‘A magical being’ / Shelley Duvall remembered by Woody Allen, Daryl Hannah and Michael Palin

 

‘Odd, charming, wonderful-looking’ … Woody Allen and Shelley Duvall in Annie Hall. 

‘A magical being’: Shelley Duvall remembered by Woody Allen, Daryl Hannah and Michael Palin

The director of Annie Hall, and Duvall’s co-stars in Time Bandits and Roxanne, reflect on working with the actor, who died yesterday aged 75

 

Woody Allen at a screening in Barcelona of his latest film, 'Coup de chance;' September 18, 2023.

Woody Allen’s superstition and Herbie Hancock’s music

Knowing there’s a new film of his to see every year offers a certain assurance that the end is not near for our broken world

La superstición Woody Allen con música de Herbie Hancock

FERNANDO NAVARRO

19 October 2023

When I left the theater, I couldn’t stop thinking about the song — the hypnotic rhythm driving the plot, igniting both body and spirit, making us feel like our broken world isn’t so broken after all. I’m talking about Herbie Hancock’s Cantaloupe Island and Woody Allen’s latest film, Coup de Chance (Stroke of Luck), in which Hancock’s jazz standard takes center stage.

Woody Allen, Sofia Coppola and Hamaguchi impress audiences at the Venice Film Festival

Woody Allen at the screening of 'Coup de Chance' at the Venice International Film FestivalGUGLIELMO MANGIAPANE

VENICE FILM FESTIVAL

Woody Allen, Sofia Coppola and Hamaguchi impress audiences at the Venice Film Festival

‘Coup de Chance,’ Allen’s 50th film, shows he still has a lot to offer, while ‘Priscilla’ presents a delicate but imperfect portrait of Elvis Presley’s marriage

TOMMASO KOCH

Venecia - SEP 05, 2023 - 13:52 COT

Music evolves in society and cinema – the narratives no longer solely revolve around men. On September 4, Elvis Presley, the King of Rock, saw the focus shift to Priscilla Beaulieu, his wife until their divorce in 1973. Director Sofia Coppola found her story intriguing, so in Priscilla, Elvis is only seen through his wife’s eyes. “It’s really tough to sit down and watch a movie about you, your life, and your love,” said a visibly moved Beaulieu after the movie’s screening at the Venice International Film Festival. “Sofia did a fantastic job.” The idea and its execution deserve accolades, but considering Coppola’s exceptional talent, one can’t help but expect something even better from her.

Diane Keaton and Woody Allen in 'Annie Hall.'BETTMANN

How Mel Brooks, Woody Allen and even Kafka exposed the absurd with laughter and wit

Humor is a defining part of Jewish culture, so don’t miss the comedic elements in ‘The Metamorphosis’

Sergio del Molino

14 July 2023

I have recently seen two adaptations of The Trial by Franz Kafka. One was an opera by Gottfried von Einem and the other was a play at the María Guerrero Theater in Madrid, directed by Ernesto Caballero with Carlos Hipólito playing Josef K. Neither one gave audiences much to laugh about. I saw the opera in Germany, where laughter may not be the norm, but the cabaret-inspired stage and the dramatic antics of certain singers (mezzo-soprano Patrizia Häusermann as Frau Grubach is a true comedic talent) helped amplify the comedic elements. On the other hand, the Spanish play was expressionistic and austere, which may have led to the misconception that The Trial is a tragedy. Or perhaps the audience was just feeling solemn that night.

 

The 100 Best Screenwriters of All Time

As chosen by working screenwriters.

Edited by Stacey Wilson Hunt

“To make a good film,” Alfred Hitchcock once said, “you need three things: the script, the script, and the script.” Yet while it’s easy to find (and argue over) lists of the greatest films ever, it’s difficult to find a list of the greatest screenwriters. We decided to remedy that — by polling more than 40 of today’s top screenwriters on which of their predecessors (and contemporaries) they consider to be the best. To compile such a list is to pose a question: What is the essence of the screenwriter’s art? Plot? Dialogue? Character? All that and more? We left that judgment to those who know best — the writers. Here are their selections (ranked in order of popularity, with ties broken by us), and representative testimonials for each.

Count Dracula by Woody Allen

Count Dracula

by Woody Allen

Somewhere in Transylvania, Dracula the monster is sleeping in his coffin, waiting for night to fall. As exposure to the sun's rays would surely cause him to perish, he stays protected in the satin-lined chamber bearing his family name in silver. Then the moment of darkness comes, and through some miraculous instinct the fiend emerges from the safety of his hiding place and, assuming the hideous forms of the bat or the wolf, he prowls the countryside, drinking the blood of his victims. Finally, before the first rays of his archenemy, the Sun, announce a new day, he hurries back to the safety of his hidden coffin and sleeps, as the cycle begins anew. Now he starts to stir. The fluttering of his eyelids are a response to some age-old, unexplainable instinct that the sun is nearly down and his time is near. Tonight, he is particularly hungry as he lies there, fully awake now, in red-lined inverness cape and tails, waiting to feel with uncanny perception the precise moment of darkness before opening the lid and emerging, he decides who this evening's victims will be. The baker and his wife, he thinks to himself. Succulent, available, and unsuspecting. The thought of the unwary couple whose trust he has carefully cultivated excites his blood lust to a fever pitch, and he can barely hold back these last seconds before climbing out of the coffin to seek his prey. Suddenly he knows the sun is down. Like an angel of hell, he rises swiftly, and changing into a bat, flies to the cottage of his tantalizing victims.

