Bari Weiss’s Interview with Woody Allen
One of the Best Celebrity Interviews I’ve Ever Seen
Woody Allen at the Venice Int’l Film Festival, Sept. 4, 2023
When I say “one of the best I’ve ever seen,” I’m not exaggerating.
I began watching this at about 12:30 a.m. two nights ago, knowing that I had to be up and going at 6:30. Since I’ve always been a fan of Woody Allen and have recently become a fan of Bari Weiss, I thought I’d take a quick look at the first five minutes – just to see if it was good enough to get back to later.
But I couldn’t stop at five minutes. Nor at 10. Nor at minute 20. I continued watching to the end, then I turned off the lights and fell immediately asleep.
I was understandably tired when I woke up, but very happy to have spent the time watching the entire interview. Not just because of the range of interesting topics covered – from what it takes to succeed at any worthy endeavor, to a secret for long-term success in the movie business, to the role of comedy in dealing with the existential pathos of life itself – but also because of the demonstrable degree of intellectual acumen one can still possess at age 89.
The interview is introduced this way on Weiss’s website (The Free Press):
“Woody Allen has done it all. The actor, comedian, and filmmaker has made 50 movies and has been nominated for 24 Academy Awards….
“Now, at the age of 89, Allen has published his first-ever novel. What’s with Baum? is the darkly comedic tale of… a middle-aged Jewish writer with a secret that could unravel his life. In other words, it’s like a Woody Allen movie – just in book form. It also touches on a major theme of our age: the idea that an accusation, once made, is as good as a conviction, [a theme he discusses with Weiss in the interview].”
You can watch the full conversation here.
Caveat: Before you have a knee-jerk reaction to the part of the interview that deals with controversial aspects of Allen’s personal life that were in the scandal sheets for several years in the middle of his career, I’m going to ask you to suspend your current conclusions until you read something I’ll be publishing in the next issue.
