Woody Allen: The Art of Humor

Woody Allen’s career in comedy began in 1953 when he left college to write jokes for Garry Moore and Sid Caesar. In the early 1960s his stand-up routines in the comedy clubs of Greenwich Village brought him widespread recognition leading to several successful television appearances. In 1965 Allen wrote and made his acting debut in What’s New, Pussycat? Allen directed his first feature film Take the Money and Run in 1969 which he also wrote and starred in. The films which followed (Bananas, Sleeper, Love and Death) were commercially successful and critically acclaimed. In 1977 Allen wrote, directed and starred in Annie Hall alongside Diane Keaton. The film went on to win four Academy Awards, establishing Allen’s breakthrough style and themes which he went on to develop in Manhattan, Hannah and Her Sisters and Crimes and Misdemeanours. The following extract is from an interview with Woody Allen conducted by Michiko Kakutani in 1995 in which Allen discusses his writing career.

INTERVIEWER

When did you start writing?

ALLEN

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

INTERVIEWER

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

ALLEN

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

Love and Death (Directed by Woody Allen)

INTERVIEWER

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

ALLEN

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

INTERVIEWER

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

ALLEN

That’s one of its appeals – that you have the control over it. Another great appeal is that when you’re finished you can tear it up and throw it away. Whereas, when you make a movie, you can’t do that. You have to put it out there even if you don’t like it. I might add, the hours are better if you’re a prose writer. It’s much more fun to wake up in the morning, just drift into the next room and be alone and write, than it is to wake up in the morning and have to go shoot a film. Movies are a big demand. It’s a physical job. You’ve got to be someplace, on schedule, on time. And you are dependent on people. I know Norman Mailer said that if he had started his career today he might be in film rather than a novelist. I think films are a younger man’s enterprise. For the most part it’s strenuous. Beyond a certain point, I don’t think I want that exertion; I mean I don’t want to feel that my whole life I’m going to have to wake up at six in the morning, be out of the house at seven so I can be out on some freezing street or some dull meadow shooting. That’s not all that thrilling. It’s fun to putter around the house, stay home. Tennessee Williams said the annoying thing about plays is that you have to produce them – you can’t just write them and throw them in the drawer. That’s because when you finish writing a script, you’ve transcended it and you want to move on. With a book, you can. So the impulse seems always to be a novelist. It’s a very desirable thing. One thinks about Colette sitting in her Parisian apartment, looking out the window and writing. It’s a very seductive life...

Manhattan (Directed by Woody Allen)

INTERVIEWER

A lot of writers find it very hard to get started on the next project, to find an idea they really want to work on...

ALLEN

Probably they are casting aside ideas that are as good as the ideas I choose to work on. I’ll think of an idea walking down the street, and I’ll mark it down immediately. And I always want to make it into something. I’ve never had a block. I’m talking within the limits of my abilities. But in my own small way, I’ve had an embarrassment of riches. I’ll have five ideas and I’m dying to do them all. It takes weeks or months where I agonize and obsess over which to do next. I wish sometimes someone would choose for me. If someone said, Do idea number three next, that would be fine. But I have never had any sense of running dry. People always ask me, Do you ever think you’ll wake up one morning and not be funny? That thought would never occur to me – it’s an odd thought and not realistic. Because funny and me are not separate. We’re one. The best time to me is when I’m through with a project and deciding about a new one. That’s because it’s at a period when reality has not yet set in. The idea in your mind’s eye is so wonderful, and you fantasize it in the perfect flash of a second – just beautifully conceived. But then when you have to execute it, it doesn’t come out as you’d fantasized. Production is where the problems begin, where reality starts to set in. As I was saying before, the closest I ever come to realizing the concept is in prose. Most of the things that I’ve written and published, I’ve felt that I executed my original idea pretty much to my satisfaction. But I’ve never, ever felt that, not even close, about anything I’ve written for film or the stage. I always felt I had such a dazzling idea – where did I go wrong? You go wrong from the first day. Everything’s a compromise. For instance, you’re not going to get Marlon Brando to do your script, you’re going to get someone lesser. The room you see in your mind’s eye is not the room you’re filming in. It’s always a question of high aims, grandiose dreams, great bravado and confidence, and great courage at the typewriter; and then, when I’m in the midst of finishing a picture and everything’s gone horribly wrong and I’ve reedited it and reshot it and tried to fix it, then it’s merely a struggle for survival. You’re happy only to be alive. Gone are all the exalted goals and aims, all the uncompromising notions of a perfect work of art, and you’re just fighting so people won’t storm up the aisles with tar and feathers. With many of my films – almost all – if I’d been able to get on screen what I conceived, they would have been much better pictures. Fortunately, the public doesn’t know about how great the picture played in my head was, so I get away with it.

