Allen on aging

Woody Allen isn’t enjoying old age, said Oliver Burkeman in The Guardian (U.K.). “It’s a bad business,” says the 76-year-old filmmaker. “It’s a confirmation that the anxieties and terrors I’ve had all my life were accurate. There’s no advantage to aging. 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.” In his 46 years as a director, he hasn’t changed his belief that there’s only one way to handle the horror of mortality: distraction. Watch a basketball game, play the clarinet. “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.” Making a film a year also stops him from dwelling on death. “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.”

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