Biography

Woody Allen was born on December 1, 1935 in Brooklyn, New York. As a young boy he became intrigued with magic tricks and playing the clarinet, two hobbies that he continues today.

He broke into show business at 15 years when he started writing jokes for a local paper, receiving $200 a week. He later moved on to write jokes for talk shows but felt that his jokes were being wasted. His agents, Charles Joffe and Jack Rollins, convinced him to start doing stand-up and telling his own jokes. Reluctantly he agreed and, although he initially performed with such fear of the audience that he would cover his ears when they applauded his jokes, he eventually became very successful at stand-up.

After performing on stage for a few years, he was approached to write a script for Warren Beatty to star in: "What's New Pussycat?" and would also have a moderate role as a character in the film. During production, Woody gave himself more and better lines and left Beatty with less compelling dialogue. Beatty inevitably quit the project and was replaced by Peter Sellers, who demanded all the best lines and more screen-time. It was from this experience that Woody realized that he could not work on a film without complete control over its production.

Woody's theoretical directorial debut was in "What's Up, Tiger Lily?"; a Japanese spy flick that he dubbed over with his own comedic dialogue about spies searching for the secret recipe for egg salad. His real directorial debut came the next year in the mockumentary "Take the Money and Run." He has written, directed and, more often than not, starred in about a film a year ever since, while simultaneously writing more than a dozen plays and several books of comedy.

While best known for his romantic comedies Annie Hall (1977) and Manhattan (1979), Woody has made many transitions in his films throughout the years, transitioning from his "early, funny ones" of "Bananas," "Love and Death" and "Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sex But Were Afraid To Ask;" to his more storied and romantic comedies of "Annie Hall," "Manhattan" and "Hannah and Her Sisters;" to the Bergmanesque films of "Stardust Memories" and "Interiors;" and then on to the more recent, but varied works of "Crimes and Misdemeanors," "Husbands and Wives," "Mighty Aphrodite," "Celebrity" and "Deconstructing Harry;" and finally to his film of the last decade, which vary from the light comedy of "Scoop," to the self-destructive darkness of "Match Point" and, most recently, to the cinematically beautiful tale of "Vicky Cristina Barcelona."

Although his stories and style have changed over the years, he is regarded as one of the best filmmakers of our time because of his views on art and his mastery of filmmaking.

- IMDb Mini Biography By: Michael Castrignano

Frequently casts himself, Diane Keaton, Mia Farrow

A lot of his movies feature at least one character who is a writer. This is often Woody himself.

Films his dialog using long, medium-range shots instead of the typical intercut close-ups

His characters (that he plays himself) are often a semi-famous, semi-successful film/tv writer, director, or producer... or a novelist

From Stardust Memories (1980) through Melinda and Melinda (2004), frequently and almost exclusively employs Dick Hyman to contribute musical arrangements, incidental music, and piano accompaniment.

Billing his actors alphabetically on opening credits

His female characters are often free spirited but naive and often come from small town backgrounds

References to classic Films, particularly the works of Ingmar Bergman

Stumbling and nervous delivery

His unchanging nebbish persona

Reddish hair

Ranked #43 in Empire (UK) magazine's Top 100 Movie Stars of All Time list (October 1997).

Refuses to watch any of his movies once released.

Suspended from New York University.

Chosen by Empire magazine as one of the 100 Sexiest Stars in film history (#89) (1995).

Older brother of Letty Aronson.

Among his biggest idols are Ingmar Bergman, Groucho Marx, Federico Fellini, Cole Porter, and Anton Chekhov.

Accused British interviewer Michael Parkinson of having a morbid interest in his private life and rejected questions about the custody battle for his children during his appearance on the BBC's Parkinson (1971) in 1999.

Despite the advancement of sound technology, all of his films are mixed and released in monaural sound, although later ones have a mono Dolby Digital mix.

Wrote the concept for the film Hollywood Ending (2002) on the back of a matchbook. Years later, he found the matchbook with the notes for the film on it and made the film.

He has more Academy Award nominations (14) for writing than anyone else, all of them are in the Written Directly for the Screen category.

In addition to being a comedian, musician and filmmaker, he is also a respected playwright.

Graduated from Midwood High School at Brooklyn College.

Was voted the 19th greatest director of all time by Entertainment Weekly.

Biography in: John Wakeman, editor. "World Film Directors, Volume Two, 1945-1985." Pages 20-29. New York: The H.W. Wilson Company, 1988.

