Woody Allen considers himself to be a lazy filmmaker, said Adam Higginbotham in the London Daily Telegraph. “Look at the guys who are not lazy—say, Steven Spielberg,” says Allen, “They work. They go out on location, and they live in the desert for a year. And they shoot every angle and do everything. I haven’t the patience.” Allen says he prefers to film in “places that are easy to live in,” like New York or London. He also prefers experienced actors, to whom he can give minimum direction, and shoots the minimum number of takes. “I’m thinking, there’s a basketball playoff game on tonight, or the Yankees are playing. You know, artistic perfection is not my priority.”
Yet when he sees the first cut of one of his films, he’s always disappointed. “All your grandiose ambitions reduce themselves to, ‘How can I save this from being an embarrassment?’” He has felt this way about all his films. When he first saw Manhattan, he was so appalled, he offered to make the studio another film for free. Now 75, he’s reconciled to never being a great filmmaker—a Fellini or a Kurosawa. “I still delude myself sometimes and think, ‘Well, maybe you’ll get lucky and something will come out like that.’ But you know, after 40, 41 films you start to realize it’s just not there.”
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