can't be used for anything. You can't use them in films, on television, on radio and nightclubs. They're jokes and they're good jokes, but there's no reason for any human being to create them. I know of no comedy writer. I know so many comedy writers that ever wrote a joke like that or took time to write an actual story joke that wasn't, you know, a crack, a remark, a one liner or banter. And yet brilliant, funny jokes appear all the time on the earth. So where do they come from? Now, I'm an atheist, so I don't really believe, but one could make a case that it's God's way of telling us that he's up there and he's spending a lot of time doing these jokes and sending them down. Because I see of no other reason for them to appear anyplace. They're not useful except as jokes. And so no one ever spends any time writing them.

[Interviewer]

Do you think that the fact that it takes longer before getting to the punchline changes the way we digest the material? Is it different to hear five quick jokes in a row versus hearing one story over that same time that ends with a punchline? How are those different?

[Woody Allen]

Well, they're different in the fact that, you know, when you hear a comedian, Henny Youngman comes out and tells jokes. Rodney Dangerfield, funny man, comes out and tells jokes and they're snapping off one after the other. In the movie, Bob Hope is snapping off funny dialogue on television, whoever's doing the thing is doing it in the context of the rhythm of banter. But nobody sits down to make up a joke. There are two rabbis in Jerusalem and the first rabbi, you know, and it goes on for a little bit and then it comes to a very funny punchline. Yeah, that joke doesn't serve any commercial purpose anywhere. So no one writes that joke. No comedy writer I ever met in my life would have written that joke or there's no market for it.

[Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Woody Allen]

And yet many of them appear, and quite wonderful ones. Yes, it's a different experience, but the laugh is there at the end. To be entertained. You need more jokes at a quicker rhythm. Although there were some guys, you know, like Myron Cohn would come out and tell those kind of stories. Where he got those stories, I don't know, he heard them places. But I guarantee you he did not have a comedy writer who sat in a room and wrote the kind of jokes he did. Those are jokes he heard from someone.

[Interviewer]

What do you recall about making Sleeper?

[Woody Allen]

Sleeper was first movie that I made with some plot to came about. I had this brilliant idea because everyone was making movies and intermissions, that I would make a big movie and the first part of it would be New York City in contemporary times. And it would be very, very funny and, you know, relationships and all that. And then at the end of the hour and a half movie, or an hour, the protagonist would fall into a vat of cryogenic sauce of some sort and he'd fall asleep and you'd go out to intermission and buy your popcorn or smoke your cigarette. Then you'd come back in and the second part would come on and suddenly you were in the future and it was all. Or whatever the cliche of the future would be or would all look like the future. So I mentioned that idea to United Artists. They loved it. They said, go ahead and do that. So I started to do it with Marshall Brickman and we couldn't seem to get it going. So after a while we just settled for the future part of it. We decided to forget the two part movie and we just did a guy who woke up in the future. And then we did, you know, the best we could with futuristic jokes, some of them being really contemporary jokes, using the future just as a gimmick.

[Interviewer]

It felt like a revolutionary movie at the time.

[Woody Allen]

Yeah, it was a different kind of a movie. Different for me. I haven't seen it in 50 years. So I'm sure our anticipation of the future was weak compared to where the future's really gone. Cause a couple of weeks ago, a couple of months ago, I was in Los Angeles and I was in a driverless car. Now in Sleeper, we drove cars. They were strange looking cars, but we drove them in reality. Now soon there's gonna be a lot more driverless Cars.

[Interviewer]

When he made Annie hall, that was the first movie that was not a joke movie. And were there any movies that you would say were inspirational to you to want to make that movie?

[Woody Allen]

No, that was strictly my inspiration completely.

[Interviewer]

Just to do something different.

[Woody Allen]

I had always wanted to face the audience and talk to them.

[Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Woody Allen]

And bring them into my, you know, I wanted to make that movie. Free association.

[Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Woody Allen]

And I. I tried that. It didn't work. I had to reassemble it in the editing room. But that was strictly my thought. It didn't come from anything. And at the time, that was a surprising movie to people for sure.

[Interviewer]

Was Manhattan your first black and white movie?

[Woody Allen]

Yes. I was out in Long island shooting interiors with Gordon Willis and we used to have dinner together all the time. And we're talking about dinner and we both wanted to make a black and white movie. And he was dying to make a Panavision movie.

[Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Woody Allen]

And I thought to myself, it'd be interesting to go against the cliche. The cliche always was when you had Panavision, it was a war movie and a big cattle stampede or something. And I thought it would be interesting to make an intimate movie, a relationship movie with a wide screen. And so we decided we would do that. We did it. You know, I always had artistic freedom to do what I wanted because I worked for very little money and everything I seemed to do succeeded. The combination of the films were good enough without being great and they were cheaply made. So the film companies let me do what I wanted to do.

[Interviewer]

Do you remember where the idea for the fireworks over the.

[Woody Allen]

That was spontaneous. Spontaneous. We were out shooting in Central park and someone said, you know, tonight there's going to be a fantastic, really firework show.

[Interviewer]

Yeah, that's amazing.

[Woody Allen]

Yeah. We didn't plan that. And there's gonna be a big fireworks show. So we quickly. One of the guys in the crew said, I have a friend who's got an apartment on the west side in Central Park West. And he would let us go up there. And we went up there and we waited and the fireworks show came on and we filmed it. And I had no idea that was going to be in the front of the movie in any way. That was just completely unplanned.

[Interviewer]

It's one of the most beautiful openings of any movie I've ever seen.

[Woody Allen]

Yeah, it's good. It worked well for us.

[Interviewer]

It really worked.

[Woody Allen]

But it was, you know, again, the luck. I mean, it's just good luck.

[Interviewer]

Do you allow actors to ad lib on the set or No, I encourage.

[Woody Allen]

Ad libbing all the time. I'm always saying, you don't have to do any of the lines in the script if you don't want. If you have to go into the room and theoretically you have to ask your wife for a divorce, you can use my lines or you can ask, just get the job done. You can do it in your own way, in any anyway. And the funny part of the phenomenon is actors always say, oh, thank you, thank you so much. It's so great to be that free and that. And then when I shoot, they go right into the script. They immediately start to. And I say to them, forget the script, you know, ad lib the scene and don't worry about mistakes. If you cough, if you throw up in the middle of the scene, you know, just do it. And sometimes I can get them to. But I encourage ad Libya. And anytime anyone reads a script and says to me, I don't like this line or I don't like this, or I don't want to wear this costume or I don't want to, I say, fine, you know, wear what you want, you know, make yourself happy. You know, if the person then comes back to me and it's terrible, or they want to say they don't want to say what I wrote, they want to say something else and it's just awful, then I'll say, you know, can you change it a little? But most of the time it's not. It's as good as what I wrote or better.

[Interviewer]

When you're writing a script, do you imagine what the characters look like?

[Woody Allen]

Yeah, I imagine what I'd like them to be. And sometimes I may even be thinking of an actor, an actor who eventually will play that, or an actor who I'm never going to get, won't play it or can't play it, but I'm using that person as a model.