Ranked #4 in Comedy Central's 100 Greatest Stand-Up Comedians of All Time.

Woody's paternal grandparents, Isaac Koenigsberg and Jennie, were Russian Jewish immigrants. Woody's maternal grandparents, Leon Cherry and Sarah Hoff, were Austrian Jewish immigrants.

Although he is barely interested in awards, he's one of the Academy's favorites - his 14 Oscar Nominations for Best Original Screenplay as of 2005 are a record for that category, and puts him ahead of Billy Wilder, who had 19 combined Oscar nominations for Writing and Directing. With 21 nominations in the combination of the top-three categories--acting, directing and writing--he holds the record there as well.

Is a fan of Alfredo Zitarrosa, one of the best Uruguayan musicians.

Directed only one movie in which both of his longtime companions Diane Keaton and Mia Farrow appear in: Radio Days (1987)

He and Mia Farrow made 13 movies together: Broadway Danny Rose (1984), Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989), Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), Alice (1990), Another Woman (1988), The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985), September (1987), Husbands and Wives (1992), A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy (1982), New York Stories (1989), Radio Days (1987), Shadows and Fog (1991) and Zelig (1983).

Married to Mia Farrow's adopted daughter Soon-Yi Previn, from her second marriage with André Previn.

As a boy growing up in Brooklyn, he spent most of his time alone in his room practicing magic tricks or his clarinet.

Told a reporter that he has earned more money from two real estate transactions than he has from all of his movies combined. Sold his long-held Fifth Avenue penthouse (which he had purchased for $600,000) for a profit of $17 million and a renovated townhouse for a profit of some $7 million (December 2005).

His godson Quincy Rose is also a successful writer and actor.

Stating in an interview that he was "not interested in all that extra stuff on DVDs" and that he hopes his films would speak for themselves. Allen has never recorded an audio commentary or even so much has been interviewed for a DVD of any films with which he had been involved.

Was originally attached to co-star with Jim Carrey in the Farrelly Brothers comedy Stuck on You (2003), but decided to pass on the idea.

Is a vegetarian.

His variety of neuroses include: arachnophobia (spiders), entomophobia (insects), heliophobia (sunshine), cynophobia (dogs), altophobia (heights), demophobia (crowds), carcinophobia (cancer), thanatophobia (death), misophobia (germs). He admits to being terrified of hotel bathrooms.

A life-size statue of him was erected in the Spanish city of Oviedo (2002).

According to Eric Lax's book Woody Allen's favorite films are (in order): Match Point (2005), The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985), Stardust Memories (1980), Broadway Danny Rose (1984), and Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993).

Although he was granted visitation rights for his son Ronan, after a custody battle with Mia Farrow, their relationship is estranged (similar to his other children with Farrow, Moses and Dylan O'Sullivan Farrow). Ronan stated that he cannot have a morally consistent relationship with a man who is his father and his brother-in-law.

Writes his scripts on a typewriter. He does not own a personal computer, and has his Email account managed by assistants.

Profiled in "American Classic Screen Interviews" (Scarecrow Press).

As a homage to Gordon Willis, his long-time friend and cinematographer, he includes a scene where you hear the actors talking outside the shot. Willis encouraged him to do this when they were shooting Annie Hall (1977).

In the early 1960's, he did stand-up comedy at Enrico's Café in San Francisco.

He's not a member of AMPAS.

Every film directed by Allen since Love and Death (1975) through To Rome with Love (2012), was cast by longtime friend and New York casting director Juliet Taylor.

European concert tour (Brussels, Luxembourg, Vienna, Paris, Budapest, Athens, Lisbon, Barcelona, San Sebastian, La Coruna) with the Eddie Davis New Orleans Jazz Band. [December 2007]

I'm not afraid of dying... I just don't want to be there when it happens.

On the plus side, death is one of the few things that can be done just as easily as lying down.

[on films] I can't imagine that the business should be run any other way than that the director has complete control of his films. My situation may be unique, but that doesn't speak well for the business -- it shouldn't be unique, because the director is the one who has the vision and he's the one who should put that vision onto film.

There are worse things in life than death. Have you ever spent an evening with an insurance salesman?

I do the movies just for myself like an institutionalized person who basket-weaves. Busy fingers are happy fingers. I don't care about the films. I don't care if they're flushed down the toilet after I die.