INTERVIEWER

How do you actually work? What are your tools?

ALLEN

I’ve written on legal pads, hotel stationery, anything I can get my hands on. I have no finickiness about anything like that. I write in hotel rooms, in my house, with other people around, on matchbooks. I have no problems with it – to the meager limits that I can do it. There have been stories where I’ve just sat down at the typewriter and typed straight through beginning to end. There are some New Yorker pieces I’ve written out in forty minutes time. And there are other things I’ve just struggled and agonized over for weeks and weeks. It’s very haphazard. Take two movies – one movie that was not critically successful was A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy. I wrote that thing in no time. It just came out in six days – everything in perfect shape. I did it, and it was not well received. Whereas Annie Hall was just endless – totally changing things. There was as much material on the cutting-room floor as there was in the picture – I went back five times to reshoot. And it was well received. On the other hand, the exact opposite has happened to me where I’ve done things that just flowed easily and were very well received. And things I agonized over were not. I’ve found no correlation at all...

Crimes and Misdemeanours (Directed by Woody Allen)

INTERVIEWER

Why did you start out writing comedy?

ALLEN

I always enjoyed comedians when I was young. But when I started to read more seriously, I enjoyed more serious writers. I became less interested in comedy then, although I found I could write it. These days I’m not terribly interested in comedy. If I were to list my fifteen favorite films, there would probably be no comedies in there. True, there are some comic films that I think are wonderful. I certainly think that City Lights is great, a number of the Buster Keatons, several Marx Brothers movies. But those are a different kind of comedy – the comedy of comedians in film stands more as a record of the comedians’ work. The films may be weak or silly but the comics were geniuses. I like Keaton’s films better than Keaton and enjoy Chaplin and The Marx Brothers usually more than the films. But I’m an easy audience. I laugh easily.

INTERVIEWER

How about Bringing Up Baby?

ALLEN

No, I never liked that. I never found that funny.

INTERVIEWER

Really?

ALLEN

No, I liked Born Yesterday, even though it’s a play made into a film. Both The Shop Around the Corner and Trouble in Paradise are terrific. A wonderful talking comedy is The White Sheik by Fellini.

Stardust Memories (Directed by Woody Allen)

INTERVIEWER

What is it that keeps a lighthearted or comic film from being on your list of ten?

ALLEN

Nothing other than personal taste. Someone else might list ten comedies. It’s simply that I enjoy more serious films. When I have the option to see films, I’ll go and see Citizen Kane, The Bicycle Thief, The Grand Illusion, The Seventh Seal, and those kind of pictures.

INTERVIEWER

When you go to see the great classics over again, do you go to see how they’re made, or do you go for the impact that they have on you emotionally?

ALLEN

Usually, I go for enjoyment. Other people who work on my films see all the technical things happening, and I can’t see them. I still can’t notice the microphone shadow, or the cut that wasn’t good or something. I’m too engrossed in the film itself.

INTERVIEWER

Who have had the greatest influence on your film work?

ALLEN

The biggest influences on me, I guess, have been Bergman and the Marx Brothers. I also have no compunction stealing from Strindberg, Chekhov, Perelman, Moss Hart, Jimmy Cannon, Fellini, and Bob Hope’s writers.

Annie Hall (Directed by Woody Allen)

INTERVIEWER

Why do you think you started writing as a kid?

ALLEN

I think it was just the sheer pleasure of it. It’s like playing with my band now. It’s fun to make music, and it’s fun to write. It’s fun to make stuff up. I would say that if I’d lived in the era before motion pictures, I would have been a writer. I saw Alfred Kazin on television. He was extolling the novel at the expense of film. But I didn’t agree. One is not comparable with the other. He had too much respect for the printed word. Good films are better than bad books, and when they’re both great, they’re great and worthwhile in different ways.

INTERVIEWER

Do you think the pleasures of writing are related to the sense of control art provides?

ALLEN

It’s a wonderful thing to be able to create your own world whenever you want to. Writing is very pleasurable, very seductive, and very therapeutic. Time passes very fast when I’m writing – really fast. I’m puzzling over something, and time just flies by. It’s an exhilarating feeling. How bad can it be? It’s sitting alone with fictional characters. You’re escaping from the world in your own way and that’s fine. Why not?