[Interviewer]

Yeah. Do you ever write for an actor who's passed away?

[Woody Allen]

Yeah, sure. I'd be writing something and I'll be thinking to myself, you know, I mean, not this specifically, but that, oh, you know, a John Wayne character, he comes in with that swagger and bravado and yeah, John Wayne would have been great to play this if he was the lawyer.

[Interviewer]

Almost like archetypes.

[Woody Allen]

Absolutely.

[Interviewer]

Would you say all of your movies on some level are autobiographical?

[Woody Allen]

That happens automatically. You don't do that on purpose. But if I wrote a film about making cheese in an Italian village, you'd find after the film came out that some aspect of it you could trace to your own life or personal experience. You can't help that.

[Interviewer]

Tell me a little bit about Stardust Memories. That's one of my favorite of your films.

[Woody Allen]

Oh, I'm glad. Thank you.

[Interviewer]

Yeah, I love it.

[Woody Allen]

I wanted to make a movie again. I kept trying to make that same movie of being in a guy's mind that he's got everything. He's rich, he's successful, and at the beginning of the movie, his housekeeper puts a dead rabbit on the thing. And as soon as he sees the dead rabbit, the concept of death goes into his mind. And the rest of the picture is kind of in his mind, and everything else after that is in his mind. And it's got a baroque quality to it. And I filmed the best I could. Someone had said to me, how could you have that character? How could he complain? He has everything. He has everything. And I was trying to explain to that person complaining to me that, first of all, I'm not complaining for myself. I'm complaining for the human race, you know. Yes, that character was lucky. He had money, he had some talent. The lead in that movie, the character I played, he had roles. Royce, he had all of those things. So I'm not complaining from him. He was a lucky guy who avoided a lot of things. But people are not so lucky for the most part. And in the end, even with all that luck, he's going to die sooner or later, you know, get ill and die. But they. They couldn't explain it. What they came away with from that movie was, oh, you have contempt for your audience. But I didn't have contempt for my audience. If I had contempt, I actually did not have contempt. But if I had contempt, I was too smart to show it. I would not have shown the audience contempt. But I never felt contempt for them. I always felt the audience was a little smarter than me. I never undersold an audience. I never wrote down to them. I always assumed. I. This movie is dedicated to people who are sharper than me, smarter. They're going to get the best jokes. They're going to get the references. I'm going to have to, you know, struggle to seduce them. But people didn't come away with that. They thought, oh, you have contempt for your audience. But I didn't, you know. So either I failed artistically to convey my intentions, or the audience was making a mistake, or. But the mistake is rarely in the audience. The mistake is almost always in the artist. It's hard to blame an audience. If people pay their money and come in, they do it because they like you and they're on your side, then you disappoint them and they get angry.

[Interviewer]

I was the audience for that movie and I absolutely loved it. Absolutely loved it.

[Woody Allen]

I'm glad there were some people that loved it, you know, but there were many people that felt you're too critical of the people that watch your movies. You think they're dumb or you think. And the exact opposite was true. And either I failed to, you know, convey it, or I did convey it and a number of people got it. But the audience let me down. But usually it's the artist who lets the audience down.

[Interviewer]

I felt like it was so original and different and I hadn't seen a movie like that before. I felt like it expanded my mind so.

[Woody Allen]

Well, thank you.

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[Woody Allen]

Glad.

[Interviewer]

How has success felt different for you than you would have imagined it to be?

[Woody Allen]

I imagined it better. I thought, you know, that it would be great and everything would be great and I would be succeed in show business and be socially adept and go to glamorous parties with beautiful women and scintillatingly witty men and my life would be a pleasure. But it wasn't. It was. You know, I still got toothaches and I still had the same problems everybody had, but I could get a better table at a restaurant. There were some perks. That's how I summed it up years ago. I said, being famous, being successful. On balance, it's better than not. It's not what you think it is, it's not what it's cracked up to be. But it's a little better than not being. I can get better tickets to a show or. There are some perks now. There are some downsides. You know, they hound you, they hound your personal life and all that. But on balance, the perks slightly outweigh the downside.

[Interviewer]

Where is the line between art and entertainment?

[Woody Allen]

Not necessarily. I mean, I always felt someone like Ingmar Bergman and Fellini Kurosawa. What's great about them is. Is that they're tremendously entertaining. When you see those Bergman films, it's not like homework. It's not like you're getting religious or philosophical lessons in the homework. You're being entertained. You watch Strawberries and it opens. You're on the edge of the seat. Your mouth is open. It's so tense. And those movies are full of entertainment. I think the obligation of the artist first is to entertain. If he doesn't entertain, then it's a bore and it's homework, and people don't want to sit through it. And they're right.

[Interviewer]

When you made both Zelig and Purple Rose of Cairo, they both have technical innovation that maybe couldn't have happened earlier. I don't know if you could have made Zelig 20 years earlier.

[Woody Allen]

When I first started to make film, my very first film, Take the Money and Run, I wanted to make a documentary comedy. No one had done that, and I did. Take the Money and Run was documentary style. It had Jackson Beck narrating it. There were interviews with people, and it set the style. There had been no documentary comedies before that, but I wanted to make one very authentic. But I couldn't. I didn't have the cloud or know how to do it. I couldn't have made a black and white film. Years later, when I was more established, I could make Zelig. And there I wanted to do strictly. I had total artistic freedom. I could make a documentary start to finish, and a period documentary, also about an odd character. And yes, I. I loved making that film. It's hard to see now. They don't play it much on television. I don't know why, but it's one of my best films.

[Interviewer]

It is.

[Woody Allen]

But they don't play it a lot on television. But it is one of the best films that I've done. Purple Rose, I struggled over. I. I thought, you know, this girl is going to the movies all the time. And then I had the inspiration of the guy steps off the screen. And I thought, gee, that is going to make a great movie. And that's a good example of. I went months with it and couldn't come up with, okay, you Got a few scenes and then what? And I couldn't finish it. I had half of it done and I put it aside for months. I just didn't know where it went. And then one day it occurred to me, the actor playing the actor who steps off the screen comes to town and there's the two of them. And it gave me the whole second half of the picture.

[Interviewer]

Great idea, but a pure luck that.

[Woody Allen]

It came to me. I mean, it just snapped into my head in one day, months later, after I had failed just having half a movie.

[Interviewer]

Do you ever get ideas based on a new technology of, oh, I could do something funny with this technique?

[Woody Allen]

I don't because I'm not a technology person. Just never been technologically interested or adept or interested.

[Interviewer]

How is writing stand up different than writing a movie?

[Woody Allen]

Oh, it's a completely different thing. It's much harder to write stand up. You know, a movie, you know, you have characters and a story and you stand up is the very essence. You've got to have almost an hour of one laugh after another. There can be no breathing room for people. You can't stand out there and talk to people because it's boring. They pay money to be made to laugh. And you come out on stage and you open and it's funny. Then you continue talking and you're talking, you know, whatever. Some comics talk an hour, some talk 45 minutes, whatever. But it's laugh, laugh, laugh, laugh. I mean, you can't have one of those things die because then they go out saying, yeah, it was pretty good, but not everything was great because one out of a hundred jokes wasn't. That's what they come away with. It's very hard to stand up comedy. I think it was the hardest thing I ever had to do to really score as a stand up comedian. There are millions of them around and many of them much better than I ever was. But there's also a million of them around that are not very good.