[at the Academy Awards in 2002, explaining why he was the one introducing a montage of New York movies] And I said, 'You know, God, you can do much better than me. You know, you might want to get Martin Scorsese, or, or Mike Nichols, or Spike Lee, or Sidney Lumet...' I kept naming names, you know, and um, I said, 'Look, I've given you 15 names of guys who are more talented than I am, and, and smarter and classier...' And they said, 'Yes, but they weren't available.'

For some reason I'm more appreciated in France than I am back home. The subtitles must be incredibly good.

The two biggest myths about me are that I'm an intellectual, because I wear these glasses, and that I'm an artist because my films lose money. Those two myths have been prevalent for many years.

Not only is there no God, but try getting a plumber on weekends.

To you, I'm an atheist; to God, I'm the Loyal Opposition.

Time is nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once.

[on why he never watches his own movies] I think I would hate them.

[on the Academy Awards circa 1978] I have no regard for that kind of ceremony. I just don't think they know what they're doing. When you see who wins those things -- or who doesn't win them -- you can see how meaningless this Oscar thing is.

There was no ripple professionally for me at all when I was in the papers with my custody stuff. I made my films, I worked in the streets of New York, I played jazz every Monday night, I put a play on. Everything professionally went just the same. There were no repercussions. There was white-hot interest for a while, like with all things like that, and then it became uninteresting to people.

Hollywood for the most part aimed at the lowest common denominator. It's conceived in venality, it's motivated by pandering to the public, by making a lot of money. People like Ingmar Bergman thought about life, and they had feelings, and they wanted to dramatize them and engage one in a dialogue. I felt I couldn't easily be engaged by the nonsense that came out of Hollywood.

When I was a kid, movies from Hollywood seemed very glamorous, but when you look back at them as a young man, you can see out of the thousands of films that came out of Hollywood there were really very few good ones statistically, and those few that were good were made in spite of the studios. I saw European films as a young man and they were very much better. There's no comparison.

The biggest flaw in being self-taught is there are gaps. You self-teach yourself something and you think you know something fairly well, but then there are gaps a university teacher would have taught you as part of a mandatory program. I would probably have been better off if I'd got a better general education, but I was just so bored.

The sensibility of the film-maker infuses the project so people see a picture like Annie Hall (1977) and everyone thinks it's so autobiographical. But I was not from Coney Island, I was not born under a Ferris wheel, my father never worked at a place that had bumper cars, that's not how I met Diane Keaton, and that's not how we broke up. Of course, there's that character who's always beleaguered and harassed. Certain things are autobiographical, certain feelings, even occasionally an incident, but overwhelmingly they're totally made up, completely fabricated.

[on the Academy Awards circa 1978] They're political and bought and negotiated for - although many worthy people have deservedly won - and the whole concept of awards is silly. I cannot abide by the judgment of other people, because if you accept it when they say you deserve an award, then you have to accept it when they say you don't.

I know it sounds horrible, but winning that Oscar for Annie Hall (1977) didn't mean anything to me.

[on shooting in London, 2004] In the United States things have changed a lot, and it's hard to make good small films now. There was a time in the 1950s when I wanted to be a playwright, because until that time movies, which mostly came out of Hollywood, were stupid and not interesting. Then we started to get wonderful European films, and American films started to grow up a little bit, and the industry became more fun to work in than the theatre. I loved it. But now it's taken a turn in the other direction and studios are back in command and are not that interested in pictures that make only a little bit of money. When I was younger, every week we'd get a Federico Fellini or an Ingmar Bergman or a Jean-Luc Godard or François Truffaut, but now you almost never get any of that. Filmmakers like myself have a hard time. The avaricious studios couldn't care less about good films - if they get a good film they're twice as happy, but money-making films are their goal. They only want these $100-million pictures that make $500 million. That's why I'm happy to work in London, because I'm right back in the same kind of liberal creative attitude that I'm used to.

I always think it is a mistake to try and be young, because I feel the young people in the United States have not distinguished themselves. The young audience in the United States have not proven to me that they like good movies or good theatre. The films that are made for young people are not wonderful films, they are not thoughtful. They are these blockbusters with special effects. The comedies are dumb, full of toilet jokes, not sophisticated at all. And these are the things the young people embrace. I do not idolize the young.

Most of life is tragic. You're born, you don't know why. You're here, you don't know why. You go, you die. Your family dies. Your friends die. People suffer. People live in constant terror. The world is full of poverty and corruption and war and Nazis and tsunamis. The net result, the final count is, you lose - you don't beat the house.

