For the first time in his long, impressive career, Woody Allen
seems to have taken all his loves and put them together. The
64-year-old writer, actor and director has now come up with Sweet
and Lowdown, a comedy posing as a retrospective documentary on
the colorful life of a fictitious jazz guitarist (Sean Penn) and
his fixation with real-life guitar great Django Reinhardt. Allen,
a New York native who shares his Manhattan apartment with young
wife and former step-daughter Soon-Yi and their recently-adopted
child, has been an avid jazz fan and musician since he was a
teenager. He still plays saxophone with a jazz group weekly at
the Carlton Hotel in Manhattan and occasionally tours the world
as a musician. So it’s understandable that the slightly
eccentric but always interesting Allen would finally come up with
a way to marry his love of music and film.
Were you excited about the musical aspect of this film?
Yes. The most pleasurable part of the movie, and is with any
movie for me is at the end when I get to add the music. I always
make my films and then cut them and when they’re done, I go
into my room with all my own records - I still have all my old
long-playing records - and I pick out the music and drop it into
spots and if something doesn’t work, I take it out and try
another one. Because this movie was about music, it was an even
greater pleasure to use my favorite records throughout the movie,
and it livened up the whole procedure.
Although Sean Penn’s character is fictitious, he
idolises the very real jazz great Django Reinhardt. Why him?
When I was about 15, I became interested in jazz from hearing
a recording by Sidney Bechet from Paris on the radio, a half-hour
concert, and gradually my interest widened to include a great
many musicians from the New Orleans area that inevitably led to
Django Reinhardt, because he was one of the greatest American
jazz musicians at that time. It was an astonishing experience for
me as it had been for millions of people. I probably own just
about everything he ever recorded, along with Louis Armstrong and
Sidney Bechet and those three would be the most dominant jazz
soloists of my lifetime in that era of music.
Why did you decide to shoot the movie in fake documentary
style?
I knew the structure would have to take place over a
reasonable period of time and as is true about Django and most
other musicians, there is always a lot of conflicting and vague
anecdotal material one learns about them. You hear from one
person they drop out of sight for a year and then somebody else
tells a story about them emerging in Texas and them someone else
contradicts the other two stories. So that’s typical about
the lives of a great many musicians and I thought it seemed like
a natural way to tell the story; just people recounting
incidents, some of which conflicted with others.
Why did you choose to make the female lead (Oscar-nominated
Samantha Morton) mute?
I wanted her mute because I wanted Sean Penn’s character
to be able to talk the whole time so we could see him brag and be
self-involved and insensitive. He can create great beauty but be
a completely insensitive person and that is interesting to me
because so many people in life are capable of such great beauty
but are so insensitive and self-involved at the same time. The
only direction that I gave Samantha when I hired her was that I
wanted her to play it like Harpo Marx. She’s so young and
had never heard of Harpo, so I told her to check out some Marx
Brothers movies and then she got it perfectly.
Now that you are happily married, does this influence the
type of movies you make?
Not really. I think it’s much more glamorous and much
less controlled than people think. I did Sweet and Lowdown
because I had an idea for a story about a fictitious jazz
musician. Then I was sitting in a room and came up with a funny
story about a bank robbery and that is my next film, Small Time
Crooks. There are no real preconceived attitudes that affect the
movies I make but yes, I’ve been very, very happy over the
last eight years of my life. I have a great wife, a child and
things have gone well for me but I think the fact that my next
film is a broader comedy is really accidental. It’s not as
if I’ve been sitting at home thinking how I could reflect
that happiness in a movie. If I had thought of Death of a
Salesman, I would have done that too.
Do you remember the first film experience you ever had?
I was a cabaret comedian and I was hired to write a movie for
Peter O’Toole, What’s New Pussycat? I wrote it and
didn’t direct it and wasn’t very happy with it. I
thought they made a big mess of it and it was very embarrassing
to me even though it was a successful film. I swore I’d
never work in films again unless I could be the director and then
a few years later they let me direct and gave me a million
dollars to make Take the Money and Run, which I never had any
insecurity about at all. I was so ignorant and naive I
didn’t think I could possibly make a mistake and I sailed
through it without any real problems. If I knew then what I know
now, I would have been shaking like a leaf but at the time I
wasn’t smart enough to know how much can go wrong when you
make a film.
How do you feel about getting older?
My birthdays have always been depressing because on the last
one, I turned 64 but it felt like just yesterday I was 16 and
writing for my first television show and people were saying,
‘you’ve got to see this kid!’ I always think of
myself that way but it’s not so. Next year I’ll qualify
for Social Security (old age pension) and a half-price pass at
the movies….
What do you think of the new technology being used in
movies today?
I think it permits creative people to do some very
interesting things. The thing that people have to realise is that
all this new technology is just a tool and if it can be used as a
tool, great. But what happens is that the technology is very
often used as an end in itself, a parade of demonstration of new
techniques by not so gifted people who can’t make
interesting movies without technology. If it is used to tell a
great story and incite emotions or make people laugh, that’s
wonderful.
Has your sense of humor changed over the years?
The same is funny for me now as it was then. Even as a child
- and I don’t say this in any bragging or self-aggrandizing
way - I always had an appreciation for sophisticated material. I
was never a fan of the Three Stooges or Laurel and Hardy. I was
much more interested in The Marx Brothers or Ernest Lubitsch. And
to this day I generally appreciate sophisticated comedy and
don’t have a very high tolerance for broad comedy. I still
find Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion one of the best comedies of
all time, and Noel Coward’s Blithe Spirit is brilliant, not
to mention Lubitsch films like Shop Around the Corner or Trouble
in Paradise. I’m not saying I can do them but I’m a
fan.
You have an extraordinary amount of control over your films
and seem to work outside the studio system with a very faithful
audience that follow you. Is this the ideal work situation for
you or would you like to have a big blockbuster hit movie?
That’s a good question. This is a good way of working
and I’m very happy. I would love to have films that reach a
wider general public but I would never do anything to make that
happen. I wouldn’t sit at home thinking of which idea would
reach a big public. I make the films I want to make and hope that
one day I will get lucky and there will be a big audience but
this has not happened to me yet. I’ve made about 30 films,
I’ve had some hits bigger than others but very few of those
were that big.
As long as there is an audience all over the world so that
nobody gets hurt financially, then I’m able to continue
functioning like this and that makes me happy. I’m one of
the few filmmakers that has this great luck; I could make a film
tomorrow about any subject I like and nobody says don’t do
it. I could cast all famous stars or no stars at all and nobody
says, ‘oh please put a big star in it’. The only thing
standing between me and greatness is me. There is no excuse for
me not to be the greatest filmmaker in the world because I do
whatever I want. The only reason I’m not is because I
can’t.
July 13, 2000