[Interviewer]

Do you think of yourself primarily as a writer?

[Woody Allen]

I always thought of myself as a writer, yeah. Because it's what I enjoy the most.

[Interviewer]

I see.

[Woody Allen]

So I always thought of myself as a writer. I was, you know, an actor too. And a stand up comic and. But.

[Interviewer]

And a director.

[Woody Allen]

And a director, yeah. But I thought of myself. I only directed because I wanted my written material done properly.

[Interviewer]

I see.

[Woody Allen]

I wasn't interested in directing as a director. I was interested in getting that story across to the people in a way that's most effective for them.

[Interviewer]

Did you ever feel like you were Part of either a group of filmmakers or Would you think of yourself like a Mel Brooks or like a Martin Scorsese or.

[Woody Allen]

Well, I came up with those guys. I came up with Robert Altman and Francis Coppola and all my betters, and Scorsese and Spielberg. And I came up alongside of them. I'm not suggesting for a second that I rate with them. I'm just saying chronologically. I came up with them. We were all working the same time. And so I would think of them as contemporaries of mine.

[Interviewer]

Would you feel kinship with them or. No.

[Woody Allen]

I mean, I like all their work. And those of them that I've met, I like very much. I mean, I like Marty and Francis Coppola. And met Spielberg very briefly, but he was very nice. You know, Cindy Lumet, I knew. I liked him very much. And Arthur Penn, I knew them. I liked them. And to the best of my knowledge, they liked me.

[Interviewer]

Besides Zelig, what are some other. That you particularly like of your films?

[Woody Allen]

Midnight in Paris? I liked Match Point. I liked Bullets Over Broadway and Purple Rose of Cairo. I would say Zelig, Bullets Over Broadway, Purple Rose of Cairo and Midnight in Paris, the three period ones. And Zelig, four period ones. And Match Point. And I have a soft spot in my heart for Broadway. Danny Rose, fantastic. But you can't go by me, because I. You know, when you make a film, you start. Or me. You start out thinking, this is going to be Citizen Kane. This is the greatest thing I've ever written. It's going to be brilliant. And then in the end, you're reshuffling the material in the editing room to save embarrassment. You just don't want to be embarrassed by it. It's not Citizen Kane. It's not even nothing. It's not even the Three Stooges. So I don't have a good view of my work. To me, my work is, oh, I screwed up here. I failed here. Look how terrible this is. I blew this joke. I blew this sequence. I should have done this. You know, I once was with Sidney Lumet. And I admired him very much as a director. I think he made some wonderful movies. And he invited a group of us, you know, about 50 people. To a screening of one of his movies. And they watched the movie as usual. A very good movie. It might have been dog day. Or he made good movie, really good movies. When it was over, people were saying, oh, Sidney, that was great. And this. And he was saying, yeah, wasn't that wonderful? Wasn't that scene? Wasn't that Scene between the two people. Great. Didn't you love that girl? You know, and I could never have that enjoyment from my work. I envied him that. He got that genuine. He wasn't a braggart. He wasn't arrogant. He got genuine enjoyment from his work. I never got that. All I got was, I really wrecked this. Or, boy, I ruined that scene completely. Or, God, I'd love to do this movie over If I had $10 million or something. But, you know, so I envy that. So I don't ever see my movies after I do them, and I don't want to see them. And I. If I'm on the treadmill and suddenly a movie flashes up and it's one of mine, I quickly go, like a shot to the ad for something else.

[Interviewer]

How is it different watching a movie on a small screen versus in a theater on a big screen?

[Woody Allen]

Oh, I miss the movie houses. I miss the cinema experience. Not just the size of the screen, although that's, you know, to see Katharine Hepburn up there in a big screen or Judy Garland in a big screen, it's powerful and it's tremendous. And to see it in a small screen, yes, you digest the material and it's pleasurable, but it's not the same thing. And I miss seeing movies with 5, 6, 700 other people. The phenomenon, the presentation adds to the enjoyment. I like to go into the movie and a lot of people around me, we all see it together. And when it's over, we've experienced something communally. It's different taste in your mouth than if you sitting on your sofa and you see it with your wife or your friend and you enjoy it. But it's a different enjoyment to me. It's not as enjoyable for you.

[Interviewer]

The first time you get to see one of your movies with an audience, what's that like?

[Woody Allen]

Well, it's usually painful. I mean, like a cold shower. You finish your movie, you cut it together, you put the music in.

[Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Woody Allen]

And then you have a screening to see. Get some idea of how. What's working, what's. What's boring people. And you stand in the back of the theater and it's, you know, like taking a cold shower. You see all the stuff you thought was so good and moving so rapidly and so exciting is not rapid or exciting. It's tedious and empty and you have to run back to the drawing board and fix it up. And sometimes you can, and sometimes you can't.

[Interviewer]

Have you ever had your heart broken?

[Woody Allen]

God, many times. And many, many times, many ways, personally. And cinematically and musically. And yes, sure, if you could speak.

[Interviewer]

To your young self when you were a child, if you could tell him something, what would you tell him?

[Woody Allen]

I would probably say go in a different direction than you went. You came into film wanting to make people laugh. Don't go in thinking of yourself more as a more profound artist. Aim for that. Don't aim for Groucho Marx and Bob Hope and those kind of movies. Go and see Vittorio De Sica and Kurosawa. See those movies and do that. Aim for that. Strike out trying to do those things rather than.

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[Woody Allen]

Making people laugh.

[Interviewer]

When you lived in Brooklyn, did you dream of living in Manhattan?

[Woody Allen]

Interestingly, people always associate my films and things, my concept of Manhattan. But the Manhattan that I was crazy about was the Manhattan that I had seen in movies. The movies were all made in Hollywood and those were all sets and nobody in Manhattan lived like that in the movies. They all lived in these duplex penthouses with terraces and with, you know, white telephones and things you ring for a butler with. And nobody in New York really lived like that. But I thought about that. Once I move into New York, I'll get a place like that and it'll be on a few levels. I'll have bar, they'll come in and, you know, the way they all came in. And the first thing they did, they walked over to the bar, they opened the decanter, they took a drink. No one I knew ever in my life walked in and took a drink. They pour the scotch or the sherry, whatever it was, and they drink and someone else would. People walked around smoking and drinking and dressing for dinner. The women and the men we dressed for Dinner at home, like if you were going to Buckingham palace now. And I thought, well, gee, this is great. I'm going to get out of Brooklyn. I'm going to live like that. But it didn't happen because that was the Manhattan that I wanted to move into. Only existed up on the screen.

[Interviewer]

Were you disappointed by that?