My brain: It's my second favorite organ.

Organized crime in America takes in over $40 billion a year and spends very little on office supplies.

I'm a practicing heterosexual, although bisexuality immediately doubles your chances for a date on Saturday night.

For me, being famous didn't help me that much. It helped a little. Warren Beatty once said to me many years ago, being a star is like being in a whorehouse with a credit card, and I never found that. For me, it was like being in a whorehouse with a credit card that had expired.

I never wanted movies to be an end. I wanted them to be a means so that I could have a decent life -- meet attractive women, go out on dates, live decently. Not opulently, but with some security. I feel the same way now. A guy like Steven Spielberg will go live in the desert to make a movie, or Martin Scorsese will make a picture in India and set up camp and live there for four months. I mean, for me, if I'm not shooting in my neighborhood, it's annoying. I have no commitment to my work in that sense. No dedication.

I think there is too much wrong with the world to ever get too relaxed and happy. The more natural state, and the better one, I think, is one of some anxiety and tension over man's plight in this mysterious universe.

Having sex is like playing bridge. If you don't have a good partner, you'd better have a good hand.

I do feel that in everyday life people on a great spectrum get away with crime all the time, ranging from genocide to just street crime. Most crimes do go unsolved, and people commit murders and ruin other people and do the worst things in the world, and, you know, there's no one to penalize you if you don't have a sense of conscience about it. There is an element in life of enormous, enormous injustice that we live with all the time. It's just an ugly-but-true fact of life.

My mother always said I was a very cheerful kid until I was 5 years old, and then I turned gloomy.

I was never bothered if a film was not well received. But the converse of that is that I never get a lot of pleasure out of it if it is. So it isn't like you can say, 'He's an uncompromising artist.' That's not true. I'm a compromising person, definitely. It's that I don't get much from either side.

I once thought there was a good argument between whether it's worth it to make a film where you confront the human condition, or an escape film. You could argue that the Fred Astaire film is performing a greater service than the Bergman film, because Ingmar Bergman is dealing with a problem that you're never going to solve. Whereas 'Fred Astaire', you walk in off the street, and for an hour and half they're popping champagne corks and making light banter and you get refreshed, like a lemonade.

Ireland's one of the few places that lives up to the hype, that is as beautiful as everyone tells you it is.

[on directing an opera] He [Plácido Domingo] said, "What if we do the Puccini trilogy - it's three one-acts that are always done together? The first two, Billy Friedkin will direct. You'll only be responsible for a one-act, a one-hour opera, and it's funny." You know, funny to opera people is not funny to the Marx Brothers.

I never had a teacher who made the least impression on me and if you ask who are my heroes, the answer is simple and truthful: George S. Kaufman and the Marx Brothers.

[on 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)] It was one of the few times in my life that I realized that the artist was so much ahead of me.

If I write a film and there is a part in it for me - great. But if I sit down in advance and think, "I'd like to be in this film," or "It's been a long time since I've been in a film so it would be fun to do one," then all of a sudden there's an enormous amount of limits and compromise. I can only play a few things so that compromises the idea instantly. I think Deconstructing Harry (1997) would have been better with Dustin Hoffman or Robert De Niro, for sure. I also tried very hard to get another actor to play the part I did in The Curse of the Jade Scorpion (2001). I think we tried to see if Tom Hanks was available, and Nicholson. Either they weren't available or didn't want to do it. So I finally played that part. And I shouldn't have, because it wasn't my usual kind of role, and I think that hurt the film.

[on Match Point (2005)] To me, it is strictly about luck. Life is such a terrifying experience - it's very important to feel, "I don't believe in luck, Well, I make my luck." Well, the truth of the matter is, you don't make your luck. So I wanted to show that here was a guy - and I symbolically made him a tennis player - who's a pretty bad guy, and yet my feeling is, in life, if you get the breaks - if the luck bounces your way, you know - you can not only get by, you can flourish in the same way that I felt Marty Landau could in Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989). If you can kill somebody - if you have no moral sense - there's no God out there that's suddenly going to hit you with lightning. Because I don't believe in God. So this is what was on my mind: the enormous unfairness of the world, the enormous injustice of the world, the sense that every day people get away with the worst kinds of crimes. So it's a pessimistic film, in that sense.

