Woody Allen spoke to The Hollywood Reporter this week to discuss his new film “Café Society,” and the piece is already kicking up backlash and outrage. Perhaps rightly so. The director is asked how his wife has changed him and he goes on to explain how he has changed her and bettered her life because she was an orphan and…. maybe Woody Allen just shouldn’t be remarking on his personal life because it’s just never going to come out right and has been marred with understandable controversy since it started.
Public outrage and parsing personal matters of this kind seem like dicey waters to enter — and not really my thing, personally — so let’s stick to cinema and let others write the thinkpieces, if you don’t mind. Thus, the interview finds Allen spilling a few details about his upcoming film “Café Society,” starring Kristen Stewart and Jesse Eisenberg, including the fact that he appears in voice form, narrating the film.
“I wanted to do kind of a novel on film, about a family and the relationships of the members toward one another, and the protagonist’s love relationship,” he explained. “I wanted it to have the structure of a novel, so I could move around and dwell on various members of the family. That’s why I narrated it because I was sort of the writer of the novel that you were experiencing when you saw the film.”
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As for his Amazon show with Miley Cyrus, even though Allen worried a few months back that he was biting off more than he could chew, the filmmaker says the project is done. “By tomorrow I’ll have edited it and finished it. Six half-hour episodes.” Not too shabby, and that’s three hours of Woody Allen we wouldn’t normally get.
There’s no name yet for the show, but Allen confirms that it’s set in the 1960s (set photos and some early talk basically hinted as much). “No, I do not have a title for it, but it’s six half-hour episodes. And it ends,” he said. “It’s not the kind of thing that could go on in perpetuity. It’s one story. It’s a comedy that stars me, Elaine May and Miley Cyrus primarily, a domestic comedy that takes place in the late 1960s. And hopefully people will find it amusing. It’s not going to start any new religions, I can tell you that.
“It was much harder to do than I thought. I thought, ‘I’ll sandwich this in between two films and knock it off. What’s the big deal? It’s television.’ But over the years, television has made enormous strides, and wonderful things are being done on television,” Allen observed about making the series when addressing his early regrets about agreeing to make it. “And I found as soon as I started to get into the project, I couldn’t bring myself to slough it off because this is not television of 50 years ago, where every silly thing was acceptable. You’re working in a medium that has grown up and has got wonderful things being done in it, and, yes, you may prove to be an embarrassment, but you don’t want to be a total embarrassment.”
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Additionally, while this is Allen’s first foray into TV, it’s likely he won’t do it again. “No, I don’t think [I will do more TV]. The only other deal I made with [Amazon] was to put out ‘Café Society.’ But I didn’t want to put it out and then go stream it right away, so we said it would have to be a normal putting out of a picture. It would have to play for several months in the theaters, the way I normally put a picture out — in a few theaters and then a larger amount. Depending on what the box office is, it either goes larger quickly or slower or whatever voodoo strategies those companies have. But that seemed fine with me.”
Allen’s Amazon series is expected to appear sometime in 2016, and we’d guess late in the year so it has time to forge its own narrative outside of “Café Society,” which comes out this summer on July 29th. “Café Society” photos via Croggles, THR and The New York Times.