INTERVIEWER

When you’re writing, do you think about your audience? Updike, for instance, once said that he liked to think of a young kid in a small Midwestern town finding one of his books on a shelf at a public library.

ALLEN

I’ve always felt that I try to aim as high as I can at the time, not to reach everybody, because I know that I can’t do that, but always to try to stretch myself. I’d like to feel, when I’ve finished a film, that intelligent adults, whether they’re scientists or philosophers, could go in and see it and not come out and feel that it was a total waste of time. That they wouldn’t say, Jesus, what did you get me into? If I went in to see Rambo, I’d say, Oh, God, and then after a few minutes I’d leave. Size of audience is irrelevant to me. The more the better, but not if I have to change my ideas to seduce them.

INTERVIEWER

What sort of development do you see in your own work over the years?

ALLEN

I hope for growth, of course. If you look at my first films, they were very broad and sometimes funny. I’ve gotten more human with the stories and sacrificed a tremendous amount of humor, of laughter, for other values that I personally feel are worth making that sacrifice for. So, a film like The Purple Rose of Cairo or Manhattan will not have as many laughs. But I think they’re more enjoyable. At least to me they are. I would love to continue that – and still try to make some serious things.

The Purple Rose of Cairo (Directed by Woody Allen)

INTERVIEWER

It seems as though when an artist becomes established, other people – critics, their followers – expect them to keep on doing the same thing, instead of evolving in their own way.

ALLEN

That’s why you must never take what’s written about you seriously. I’ve never written anything in my life or done any project that wasn’t what I wanted to do at the time. You really have to forget about what they call ‘career moves.’ You just do what you want to do for your own sense of your creative life. If no one else wants to see it, that’s fine. Otherwise, you’re in the business to please other people. When we did Stardust Memories, all of us knew there would be a lot of flack. But it wouldn’t for a second stop me. I never thought, I better not do this because people will be upset. It’d be sheer death not to go through with a project you feel like going through with at the time...

INTERVIEWER

Don’t you think that as serious writers mature they simply continue to develop and expand the themes already established?

ALLEN

Each person has his own obsessions. In Bergman films you find the same things over and over, but they’re usually presented with great freshness.

– Extract from ‘Woody Allen, The Art of Humor No. 1. Interviewed by Michiko Kakutani. The Paris Review. Fall 1995, No. 136.’

Kon Ichikawa: Politics and Desire

Conflagration (Directed by Kon Ichikawa)

In a career extending from the mid-1930s to the mid-2000s, Kon Ichikawa directed almost 80 films that ranged widely in genre, form, and tone. He has made ferociously humanist war films (The Burmese Harp, Fires on the Plain) and light-hearted domestic comedies (Being Two Isn’t Easy); formalist documentaries (Tokyo Olympiad) and extravagant period pieces (An Actor’s Revenge); his celebrated adaptations of famous Japanese novels such as Enjo and The Makioka Sisters earned him a reputation as a “deadpan sophisticate”(Pauline Kael) with an elegant compositional style, venomous wit, and narrative daring, but he was also a crafty master of populist entertainments.

The problems of apprehension and evaluation posed by the diversity and magnitude of Ichikawa’s oeuvre are compounded by other factors, notably the formidable influence of his wife and scenarist, Natto Wada, whose withdrawal from writing his scripts in the mid-1960s marked a turning point in his career; and the difficulties he encountered with the studios, who occasionally punished his failures and transgressions by assigning him dubious projects, or hired him only on “salvage operations.” While often referred to as a link between the “golden age” of Japanese cinema and the New Wave of the ’60s, Ichikawa has rarely been given his due as an innovator, even though his experiments with formal elements (the CinemaScope frame, the tonalities of black and white and colour, the graphic design of compositions, the use of freeze frames, masking, flash cutaways), with unconventional registers of dialogue and acting, and with subjective or surreal imagery are among the most daring and influential in postwar Japanese cinema.

In the following excerpt from an interview with Joan Mellen from 1972 Kon Ichikawa discusses his influences as a filmmaker and the political dimension to his films.

Q: How did you start making films?

A: When I was a youth it was the time of the Western film world’s so-called renaissance. There were so many great European and American films. They had a great impact on the Japanese. Japanese then began to pursue filmmaking seriously. This influenced me considerably.

Q: Which European and American films or directors most affected you?

A: I should mention the names of filmmakers who moved me very much rather than individual titles. Among them, in America, Charlie Chaplin stands out, as does William Wellman. In France René Clair. Nor can I forget Sternberg and Lubitsch.