I'm kind of, secretly, in the back of my mind, counting on living a long time. My father lived to a hundred. My mother lived to 95, almost 96. If there is anything to heredity, I should be able to make films for another 17 years. You never know. A piano could drop on my head. (December 2005)

If they said to me tomorrow, "We're pulling the plug and we're not giving you any more money to make films," that would not bother me in the slightest. I mean, I'm happy to write for the theatre. And if they wouldn't back any of my plays, I'm happy to sit home and write prose. But as long as there are people willing to put up the vast sums of money needed to make films, I should take advantage of it. Because there will come a time when they won't.

[on Shelley Duvall] She's a true one of a kind. She's so effective on the screen, that if she's cast properly, she's incapable of being anything else but fascinating.

[on Ingmar Bergman] He and I had dinner in his New York hotel suite; it was a great treat for me. I was nervous and really didn't want to go. But he was not at all what you might expect: the formidable, dark, brooding genius. He was a regular guy. He commiserated with me about low box-office grosses and women and having to put up with studios. The world saw him as a genius, and he was worrying about the weekend grosses. Yet he was plain and colloquial in speech, not full of profound pronunciamentos about life. Sven Nykvist told me that when they were doing all those scenes about death and dying, they'd be cracking jokes and gossiping about the actors' sex lives. I liked his attitude that a film is not an event you make a big deal out of. He felt filmmaking was just a group of people working. I copied some of that from him. At times he made two and three films in a year. He worked very fast; he'd shoot seven or eight pages of script at a time. They didn't have the money to do anything else. I think his films have eternal relevance, because they deal with the difficulty of personal relationships and lack of communication between people and religious aspirations and mortality, existential themes that will be relevant a thousand years from now. When many of the things that are successful and trendy today will have been long relegated to musty-looking antiques, his stuff will still be great.

[on Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)] Everything wonderful about that movie... is because of the way it was directed. Otherwise, I thought there were flaws in the writing of the movie and flaws in some of the performances of the movie. But the directing of the movie was so bravura and so superb, that it was just a knockout.

I think what I'm saying is that I'm really impotent against the overwhelming bleakness of the universe and that the only thing I can do is my little gift and do it the best I can, and that is about the best I can do, which is cold comfort.

I think Frank Capra was a much craftier filmmaker, a wonderful filmmaker. He had enormous technique, and he knew how to manipulate the public quite brilliantly. I was just doing what I was doing because it interested me, and in fact obsessed me. I was not doing it with an eye to manipulate the public. In fact, I probably would have had a larger public if I had gone in a different direction.

I didn't see Shane (1953) as a martyred figure, a persecuted figure. I saw him as quite a heroic figure who does a job that needs to be done, a practical matter. I saw him as a practical secular character. In this world there are just some people who need killing and that is just the way it is. It sounds terrible, but there is no other way to get around that, and most of us are not up to doing it, incapable for moral reasons or physically not up to it. And Shane (1953) is a person who saw what had to be done and went out and did it. He had the skill to do it, and that's the way I feel about the world: there are certain problems that can only be dealt with that way. As ugly a truth as that is, I do think it's the truth about the world.

[on his character Mickey's personal crisis in Hannah and Her Sisters (1986)]: I think it should be interpreted to mean that there are these oases, and life is horrible, but it is not relentlessly black from wire to wire. You can sit down and hear a Mozart symphony, or you can watch the Marx Brothers, and this will give you a pleasant escape for a while. And that is about the best that you can do.... I feel that one can come up with all these rationalizations and seemingly astute observations, but I think I said it well at the end of Deconstructing Harry (1997): we all know the same truth; our lives consist of how we choose to distort it, and that's it. Everybody knows how awful the world is and what a terrible situation it is and each person distorts it in a certain way that enables him to get through. Some people distort it with religious things. Some people distort it with sports, with money, with love, with art, and they all have their own nonsense about what makes it meaningful, and all but nothing makes it meaningful. These things definitely serve a certain function, but in the end they all fail to give life meaning and everyone goes to his grave in a meaningless way.

Sarah Palin is a colourful spice in the general recipe of democracy. She's a sexy woman. Yes. Me and Sarah - we could do a romance.

[on why he chose in 2010 to read his short stories for Adiobook]: I was persuaded in a moment of apathy when I was convinced I had a fatal illness and would not live much longer. I don't own a computer, have no idea how to work one, don't own a word processor, and have zero interest in technology. Many people thought it would be a nice idea for me to read my stories, and I gave in.