[Woody Allen]

Oh, gradually I got to realize. It took years. I got to realize that, gee, maybe it never really existed. Some of it, a small amount of it, did exist when I got into Manhattan. You'd go to the theater at 8:40. It was a civilized hour. You could have dinner first. Afterward you'd go to a supper club maybe for something to eat, you know, a little snack or something. And, you know, you lived more. You know, there were nightclubs, I mean, in New York, the Latin Quarter and the Copacabana. There was a touch of that in New York, but nothing like what you would see when you went to a movie or nothing. What we imagined there were three levels. For us, the first level was actual reality.

[Interviewer]

Yes.

[Woody Allen]

Which was grim. And you lived in Brooklyn and your house was nothing special. And you had linoleum and oilcloth tablecloths. And it was then there was those people who lived in the movies and they lived in these houses and they were always going around Manhattan and cars and everything was just great for them. Then there was a third level of we were aware, but not firsthand of movie stars in Hollywood. And we figured, hey, you know, Humphrey Bogart lives next to Jennifer Jones. And then Gregory Peck lives next to Betty Grable. And all these people live out there. And in the evenings they're going to Ciro's and the Macombo and Humphrey Bogart is going over to Dick Powell's house and they're Gene Kelly, they're gathered around his piano singing. And, you know, there was this fantasy of life in Hollywood. In real life, in Hollywood, they had swimming pools and they were all beautiful people who actually existed, flesh and blood. And then there were the movie people that had their own life. I mean, from movie to movie. Esther Williams would swim and Van Johnson would pursue her and we'd see this character actor. We got familiar with them. And then there was our life, grim and grungy and realistic and sad. So these were three levels. And I always had hoped to graduate into a better level. But so much of it was just fantasy and wishful thinking and stimulated by both Hollywood movies and the Hollywood fan magazines and gossip columns that wrote about these stars.

[Interviewer]

Fantasy seems to play into many of your movies. Magic happens in your Movies, Yeah, Fantasy.

[Woody Allen]

You wish that life was like that. More fantasy, less real. Reality is a bone crusher, you know? And in the fantasy world, there is always a loveliness and charm and unreality is a very beautiful place. Yeah.

[Interviewer]

Can you escape into that in the real world as well? Or is it only in art and only in movies that you get to.

[Woody Allen]

Experience that you could escape to some degree? Varying degrees. When I was a kid, I would go into a movie house, and you walk into a dark theater and the terrible world is out there, and suddenly you're in the dark and big on the screen is, you know, June Allison and all these wonderful people, and they're beautiful. And the guy's never at a loss for witty remark or a brave action. It's great. So you could, for an hour and a half, get the reality out of your way. Then when I got older, I found I could make movies. And in making movies, I could wake up in the morning and go off to the set and there would be some beautiful actress and some wonderful, handsome leading man who was funny and charming. And they would have costumes, and I knew music was going to come in here, and there were great sets. And now we're in the 1920s or we're in Paris. And so I could live my life out avoiding reality as much as possible. But you can't, unfortunately, get away from it. I mean, it kind of oozes in like some kind of toxic ichor.

[Interviewer]

Did you always have a dream to make films from childhood?

[Woody Allen]

Not really. I wanted to be in show business. I knew that, but not films necessarily. I started out as a writer and I was happy in my little isolated room writing. And then I wrote for some television shows and I kind of accidentally got into movies. I became a comedian, and they thought I did funny stuff. So they thought, why don't you give them a chance to write a movie? Maybe write a funny movie. In spite of my incompetence, kept succeeding. Everything I did, I succeeded. It's not that I was good at it. I got a million lucky breaks. I worked hard and everything fell my way. So even if I did something wrong or bad, which I did all the time, I succeeded. When I became a comedian, I was petrified. I didn't stage fright. I didn't know what to do. I got on stage, but I succeeded. When I came off the stage, I. All the nightclubs wanted me. When I was a kid and I wrote for a television show, I was just a teenager, I wrote for a television show. Next year I had a reputation and all the writers wanted me to work on, you know, so it's like I could do no wrong at that time. It's not that I was so good. I wasn't. I was, you know, competent, but not great by any means. But I got a million breaks when I wrote a movie script. I had no credentials to direct a movie, but just when I finished my script, a new company formed, called Palomar Pictures, and they couldn't entice John Houston and William Wyler and these people to make movies for them. So they turned to me, people like me. And I was one of the people most like me. They gave me $1 million budget, and I made Take the Money and Run. And I made all kinds of mistakes on the picture and did the best I could. I knew nothing about filmmaking. And it opened and it was a big success. And then I followed it with bananas, with some improvement in my technique, but not much. I was still pretty rotten. Also a very big success. It was like I kept failing. Not failing, but stumbling upward.

[Interviewer]

Yeah, it sounds like the fantasy in real life. You got to experience the fantasy that way. It just happened.

[Woody Allen]

Yeah, I had some talent, but not proportionate. I combined that small talent that I had with very hard work. Lot of ambition and a lot of luck.

[Interviewer]

How did you get your first writing job?

[Woody Allen]

My first writing job, I was in high school. I was 16. And all the other kids around me were making their college choices. This one was going to be a doctor, and this one was going to be an architect, and that one was going to be a journalist. I had fantasies. I thought I'd be. Sounds crazy. I thought I'd be a cowboy. You know, I wanted to be a cowboy. I wanted to be what I had seen in the movies. I wanted to be a private detective. I looked at the Yellow Pages and looked up the names of private detectives, asked them if I could come in and follow what they did. So it was complete fantasy. I was always amusing. And some friends of mine said, why don't you write some of those jokes out? And I write them out, and then somebody said, you should send them in. There were many Broadway columnists then running the newspapers. Why don't you send them in? Because they always publish jokes. So I typed them up after school and sent them in to some of the Broadway columnists. Earl Wilson, Walter Winchell, the various ones. And after very short time, a month maybe, I saw my name in print with a joke. So I started doing it more, and my name started appearing all the time in the columns. An advertising company Called up Earl Wilson and said, who is this guy Woody Allen who's always appearing? And they said, he's some kid in Brooklyn, he sends us the jokes. And they called me up, they got my name and phone number, they called me up and they said, do you want a job coming in and writing jokes first? And I said, yeah, I'd love it. At that time they paid me $40 a week, which was huge because you know the jobs that I got in the neighborhood, delivering for the tailor, for the butcher, you know, you got 35 cents an hour and tips and you made no money. $40. My parents made that working eight hours a day in an office as a bookkeeper. So I would go in, I'd go to school. My school hours were eight in the morning till one at Midwood High School and I'd finish at one, get on the BMT subway ride into Manhattan and on the way in, it was a 40 minute trip or so. I'd write jokes, jokes, jokes, get in there, go into a little cubby, type out more jokes and I give them. I know it sounds hard to believe. I, I would give them 50 jokes every day.

[Interviewer]

Amazing.

