I have spent alot of time talking about Woody Allen films on this blog and looking at his worldview. He has a hopeless, meaningless, nihilistic worldview that believes we are going to turn to dust and there is no afterlife. Even though he has this view he has taken the opportunity to look at the weaknesses of his own secular view. I salute him for doing that. That is why I have returned to his work over and over and presented my own Christian worldview as an alternative.

My interest in Woody Allen is so great that I have a “Woody Wednesday” on my blog www.thedailyhatch.org every week. Also I have done over 30 posts on the historical characters mentioned in his film “Midnight in Paris.” (Salvador Dali, Ernest Hemingway,T.S.Elliot,  Cole Porter,Paul Gauguin,  Luis Bunuel, and Pablo Picasso were just a few of the characters.) Check out these trivia facts below.

Here is some trivia about Woody Allen:

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.

Join the army, see the world, meet interesting people – and kill ’em.

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

If it turns out that there is a God, I don’t think that he’s evil. But the worst that you can say about him is that basically he’s an underachiever.

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

If only God would give me some clear sign! Like making a large deposit in my name at a Swiss bank.

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

My one regret in life is that I am not someone else.

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

[About the audience] I never write down to them. I always assume that they’re all as smart as I am . . . if not smarter.

[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.

[on being nominated for an Oscar for Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989)] You have to be sure to keep it very much in perspective. You think it’s nice at the time because it means more money for your film, but as soon as you let yourself start thinking that way, something happens to the quality of the work.

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.

The directors that have personal, emotional feelings for me are Ingmar Bergman and Federico Fellini, and I’m sure there has been some influence but never a direct one. I never set out to try and do anything like them. But, you know, when you listen to a jazz musician like Charlie Parker for years and you love it, then you start to play an instrument, you automatically play like that at first, then you branch off with your own things. The influence is there, it’s in your blood.

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.

I had a line in one of my movies – ‘Everyone knows the same truth.’ Our lives consist of how we choose to distort it. One person will distort it with a kind of wishful thinking like religion, someone else will distort it by thinking political solutions are going to do something, someone else will think a life of sensuality is going to do it, someone else will think art transcends. Art for me has always been the Catholicism of the intellectuals. There is no afterlife for the Catholics really, and there’s no afterlife for the arts. ‘Your painting lived on after you’ – well, that doesn’t really do it. That’s not what you want. Even if your painting does have some longevity, eventually that’s going to go. There won’t be any works of William Shakespeare or Ludwig van Beethoven, or any theatre to see them in, or air or light. I’ve always felt you’ve got to live your life within the context of this worst-case scenario. Which is true; the worst-case scenario is here.

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.

I was just a poor student. I had no interest in it. When I make a film the tacit contract with the audience is that I will give them some entertainment and not bore them. I have to do that. I just lay a message on them. Great filmmakers, like Ingmar Bergman or Akira Kurosawa or Federico Fellini, they’re very entertaining, their films are fun. Well, in college they never made it entertaining for me, they just bored me stiff.

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.

I can bring stars, I’ve worked with terrific cameramen, but people still have a better chance of making their $150m films because they’re not interested in the kind of profits I can bring if I’m profitable.

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.

Of course, I would love everybody to see my films. But I don’t care enough ever to do anything about it. I would never change a word or make a movie that I thought they would like. I really don’t care if they come or not. If they don’t want to come, then they don’t; if they do come, then great. Do I want to do what I do uncompromisingly, and would I love it if a big audience came? Yes, that would be very nice. I’ve never done anything to attract an audience, though I always get accused of it over the years.

[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.

Related posts:

I love the movie “Midnight in Paris” by Woody Allen and I have done over 30 posts on the historical characters mentioned in the film. Take a look below: