Woody Allen Press Conference
The poster for Vicky Cristina Barcelona includes the tagline: 'Life is the Ultimate Work of Art.' What does that mean to you?
Woody Allen: "…I have to disavow the copy line. Usually when the marketing people show you posters for your movie, usually your heart sinks, because you think you have made a beautiful film - at least you have tried to make a beautiful film - and they usually show you something that is aimed, in the most heavy-handed way, at the lowest common denominator. Now on this picture, they showed me the ad and I thought it was beautiful. I thought it was great. I was so shocked that I was not going to have to send it back and say, 'Please try again.' It was a beautiful ad, better than anything I had imagined."
"I never feel a copy line is necessary, but marketing people always throw one in there. I wasn’t even aware of the copy line. It’s meaningless to me. It has no relation to the film and no relation to anything. It’s something to get the suckers in off the street. I wish it wasn’t in there. The poster is beautiful and it’s one of the nicest I’ve ever had. That’s how I feel about copy lines. They are always terrible. They never mean anything, they never bring anybody in, and they satisfy the marketing people for some strange reason."
How do you feel about your statue in Oviedo?
Woody Allen: "My statue in Oviedo is one of the great mysteries of Western civilization. It’s a lovely town in Spain. I went there a couple of times and it’s beautiful. I went once years ago for something. Without asking me, I never did anything there, I never saved anybody’s life, and they said, 'We are putting a statue up of you in town.' I thought it was a joke. Then in the town there is a statue of me."
It’s a good statue, completely undeserved, but a bronze statue of me. It looks good. I’ve got my sport jacket on, corduroy trousers. First I thought it was one of those things where I leave town and they take it in, then when Brad Pitt comes to town they put his statue out. Why a statue of me? I’ve never done anything up there."
"I have a photograph of it at home with two feet of snow piled on my head. People keep stealing the glasses from it - and they are welded onto the statue. Guys come with blowtorches at night and they take the glasses off. I have been there where I’ve had half of my glasses off. They fixed it up this time when I was going there. It’s inexplicable. I don’t know what the connection is, like picking someone off the street. I just don’t understand, but they are nice people, and I’m happy to go there. I don’t visit the statue much."
Vicky Cristina Barcelona is being called your sexiest movie yet. It seems like in your early movies you never had sex scenes. Can you talk about discovering sex at this point in your life?
Woody Allen: "It’s just by chance. Everybody thinks that there is an agenda that I have. Maybe they think it's certain psychological turning points in my life. It’s not really so. It just so happens that this story requires a certain amount of sensuality. There is a kissing scene, a scene between the two girls that is brief, and there isn’t really a lot of sex in the picture. It's nothing really that I’ve discovered. Whatever is required."
"I just finished a picture with Larry David, Evan Rachel Wood, and Patricia Clarkson. There is sex in the movie. It’s a comedy, a romantic comedy. It's just by chance that the next film I thought of was a musical with sex, or a very sexual picture, or if I have an idea for what I felt was a brilliant pornographic comedy idea. If I had an idea for a family comedy, it’s just whatever idea I come up with. These naturally had a little passion in it. …I turned on the television set and Showgirls was on TV. Now that was clearly sexual. This one isn’t."
What life lessons did you learn as a little boy that still serve as a strong source of inspiration for you even now?
Woody Allen: "I think that the biggest life lesson I learned as a boy that has helped me and is still with me is that you really have to discipline yourself to do the work. If you want to accomplish something you can’t spend a lot of time hemming and hawing, putting it off, making excuses for yourself, and figuring ways. You have to actually do it. I have to go home every single day, know where I am, what I’m doing, and including 45 minutes of practice on my Clarinet because I want to play. I have to do it. I want to write, so I get up in the morning, go in and close the door and write. You can’t string paper clips and get your pad ready and turn your phone off and get this, get coffee made. You have to do the stuff."
"Everything in life turns out to be a distraction from the real thing you want to do. There are a million distractions, and when I was a kid I was very disciplined. I knew that the other kids weren’t. I was the one able to do the thing, not because I had more talent, maybe less, but because they simply weren’t applying themselves. As a kid I wanted to do magic tricks. I could sit endlessly in front of mirror, practicing, practicing, because I knew if you wanted to do the tricks you’ve got to do the thing. I did that with the Clarinet. When I was teaching, I did that with writing. This is the most important thing in my life because I see people striking out all the time. It’s not because they don’t have talent, or because they don’t want to be, but because they don’t put the work in to do it. They don’t have the discipline to do it. This was something I learned myself."