[Woody Allen]

And, and there were topical jokes, jokes about the president, jokes about inane, jokes about parking spaces and mother in laws and, and I had the job. And then someone heard that I was a good joke writer and they wanted to know if I would supply jokes for their radio show. And of course I did. And one thing led to another and before long I had a good reputation and I flourished. I mean, I kept, I did radio shows and then I did what they called at that time simulcasts. It was part radio, part television at the same time. Then I did television shows then by the time I was about 20 or 21 or so, I got a job with the Sid Caesar show, which was the jewel of comedy. I mean, everybody knew it would be like at the epitome of the Saturday Night Live show or something. Everybody wanted to be a writer and I wanted to be on, everyone wanted to be on the Sid Caesar show. And they hired me and I worked on the show and I worked with all these great writers, Danny and Doc Simon, Larry Gelbard, Mel Brooks, you know, I mean, and they were all very nice to me. They were all, they all liked me and I was legitimately in awe of them and respectful of them. So. And they liked me and I wrote funny jokes and they liked that. So I just kept succeeding. Yeah, I had a charmed life. And when I made my first movie, I didn't direct it. They asked me to write this script for what's New Pussycat? And they said to me, can you write this thing? Charlie Feldman, the producer, said, well, we can all go to Paris and we have Warren Beatty and we'll have a great time in Paris and write yourself a little part in it. And meanwhile, Beatty dropped out. And through Feldman's production genius, they got Peter o', Toole, they got Peter Sellers, they got Capucine and all these hot actresses for it, Romy Schneider. And they made this movie of my script. Well, it was the most terrible movie. They ruined it completely. I had a miserable experience in Paris, apart from Loving Paris, but I had a terrible experience, and yet I was failing upward. The picture became a gigantic success. It was probably the biggest money earning comedy to its time. You know, it's like I could do no wrong. And I hated the picture. I mean, I hate it to this day. And I hated it then. And then I wrote a script and I vowed I would not do the script unless I could be the director and control it. And as I said before, a young company started out, Palomar Pictures, and they took a chance on me and, you know, because they couldn't get better than me. They couldn't, you know, and that picture, you know, I ran into all kinds of problems in the editing room. And the edit opened and it was a very big success. And Bananas was a big success. And then I wrote everything you always wanted to know about Sex, which was a film that was not so well received, but a tremendous success financially and with the public. And then I did Love and Death, which was a success. And then I decided to take a chance and make a film that wasn't so broadly funny. I would do more characters, more realistic, and I would sacrifice some laughs. And a lot of people around me said, you're making a big mistake and all that. And I wrote Annie hall with Marshall Brickman, and we decided this was gonna be a more serious picture, more serious than, you know, Bananas. And we sacrificed laughs for the story.

[Interviewer]

What do you think brought that on, that idea to do that? It was a big step.

[Woody Allen]

I was always ambitious and I always wanted to do it in the same sense as when that succeeded. I followed it with interiors because I didn't want to just make comic films. So I was always trying to be ambitious and try more than I had the ability to do. I was always punching upward, failing artistically, but being saved by my luck.

[Interviewer]

Yeah. Did it keep it interesting for you by making a different kind of movie than you had made before?

[Woody Allen]

Yes. It always was interesting to have some, rather than just turning out the same thing, you know, I felt. For instance, I was a great fan of the Marx Brothers, but I felt they made the same picture time after time. And of course, they were brilliant, but it was the same film. So eventually, once you see five of them or seven of them, they waned their popularity. And this has gone on to my 50th picture, the last picture I made to keep the sense of challenge going, I made in French. I don't speak French, but I made it in French because I wanted to challenge myself. I'd always admired French movies, and I wanted to work in another language to keep me awake on the set. So I wasn't just, yes, I've made 50 films. I go through the mechanical motions. I can do it and do it again. So that's always been a provocative stimulator for me.

[Interviewer]

Tell me a little bit about making a movie in French. Did you have a translator at your side at all times?

[Woody Allen]

No, I had so many of them spoke English. I wrote the film in English, of course, and somebody translated into French.

[Interviewer]

I see.

[Woody Allen]

And then I would do it, and I would. The actors could speak English, at least part English, or they could speak better English than me. They were very good at it. And I would speak to them, they would do it. And I could tell they were speaking in French. But I wrote. I knew what they were saying because I wrote the dialogue. And you can tell. If you go see a Kurosawa film, you know who the great Japanese actors are, and you're stunned by Mifune or something because he's a great actor. You know nothing of Japanese, probably. That wasn't the problem. The problems always with that film or with any film I've ever done. The problem is always, always in the writing. If the writing is good, you don't have a problem making the film. You know, there are many wonderful actors around, great cameramen. It's common sense where to put the camera and what to do. You always are screwed up in films and have agonizing times. When you finally come to the realization that what you wrote, or only the first half works, or you run into trouble on a character somewhere or a plot point, it's always a problem in the plot.

[Interviewer]

And when that happens, do you only get to see it when you're making the film? Is that the only time you would know that?

[Woody Allen]

It's the only time I ever saw it. I mean, I don't know of anybody that can read a script all the time. And Just anticipate the problems. I couldn't tell till I shot the whole film, put the whole film together, put the music in and look at it. And I said, oh God, the whole second half doesn't work. And then I'd go back and reshoot and I would re edit and struggle. And many of my films were made in the reshooting and the re editing, including Annie Hall. That's why I noticed it was so much more pleasurable to write a novel. Because in the film, when I called them up and said I've got to reshoot, they're thunderstruck because it's going to cost $250,000 a day to reshoot something. But with the novel, when it's terrible, I reread it. I tear it up and throw it away. It doesn't cost a penny, you know, so it was nicer artistic.

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[Woody Allen]

Warning. This product contains nicotine. Nicotine is an addictive chemical.

[Interviewer]

Tell me about what's with Baumgarth.

[Woody Allen]

It's a book that I wrote, a novel and I thought it'd be amusing and it was fun to work on. I started it between films and between films I wrote a little more and a little more and finally I finished it and gave it a quick rewrite and traced it up a little bit and then put it out.

[Interviewer]

How long has it been in the works?

[Woody Allen]

Well, on and off sporadically, you know, for, you know, I would say a year.

[Interviewer]

That's not long.

[Woody Allen]

Well, but only in small doses.

[Interviewer]

Yeah, but still, a year for a novel is quick.

[Woody Allen]

You know, it's a small novel, I mean, but on the other hand, it is as long as the Great Gatsby. And it's not as good, but it's as long. And it's, you know, longer than Joseph Conrad's novels. And so it's a respectable length, but it's not. It's not as big as War and Peace.

[Interviewer]

Well, I don't think there's any rule about that. Right. It just has to be good. No.

[Woody Allen]

You know, but hopefully it's more amusing. Yeah.

[Interviewer]

There's a story in the book where a character is accused of not being able to speak from the heart. And I wanted to ask you, do you feel like you've always been able to speak from the heart?

[Woody Allen]

Well, most of the time, yeah. Every once in a while, something comes up where you don't speak from the heart because you can't, because it would hurt somebody's feelings or betray a confidence of someone. But most of the time, you can speak from the heart harder. You know, I don't live in a hostile society or where there's problems, and if I have to watch what I say. So I always, you know, was always free. I grew up in Brooklyn. People spoke what they felt, and it was never so radical what they felt or so dangerous.

[Interviewer]

Was this the first time you've written a novel?

[Woody Allen]

I tried one maybe 30 years ago, and I brought it to my editor at the New Yorker, Roger angel, and he read it and he said, it's very funny and very. The word he used, warming. But it doesn't come to any climax. It's like all foreplay and no climax. And I said, okay, then I don't want anybody else to see it.

[Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Woody Allen]

And I put it in my drawer and I never took it out again. I mean, I left it there. And I went on, I figured, well, maybe novel's not my thing. But, you know, 25, 30 years later, I need to come back to that one. You know, another couple of months, not even I'll be 90. And I thought to myself, I want to, you know, write a couple of novels.

[Interviewer]

How often do you start projects and feel like this one isn't going to work, I'm going to move on to something else?

[Woody Allen]

Often I've started some books that way. I've started film scripts. You know, when I was younger, I didn't realize that you had to know where you were going. You had to know the ending and be satisfied with that ending. So I get an idea, and it would be. It would dazzle me. This is great. It's so funny, so brilliant. And I start to write it. And I get up to page 50 and I'm out. It goes no place. I've got 50 wonderful pages of imagination and dialogue and it goes nowhere. It's wasted. So then I decided, you've got to know where you're going with the thing. And once I knew that, I fell into the trap. Less of starting projects that came to nothing. But before that and even somewhat after, I'd start projects and realize on page 10 or page 80 that this has not worked. It's not working. It appeared to be tantalizing and delectable, but not working out.

[Interviewer]

Do you remember what the first film was where you knew the ending before you got there?

[Woody Allen]

It's a good question, because I'm going through all my films now. I'm past already interiors. And I didn't know. I didn't know in Manhattan. My God. You know, I can only say this. I can't remember them all, but I. I knew where I was going with Match Point.

[Interviewer]

Wow, that's deep into the library.

[Woody Allen]

Yes. Yes. I thought to myself, a guy kills somebody, but he kills the next door neighbor. So you think, you know, that he killed the next door neighbor and he ran into the other person and had to kill them. So all the suspicions deflected on the other person and there's no motive in there, you know, So I knew I was going there, that I. That I knew, but I. And I guess the pictures since then I kind of knew. I mean, everything since then I did know Vicky, Christina, Barcelona and Midnight in Paris. I knew. Yeah. In the later films, I know, I. I knew all the endings. I didn't get to the end and flounder around on any of that.

[Interviewer]

Do you remember the first time you went to Hollywood?

[Woody Allen]

Yes. I was flown out there with a group of writers. NBC had something called the Writer Development Program. They picked out a number of writers, young writers to develop as writers, because they wanted us to mature as writers and work for their television shows. And they were very careful in their selection, but didn't work because most of the people they picked did not wind up as writers. They went into other businesses. I was one of their success stories because I was so dedicated. I was so disciplined and ambitious, and they flew us out there. There was a failing television show called the Colgate Comedy Hour. They flew about six of us out there to apprentice on the show, hoping that we could make a contribution and help the show. And also we would learn something from the more experienced writers who had written the show into trouble. Anyhow, nobody knew what they were doing. And when I got out to Hollywood, of course, I was walking on clouds. I thought to myself, my God, this is where Bob Hope lives. And I just didn't believe it. And even years later, when I went out to Hollywood, briefly, Dick Cavett was out there. Cavett and I used to go and look at the homes of W.C. fields and we were just awestruck. But when I went out, I was alone. I was a teenager and I was thunderstruck by Hollywood. I was thunderstruck by the sunsets and by the fact that movie stars lived there and that I would be standing on a Saturday night at night. Hollywood and vine, which I had only known because of listening to Jack Benny. And then I was overcome with the fact that they referred to Danish pastries as sweet rolls. I couldn't get my mind around that. And that when you sat down to get coffee and orange juice and a toasted English muffin, they put the coffee down first. I couldn't get used to that because it was always cold by the time the muffin came. These are my impressions of Hollywood. But I loved it when I first went out there. Then as I got older and got more experience living in Manhattan, I much preferred the noisy excitement and energy of Manhattan to the softer life of California.

[Interviewer]

How did you go from being a writer to the first time getting on stage as a comedian?

[Woody Allen]

Because I was a writer. And in the writer development program, they said to me, I'd like you to go down to the Blue Angel. There's a comic down there called Mort Saul and I'd like you to take a look at him because we're thinking of developing him at NBC. And I went down there and I was knocked for a loop. I'd never seen anything like that. I mean, it just changed my life in one second. I came back and I thought to myself, what am I doing? Everything I'm doing is so terrible. The comparison is, I still feel that way to this day. And I was just stunned. And I thought to myself, I'd like to write for this guy, I'd like to listen to this guy. I'd like to be this guy. And I mentioned, just mentioned it to my then manager, Jack Rollins, that I've had a thought maybe of writing something for myself and doing it. And he seized on that and would not let it go. He saw in me, which I did not see, a stand up comedian, and he wouldn't let it go. And despite the fact I said, I don't really want to do this, I don't like It, I don't know. He said to me, just trust me, do this for a year or two and let me worry about it and make all the decisions. You just show up and work. And I did. I was nervous every show. I hated it. But again, I succeeded in spite of myself. The first night I went on at the Blue angel in New York, it was a Sunday night, it was the night that they put amateurs on. And Shelley Berman was the stand up comedian there, he was the star. And he gave me a wonderful introduction, really lovely. And I went on. I was frozen and I worked. When I came off, I thought, God, I was awful and awful and awful. But the next day the offers came pouring in. This nightclub, that nightclub, this television show. And Jack Rollins said no to all them. He said, now you gotta buckle down and work, get up in the cabarets and work every night. And that's what I did. I quit. I was a writer on the Garry Moore show and I was making, you know, good money at that time. I mean, it was like a few thousand dollars a week. And I quit to be a standup comedian making zero, making no money at all, just to go in and work at a place called the Duplex downtown. And then the Bitter End, no salary at all. And I worked and worked night after night after night. And then I, you know, I didn't get better at it, but I, I got more relaxed. Maybe never, never totally relaxed. I was never great at it. In retrospect, I'm overrated. I was a decent comic, but not a great one. But I'm always thought of as, oh, you were a wonderful stand up comedian, but compared to someone like Mort Saul, I mean, if I had my life to live over again, which I'm counting on, I would be a different kind of stand up comedian. Sometimes I even get the urge now, you know, it's not too late to atone for the rotten comic I was then. I should get back up on stage and do what I really feel I could do and be very strong as a stand up comedian. And then the impetus wanes and I think, oh, I'm gonna, am I gonna go to St. Louis and Chicago and Boston and work nightclubs at one in the morning, you know, and so I come to my senses. But I did work as a comedian. I was very successful and that led to the movies and stuff, but I was never, I don't say this with false modesty. I was overrated.

[Interviewer]

The idea of you going back to stand up is a very beautiful idea.