Q: Why have Japanese filmmakers been so interested in historical themes and period films?

A: I don’t think Japanese films lean particularly toward the jidai-geki, or costume drama. Some people are interested in episodes of a certain era, but I would not want to make the distinction between jidai-geki and gendai-geki. To me they are the same. If I may add my opinion, films which have modern themes and modern implications should not be simply classified as jidai-geki, even if they are set before the Meiji era. They are indeed modern films although they may take the form of costume plays.

Q: You don’t think there are more historical films made in Japan than in the United States, although we do have the "Western", which may be thought of as similar to the jidai-geki?

A: We probably have a few more and it may have some significance, in my case for one. It is true of course that there are more jidai-geki made here than gendai-geki. You see film is an art which involves the direct projection of the time in which we live. It is a difficult point to state clearly, but my general feeling is that Japanese filmmakers are somewhat unable to grasp contemporary society. In your country, there seem to be many more dramatic current themes to portray. To render something into film art we really need to understand thoroughly what we want to describe. Unable to do this, many of us go back to history and try to elucidate certain themes which have implications for modern society.

Q: Is it because Japanese society is undergoing great political and social change at the present time?

A: Yes, that is correct.

Q: Are you interested in the theme of political apathy or indifference in the Kogarashi Monjiro stories?

A: Yes, the protagonist is an outlaw and a loner, like an "isolated wold". He is like the character in many Westerns. He is always anti-establishment.

Q: Do you suggest through this character that political action is fruitless, especially in the sense that an isolated individual attempting to do away with evil would find it impossible?

A: You might say that in terms of the political implications, although the political element is not the main theme. I am much more interested in the search for what defines human nature.

Q: In general would you say that you are more interested in psychological aspects than political?

A: Yes, generally so...

Q: What aspect of the original novel, The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, were you interested in when you made Enjo?

A: In this film, I wanted to show the poverty in Japan.

Q: Who wanted to show the poverty especially, you or Mishima?

A: No, I.

Q: Is it a material or spiritual poverty?

A: I started from the economic and naturally pursued the spiritual also, because it is the story of man. The economic side represents sixty per cent and the spirital forty percent.

Q: Doesn’t this indicate a strong political element in your words?

A: Only for this film in which spiritual poverty is caused by economic poverty. Usually I don’t consider myself a politically minded director. When I am making a film, I don’t think of the political side of the film very much; it is not the main thing.

Q: Maybe political is the wrong word. By "political" I mean social consciousness, the relationship between the individual and society, not in the sense of political parties.

A: Then yes, that is important to my work. I am both aware of and concerned with social consciousness.

Q: Is there any similarity between your private Mizushima in Harp of Burma and Goichi Mizoguchi in Enjo?

A: They represent the youth in Japan. In the case of Mizushima the time was the middle of the war, and with Goichi it was just after the war. In this sense, both whether a soldier or not, represent Japanese youth.

Q: What is the origin of their disillusionment with the world? Are they each disillusioned about in a general way? Although their behaviour is, of course, different: one leaves the world to become a Buddhist monk and decides never to return to Japan and Goichi in Enjo burns down one of the most famous shrines in Japan.

A: Both are very young, and both are in search of something. Neither knows exactly what he is after, as they are still young. Both thrust themselves against the thick wall of reality and disillusionment trying to find out what they desire.

Q: As in the burning of the temple. What do they desire?

A: Truth.

Q: Is it the truth of themselves or of the world?

A: The truth of their own lives.

Q: Is the meaning they seek in their lives similar to that of Watanabe in Kurosawa’s Ikiru? Watanabe of course is an old man.

A: Possibly so. I can say it is close. It depends on the viewer’s interpretation.

Q: What is the statement about the nature of war that you are making in Fires on the Plain?

A: War is an extreme situation which can change the nature of man. For this reason, I consider it to be the the greatest sin.

Q: Do you use a social situation like war as a device to explore the human character? The social situation would be a means of showing what the human being is capable of – as in Tamura’s cannibalism, homicide, or the massacre in the film – as opposed to showing what happens in a society that leads to war?

A: I use the situation of war partly for this reason, but also to show the limits within which a moral existence is possible.

Q: Why do you have Private Tamura die at the end?

A: I let him die. In the original novel he survives to return to Japan, enters a mental institution, and lives there. I thought he should rest peacefully in the world of death. The death was my salvation to him.

Q: What he saw made him unable to continue to live in this world?

A: Yes, he couldn’t live in this world any longer after that. This is my declaration of total denial of war, total negation of war.