Well, I'm against [the aging process]. I think it has nothing to recommend it. You don't gain any wisdom as the years go by. You fall apart, is what happens. People try and put a nice varnish on it, and say, well, you mellow. You come to understand life and accept things. But you'd trade all of that for being 35 again. I've experienced that thing where you wake up in the middle of the night and you start to think about your own mortality and envision it, and it gives you a little shiver. That's what happens to Anthony Hopkins at the beginning of [You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger (2010)], and from then on in, he did not want to hear from his more realistic wife, "Oh, you can't keep doing that - you're not young anymore." Yes, she's right, but nobody wants to hear that.

[on the controversy surrounding his marriage to Soon-Yi] What was the scandal? I fell in love with this girl, married her. We have been married for almost 15 years now. There was no scandal, but people refer to it all the time as a scandal. I kind of like that in a way because when I go I would like to say I had one juicy scandal in my life.

I think universal harmony is a pipedream and it may be more productive to focus on more modest goals, like a ban on yodeling.

I've always felt close to a European sensibility. It's a happy accident: when I was a young man and most impressionable, all these great European films were flooding New York City. I was very influenced by those films. I comes out in my work without trying to. It's like if you grow up hearing Mozart your whole life at home and you start to write music, probably what comes out - until you develop your own style - is an imitation of Mozart, to some degree. And that's what happened with me and films. I've very often relied on European cinema as a crutch or as a guide. The films I grew up with - Bergman and Fellini and Kurosawa and De Sica and Antonioni - just left an indelible mark on me. It's the same with certain American films that impressed me as a young boy, like The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948) and Citizen Kane (1941) and Double Indemnity (1944). There have been very few American films since that have equalled the impact those films had on me, because I do think the time you see them figures into it. Consequently my films have been well appreciated in Europe, more than the United States, where it's been so-so.

[on Shadows and Fog (1991)] I think I did a good job directing it and Santo Loquasto's sets are beautiful. But the picture is in the writing and people weren't interested in the story. You know when you're doing a black-and-white picture that takes place in a European city at night in the twenties, you're not going to make big bucks. Nobody liked the picture. Carlo Di Palma won an award for it in Italy. It just looked great. There was pleasure in the way it was photographed, and in making it. I make these films to amuse myself, or should I say to distract myself. I wanted to see what it would be like making a film all on a set, outdoors being indoors. And setting it during one night and having all these characters and this old European quality to it. The hope is that others will enjoy it when I'm finished. It fulfilled that desire that keeps me working, that keeps me in the film business. I do all my films for my own personal reasons, and I hope that people will like them and I'm always gratified when I hear they do. But if they don't, there's nothing I can do about that because I don't set out to make them for approval - I like approval, but I don't make them for approval.

My sets are boring. Nothing exciting ever happens, and I barely talk to the actors.

[To Stu Hample on developing the comic strip "Inside Woody Allen"] Need more character engagement - instead of jokes being free-floating, they must be jokes on the way to character development. Jokes are like the decorations on the Christmas tree - but it's a beautiful tree you need to start with. Only then can you hang baubles on it. (Sorry for the disgusting metaphor.)

I finished writing the script [for To Rome with Love (2012)] and saw that there was a part that I could play. I never force it. I never write something for myself. I'm trying to be faithful to the idea. If I had made To Rome with Love in the United States, I could have played Roberto Benigni's part. If I was fifty years younger, I would have played Jesse Eisenberg's part. Right now, I'm reduced to fathers of fiancees.

I'm not as crazy as they [fans who meet me] think I am. They think I'm a major neurotic and that I'm phobic and incompetent and I'm not. I'm very average, middle class. I get up in the morning, I have a wife and kids, I work, I've been productive, I practice my horn, I go to ballgames, it's a normal kind of thing. I have some quirks, but everybody has some quirks.

That, or anything I ever won, has never changed my life one iota. And the fact that Midnight in Paris (2011) made $160 million meant zero in terms of anyone - and by anyone I mean no one - stepping forward and saying, 'We'd like to bankroll your next film.'

For me, success is, I'm in my bedroom at home and get an idea and I think it's a great idea and then I write it, and I look at the script and I say, 'My God, I've written a good script here.' And then I execute it. And if I execute the thing properly, then I feel great. If people come, it's a delightful bonus.

It isn't just psychological, when you're getting closer to death that time passes faster. I think something happens physiologically so that you experience time in a very different way ... It's also scary, as you'll see when you get older. It doesn't get better. You don't mellow, you don't gain wisdom and insight. You start to experience joint pain.