[Woody Allen]

I would love to do it but, you know, it would take me about a year to write enough material the way I worked. I would practice it at home alone first, and then go into some club at night and do it. And I always, unlike other comedians, they always advised me, when you have new material, throw it in to the second show at night. So if it dies, I never felt that was a good test of material. I always felt you had to do it Saturday night, prime show, and if you died with it, you died. I never died with any of it because I wrote funny and the jokes are funny, and when you're on stage, you have a survival instinct. So if I wrote a routine and I was doing routine, talking to the audience, I was getting my laughs and I sensed the next joke is not going to work. And you just sense it like you, you know, it's instinctive. I would edit right there and go to the joke after it. So I never really died. I always edited on my feet and cut out the junk while I was working. So they always got good jokes. The best that I could write at the time when I was a good joke writer.

[Interviewer]

Do you think that had you not done stand up, the rest of your whole life would be different?

[Woody Allen]

Yes, it was a key piece. And Jack Rollins, my manager, who was the best of all managers, a legend in the business, pointed out to me and accurately, I was a writer for years. And you go from show to show, you know, and it's fine on your reputation. The minute I did a stand up routine on Jack Paar or something like that and scored, my whole life changed, it dwarfed the excitement and the amount of offers I got as a writer. Wow. You know, to say, well, he wrote the Sid Caesar show on the Sid Caesar show, or he wrote, you know, on this show or that show, okay, we'll hire him on our show. But as soon as they say, oh, is he the guy on the Ed Sullivan Show Sunday night did that. The offers came in. I got more writing offers doing one standup routine. The visibility and the impact of live performing is so more intense than what you get to the passivity of being an isolated writer.

[Interviewer]

When you saw Mort Saul that first time, tell me what it was about him that was so great.

[Woody Allen]

Well, I, of course, misperceived. I thought, oh, this guy jokes are so great. They were great. They were the greatest I've ever seen. And I didn't realize that it was his Persona that was so great so that he could say anything and it would be wonderful. And the jokes were superb. His Persona was legitimately. A kind of. He had a sort of canine intelligence, coruscating wit. You were in the presence of an overwhelmingly witty, brilliant character. And I thought it was the jokes. And I even remember saying to Jack Rollins, my manager, why can't I just go out there and read the jokes? You know, it's a joke. And Jack used to say, it's not the jokes. You don't realize. It's the Persona. It's the human being. That's what they're responding to. You're responding to the Persona of Mort Saul. Yes, his jokes are brilliant and very different than other people's. Much superior, but it's him. And I couldn't grasp that for years. Finally, it occurred to me. It came over me that it was the guy. It was such a dazzling experience to watch him in his speech. Now, someone listening to me now can go back and see a tape or listen to a record. They won't get the impact. This is truly an experience. You know, someone once said to me, years ago, we were talking baseball. I'm talking about Babe Ruth. And they said, you really had to be there. Same with Mort. You had to be there. Yes, you can get some taste of what he was like from a clip or from the record album, but at that time, it was electrifying. And of course, when he burst on the scene, they did a profile in the New Yorker on him. He was on the COVID of Time magazine. He was hired to work the White House altar. And he wasn't just a guy doing, let's say, political jokes. His political jokes, to me, I wished he had done less of them and more of his human relationship jokes. Every subject he turned to, from his relationships with women and human relations to special subjects, sports cars and high fidelity and going into Brooks Brothers to buy a suit. And people that lived and worked on Madison Avenue, advertising agencies and politics was part of that. But, you know, to me, only one part. It was so amazing to hear him speak, and I didn't realize that it was him. It was. What I was responding to was the person in the same way that if you see a movie, you respond to Marlon Brando or Frank Sinatra or something. It's the Persona. I was thick. I couldn't grasp that. I kept thinking, oh, this guy's jokes are so brilliant. He's really a brilliant writer. So. And people used to say to me, at the time, other comics would say to me this. Before I became a comic, they would say, what do you see in Mortal? He just comes out and talks. I could come out and Talk. But he just. But he was so skillful that it never sounded like a comedian talking to you. It sounded like a scintillating intellectual talking to you. An amazingly witty, funny, scintillating intellectual talking to you. And just knocked me for a loop at the time.

[Interviewer]

Was he the first comedian who didn't just do jokes?

[Woody Allen]

No, there were others who just didn't do jokes. For example, WC Fields didn't just do jokes. He didn't do jokes. He was just a hysterical personality, funny beyond belief. Jonathan Winters didn't do jokes. He had a special thing. Elaine May Someone who could read the phone book and you would laugh.

[Interviewer]

Great comedians do they all have that Persona that is what you fall in love with?

[Woody Allen]

Yes, it's all the great comedians. You know, a million comedians do those one liner jokes but for some reason when Groucho did them, they have something special to them. It's in the voice and the mystical area of genius that you can never quantify and you never. It's just there. It's like when a musician, you know, I pick up the clarinet and play a tune on it, it's one thing, but somebody else picks it up and they blow into it, same thing and it just oozes with feeling and you can't figure out why. You know, you do all the same things. You use the same number reed, you use a good clarinet, you hunch your shoulders and close your eyes, you straining and it's fine. But when the person really has it and you can never get to what that thing is, that's the part that the AIs are never going to duplicate. They'll always match something, but they're never going to, they're never going to get that impossible to capture thing that makes Bud Powell play the piano and somebody else play it and it's just a different instrument.

[Interviewer]

Did you ever get to meet Groucho?

[Woody Allen]

Oh, I knew him well. I mean I met him. Cavett introduced me to him at Lindy's and we, I got friendly with him. I Correspondence with him. Yes. I spent a good deal of time with him when he came to New York and when I went out to California, I always visited him. I was at his house any number of times. Dan Keaton and I spent Christmas Eve with him. Yeah, I did. And he was, you know, he could say anything and it would sound funny. Yeah, you know, he just. Where somebody else it wouldn't. But with him it was magic. It sounded funny.

[Interviewer]

Would you get the sense that he was trying to be funny or he couldn't help it.

[Woody Allen]

Both. He was frequently trying to be funny and he was funny. Not like the boorish person who tries to be funny and doesn't make it. Yeah, but he also, if he would say, you know, anything, it would sound funny because it just came from Groucho. Yeah, you can't really get your mind around what it is. But because so many comics do those one liner jokes like he used to do and make those remarks like the delivery. Bob Hope. Bob Hope had an amazing delivery. It was just amazing. He could say those one liners and everybody else saying them sounds thick and heavy handed. And he does them and they come across like, you know, little poems.

[Interviewer]

Did you get to meet Bob Hope as well?

[Woody Allen]

I met him briefly. I was never as friendly with him. I mean, I loved him, but I was never close with him is what I mean. Yeah, I met him briefly. Cavett and I did a little documentary on him that was played at Lincoln center the night they honored him. So we got to pick out a lot of stuff that we liked of his little moments. He just had a great delivery. I copied his. I wouldn't copy Groucho's delivery because it's too special. But Hope was more of a human being, more of an average human being, less broad than Groucho. When I first started, I leaned on Mort Saul. And one columnist wrote, if Woody Allen could ever get rid of those Mort Saul mannerisms, he'd be a really good comic. And I sounded like Morzah, you know, the same way any musician who starts and plays jazz, the piano will start playing like Thorny a smoke or, you know, whoever influences him, whoever he loves. And so I sounded like Mort. So when I first started a grade B version, grade D version, and then I started to lean more on Bob Hover so you could. When I see myself ever in a movie, you know, you can see that I'm copying this great master.