Q: In Alone in Pacific you seem to be saying that determination is important, not what you do, nor the nature of the act.

A: Yes. That was my precise conception.

Q: Isn’t what we do important? Wouldn’t you say that there is some distintion between doing some useful thing and voyaging alone on the pacific?

A: No, no difference.

Q: In Japanese films and in yours in particular, much more so than in Western films, there seem to be mixtures of styles or rather varied methods of filmmaking which are combined sometimes even within a single film. Many of your films, and those of Oshima and Shindo for example, are so completely different from one work to the next. Is this a special characteristic of the Japanese film? I am thinking in particular of your segment of A Woman’s Testament.

A: [Laughs] Do you think so! Probably you are examining the films in great detail! We don’t see this particularly. I believe that expression should be free, so this notion may affect the fact that you have just described. But I am never conscious of differentiating my methods or that I have one single special style. All depends on the story or the drama on which I am working.

Q: This seems to be something unique about the Japanese film. In American films one director’s works are generally similar, especially among the older directors.

A: I think each should differ according to what is being expressed. As I am Ichikawa and no one else, even when I try to change the style according to the theme there is always some similarity from one film to the next. Right now I am working with an Italian director, Pasolini. I have really been influenced by him. I consider him one of the greatest filmmakers today. Do you know his work?

Q: Which films of Pasolini do you admire the most?

A: Oedipus Rex, Medea, The Decameron, The Gospel According to St. Mathew, Teorema. I consider Pasolini the finest director making films today. Among American directors I was impressed with Peter Fonda, not with his Easy Rider, but with The Hired Hand. He seems to be very young, yet he has a very good grasp of his subject. He understands love so beautifully. How old is he?

Q: He is about thrity-five. Whom do you admire among the younger Japanese directors?

A: None among the young ones. I don’t know any of their films.

Q: How about among the older ones?

A: Mizoguchi, Kurosawa, of course.

Q: In connection with Mizoguchi’s Oharu I visited the Rakanji Temple in Tokyo. Didn’t he film one of the main scenes there?

A: But it could be that he made that movie in Kyoto. Is Oharu the American title? The title in Japanese is Saikaku Ichidai Onna. You know, there are several Rakanjis.

Q: Is there a contradiction in the fact that you seem to praise the family system in Ototo (Her Brother) but attack it in Bonchi? Or were you criticizing the matriarchal family in particular in Bonchi?

A: "Attack" is a strong word, but yes, I have criticized the family system in Ototo and yes, in Bonchi I attack the matriarchy. Ototo takes place in the Taisho era, before the war, about forty years ago, but today we still have much the same problem in our family system. I hold the opinion that each family should be accustomed to respecting the individuality of every member. This is what I wanted to say.

Q: What is your viewpoint in Hakai (The Outcast)?

A: The theme is racial discrimination. Japanese discriminate against burakumin. Originally when the Koreans emigrated to Japan, they brought their slaves with them; these were segregated and called burakumin.

Q: Were you then treating the great discrimination against the Koreans by the Japanese?

A: I think all human beings should be equal.

Q: Could you say something about how you used the visual details of the architecture in Enjo to reveal the psychology of the boy?

A: Yes, I sought to do this. This beautiful structure was simply nothing but old decayed timber, no more than that. The boy didn’t think so at first, but he gradually realized it.

Q: What is the relationship bewteen his feeling about himself and his feeling about the building?

A: Let me add this. It doesn’t have to be the Golden Pavilion. It can be any one of the so-called great monuments in our history. They are so fine. Nobody questioned their greatness because many generations were taught to revere them. Well, in actuality some people think the particular monument, in this case the Golden Pavilion, is great, but some think it is not. Varying opinions should be accepted because excellence is solely dependent upon the viewer’s conception.

Q: Does he hate the building and burn it down as an act of self-hatred?

A: Yes, he hated himself and destroyed himself.

Q: The building represented everything which oppressed him?

A: Yes, that expresses it.

Q: Is that why people are shown as very small and the building huge in some scenes? They are individuals very vulnerable to and unable to control outside influences which dominate them, of which the Kinkakuji stands as a symbol.

A: Yes, that’s right. One further thing, I wish to stress is that Goichi was handicapped. He stutters and cannot express himself well and in a sense he closes himself off from society. He has a sense of inferiority in relation to that magnificent building and he suffers from his isolation. I myself did not think the Golden Pavilion so great or beautiful a structure. I may be wrong but my point here is that the presence of this great structure does not secure the well-being of human beings around it, or make them happy.