My own feeling was always [that] I was totally uninterested in what anyone thought. I loved Soon-Yi Previn and it was a serious thing, not frivolous. We've been together for years, and it's been, on a personal basis, the best years of my life, really. And certainly the best of hers - not because of my scintillating personality, but it really brought her out of herself. She really had a chance to get into the world.

I have a very pessimistic view of everything. Obviously, I'm not a religious person, and I don't have any respect for the religious point of view. I tolerate it, but I find it a mindless grasp of life. [It's] the same thing with the philosophers who tell you that the meaning of life consists of what meaning you give it. I don't buy that, either. It's very unsatisfying.

I know of only six genuine comic geniuses in movie history; Charlie Chaplin (Charles Chaplin), Buster Keaton, Groucho Marx & Harpo Marx, Peter Sellers, and W.C. Fields.

I'm just trying to be objective and honest. If you were having a 10-film festival and showing Citizen Kane (1941) on Monday, Rashomon (1950) on Tuesday, Bicycle Thieves (1948), The Seventh Seal (1957) ... I don't think anything I've ever made could be placed in a festival with those films and hold its own.

My experience has been, with one exception [Midnight in Paris (2011)], that when I do a film in a foreign country, the toughest audience for me is that country. In Italy, they said: 'This guy doesn't understand Italy.' And I can't argue with those criticisms. I'm an American, and that's how I see Barcelona or Rome or England. If the situation was reversed, and somebody from a foreign country made a film here, I might very well be saying: 'Yeah, it's OK, but this guy really doesn't get New York.' And I'd be right. And I'm sure they're right.

[Ageing] is a bad business. It's a confirmation that the anxieties and terrors I've had all my life were accurate. There's no advantage to ageing. You don't get wiser, you don't get more mellow, you don't see life in a more glowing way. You have to fight your body decaying, and you have less options. The only thing you can do is what you did when you were 20 - because you're always walking with an abyss right under your feet; they can be hoisting a piano on Park Avenue and drop it on your head when you're 20 - which is to distract yourself. Getting involved in a movie [occupies] all my anxiety: did I write a good scene for Cate Blanchett? If I wasn't concentrated on that, I'd be thinking of larger issues. And those are unresolvable, and you're checkmated whichever way you go.

[European backers support me when Americans won't] You'd think that after a hit like Midnight in Paris (2011) - made a lot of money, not by The Dark Knight (2008) standards, but by my standards - there would be some companies that would want to do a film with you. But I didn't get a single offer. Not one ... and then an Italian company I'd been talking to for years was willing to put up money.

[The French] think I'm an intellectual because I wear these glasses, and they think I'm an artist because my films lose money.

Editing is that moment when you give up every hope you have of making a great piece of art and you have to settle with what you have.

There are worse things than death. Many of them playing at a theater near you.

My parents both lived to ripe old ages but absolutely refused to pass their genes to me as they believed an inheritance often spoils the child.

[Los Angeles] is not a city I could ever live in because I'm not temperamentally suited to the lifestyle here. I could never survive getting up in the morning and seeing all that sunshine and having to get into a car to go anywhere. But I have lots of friends here and I enjoy coming out for a couple of days, eating at a couple of great restaurants, having some laughs and then going home.

Europeans started to finance my films very, very generously, and they did so under my rules, which means they don't interfere with me in any way, they don't read my scripts, they don't know what I'm doing and they just have faith that I'll make a film that won't embarrass anyone. It started off in London in 2004 with Match Point (2005) and then I kept going.

[In 2012]: I always wanted to be a foreign filmmaker. But I'm from Brooklyn so I couldn't be because I wasn't foreign. But all of a sudden, through happy accidents, I've become one, to such a degree that I'm even writing subtitles. So I'm thrilled with that. The language is never a problem because when you're making a movie there are only a few things you ever talk about and you learn them right away. I did three pictures with a Chinese cameraman who didn't speak a word of English - not a word. And it didn't matter at all because we were only talking about the lighting and the angle.

[on his fear of flying] It's something I'm not thrilled with. I'm always sitting in my seat bracing for the crashing of the plane, but I can't avoid flying because if I don't fly I can't go to places to shoot a film or do promotion for it. And since my wife doesn't have any phobias, she has no fear of flying, nor do my children, so I fly to accommodate them, but it's very difficult for me and always with clenched fists.