[Interviewer]

When you do jokes in front of an audience, you get an immediate feedback. You know, what works and what doesn't. How is it different when you're making a movie? There's no audience, nobody's laughing. How do you know when it's funny?

[Woody Allen]

If you're a professional comedian or you're a professional comedy worker or not writer or director, you know, I know in my room, by myself before I go out in the world that this routine I've done is going to get laughs. I'm going to get laughs with this. Not that long ago, I had to. I didn't want to, but I had to because I Love her. Go out to California and do some standup because they honored Diane Keaton and I had to go on stage at American Film Institute or something. One of those things. I could stay in my room alone beforehand and say the thing and with complete professional confidence that I'm going to get laughs with these things. And I did. Because if you're a professional, that's a gift that you have that you can make up funny stuff and you know it's funny. Whereas an average guy that doesn't have that odd gift can't do that.

[Interviewer]

When you newly write something funny, do you laugh or do you just think it's funny?

[Woody Allen]

No, no, I laugh. People think that you make up something and then you say it, but it proceeds from your unconscious completely. When I'm writing something, it. It surprises me. I don't think of it and say it. It comes from the person inside you. So all of a sudden it says its thing. It surprises me when I say something funny and I laugh at it.

[Interviewer]

Yeah, it's great, you know, it's a great feeling. No.

[Woody Allen]

Yeah. To laugh is always a good feeling.

[Interviewer]

Yeah. How much of the work is intellectual versus something else?

[Woody Allen]

You experience it as intellectual. You sit down, you're thinking, you're using a rational mentality to put something together logically. But then the thing pops in inspirationally. It's a combination of working at it and then the inspiration comes. You have no part in the inspiration that proceeds from inside you.

[Interviewer]

Has there ever been a time where inspiration didn't come?

[Woody Allen]

Yeah, sure. You sit there and you think and you think and you use your intellect and you try this and you try that and you try a million things and it doesn't come, and then you move on to something else because you never got it.

[Interviewer]

How much of the writing comes from real life? Do you see something and then think that's funny and then it works its way into a script?

[Woody Allen]

Both. I mean, a portion of the stuff you write comes from real life. You see something and you think that would be funny or that is funny, and it would make a good comic situation. And some of it is just. You know, when I wrote for television shows, you got locked into a room on Monday morning and the show would be live on Saturday night or something, and you had to write. And you couldn't just wait for the inspiration. If it didn't come, it didn't come. But you had to manufacture the best you could. It wouldn't be the best stuff you could come up with if you could wait to be inspired. But you had no choice. So some of it is from real life, and some of it is you manufacture.

[Interviewer]

On the Sid Caesar show, the writers room, were those. Would you say that was the funniest group of people you've ever been around?

[Woody Allen]

They were wonderful writers. I mean, you know, now the work of Larry Gelbart and Doc Simon and Mel Brooks, of course. They were great professional comedy writers. Yeah, I would say probably the funniest group. And not just funny. They were funny, but they. They knew how to write. Yeah, they were more than funny. They were intelligent men and they knew how to write. They knew when a joke would be holding up. The progress of the skit. You know, the Syd Caesar show, even before I joined the. Did foreign movies and operas and, you know, there's great scope. You know, when I. When I wrote a special, it wasn't for Sid. I think we wrote a special for Art Carney once, and we were able on that same special to do a Tennessee Williams satire, an Ingmar Bergman satire. You know, this stuff was not that common in television at the time.

[Interviewer]

Would you all work in a room.

[Woody Allen]

Together at the Sid Caesar show you did? Yeah.

[Interviewer]

And would you finish each other's jokes or add on to each other?

[Woody Allen]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. They were all very nice people. You'd add on or top a joke. Yeah, it was what you would expect. People wandering around aimlessly and doing jokes, and each one building on a joke or. Or making a better joke and sometimes fighting for your joke. You know, I've written very often with just one other writer, you know, with like Larry Gelbart or something, or Mel Brooks and one other writer, Mel Tolkien, or just with Marshall Brickman, who I collaborated with Mickey Rose. And it's easier with two people. For me, it's easiest by myself. But with two people, if you're friendly, and I was friendly with those people, it was easier. Once you get more people in the room, it becomes a little more chaotic.

[Interviewer]

Understood.

[Woody Allen]

On the Caesar show, Sid was always in the room as a major contributor. I mean, he just wasn't the comic that you gave stuff to. He contributed.

[Interviewer]

What was he like? Sid Caesar?

[Woody Allen]

Grandiose. He was large, generous, very brilliant, hilariously funny. Everybody and his brother today is called a comic genius. But Sid really was a genius. And he had a very large personality. Very big. And, you know, he was not shy. It was, I can only say large and hilariously funny and very generous.

[Interviewer]

When you were younger, who were the other comedians that you looked up to? Who were the greats from childhood?

[Woody Allen]

Well, Sid. Cause when he came along, I was only, you know, like 12 years old or something. Yeah, W.C. fields, Groucho Marx, Bob Hope, of course, these were my idols. And I loved Mike Nicholson, Elaine Ray and Jonathan Winters, and Mort Saul, of course. There were some other comedians that I thought, you know, were quite funny. I mean, I thought Henry Youngman was hilariously funny. Milt Kamen was very funny. Not well known, but very funny. And all of those guys were kind of funny in a certain way. All those Vorstvel guys, Phil Foster and Jackie Leonard and, you know, they all had a certain funniest. But the ones that really knocked me out were the ones I mentioned. Bob Hope, the Lucy Fields, Groucho Marx. Those were the ones that I grew up with that I thought were hilarious.

[Interviewer]

Did you ever meet Jerry Lewis?

[Woody Allen]

Yeah, I knew Jerry Lewis pretty well. Jerry Lewis I found to be an enormous talent, but. But the films didn't add up. You know, he squandered it. I thought so much of it. He was such a talented guy. You know, when he danced like Fred Astaire, you could say, oh, God, that's Fred Astaire he's doing. And he looked like him. If he sang, whatever he did, when he'd do his nightclub act and do stuff, his typewriter thing and throw that cane way up in the air and spin around, he'd catch it. He could dance a little. What he needed was somebody disciplining him. He was like an atomic bomb. You had to use him, right? And nobody ever did. You know, he did those silly movies, and they're all silly. And within those silly movies, you could see how gifted he was. And you wished that somebody had used him for a good movie. Now, years later, Scorsese did, but it was a serious movie. But you wish Jerry had just given himself over to somebody and trusted him. They could have turned out a brilliant comedy with him. Tetragrammatin is a podcast. Tetragrammatin is a website. Tetragrammaton is a whole world of knowledge.

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[Interviewer]

Alt.

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