Woody Allen / Life

LIFE

    by Woody Allen 

Life is full of misery, loneliness, and suffering - and it's all over much too soon.

Salinger’s Pursuit of Teen Girls Gets Renewed Attention After ‘Allen v. Farrow’

Actress Michelle Williams arrives at the 2012 Independent Spirit Awards clutching a 'Catcher in the Rye' accessory. (Photo by Frazer Harrison

 

JD Salinger’s Pursuit of Teen Girls Gets Renewed Attention After ‘Allen v. Farrow’

Rae Alexandra

April 2, 2021

Yesterday, Vanity Fair published a compelling essay by prolific author Joyce Maynard. In it, she drew a parallel between Woody Allen and J.D. Salinger, saying both men harbored obsessions with very young women. Maynard was inspired to write the piece after watching recent HBO documentary series, Allen v. Farrow. But her motivation was born from the fact that, when she was a teenager, she had a relationship with the then-53-year-old Salinger.

Woody Allen / Life

 

Woody Allen

LIFE

Kate Winslet On Working With Woody Allen: “I’m Grappling With Regrets”

September 11, 2020 by archyde

“I didn’t know Woody and I don’t know anything about that family,” Winslet said at the time.

She continued: “As the actor in the film, you just have to step away and say, I don’t know anything, really, and whether any of it is true or false. Having thought it all through, you put it to one side and just work with the person.”

“Woody Allen is an incredible director,” she went on. “So is Roman Polanski. I had an extraordinary working experience with both of those men, and that’s the truth.”

ARCHYDE

Apropos of Nothing by Woody Allen review – a life and an accusation

Woody Allen
Photo by Jane Bown
Illustration by T.A.

BOOK OF THE DAY

AUTOBIOGRAPY AND MEMORY

Apropos of Nothing by Woody Allen review – a life and an accusation

This controversial memoir displays the filmmaker’s self-deprecating wit, but his account of Mia Farrow and their family veers between sadness, fury and spite

Fiona Sturges

Tuesday 9 April 2020

In this memoir, Woody Allen is keen to clear up some misconceptions. He is not, as he has frequently been described, an intellectual. As a man who is practically “illiterate and uninterested in all things scholarly”, he dismisses the notion as being as “phony as the Loch Ness Monster”. He also explains that, contrary to appearances, he is no slouch on the sports field. In his youth he was a fast runner, “very fine” at baseball and a decent schoolyard basketball player who could also “catch a football and throw it a mile”.

Allen, 84, also wants it to be known that he is not a child molester, as claimed by his former partner, the actor Mia Farrow, and his alleged victim, their seven-year-old adopted daughter, Dylan Farrow, who is now 34. Throughout this complicated saga, which erupted in 1992, and was reignited in 2014 when Dylan wrote an open letter reasserting the alleged assault, many have had their say on the matter. Along with Dylan’s letter, there have been public missives from Allen’s son Ronan (who has stood firmly with his sister), Mia’s adopted son Moses (who has taken Allen’s side and whose letter is extensively quoted here), and Soon-Yi Previn (Mia and her ex-husband André Previn’s adopted daughter, who had an affair with Allen and later married him). Police investigators have twice found no legal case against Allen, a fact that is sometimes forgotten amid the public rush to judgment. While Allen quips that the main theme of Apropos of Nothing – which was controversially binned by its original publisher, Hachette, after staff staged a walkout – is “man’s search for god in a pointless, violent universe”, the 90-odd pages devoted to the Farrow “to-do” would suggest that, after remaining mostly quiet on the subject for 30 years, he has deemed it time to offer his version of events.

Woody Allen  and Soon-Yi Previn

Of course, this is the story of a life, not just an accusation, and, as one might expect from a writer with his comic pedigree, Allen’s style is gossipy and spry when dealing with his childhood and rise to fame. It begins with a sprint through his early years in Brooklyn as the son of a cab driver father and bookkeeper mother. His parents “disagreed on every single issue except Hitler and my report cards”, but they doted on their two children. Cultural awakening arrived via his cousin Rita, who would take him to the movies on Saturday afternoons and encouraged him to listen to the radio where he discovered Cole Porter, Rodgers and Hart, Benny Goodman and Billie Holiday. At 11, a trip to Manhattan with a childhood friend opened his eyes to vaudeville after they found the cinema closed. He was so taken with the comedy skits that he returned every Saturday, taking a pencil and paper to make notes.


Woody Allen and Mia Farrow in Broadway Danny Rose (1984

While still at high school, he began sending jokes off to newspapers, many of which were printed. Eventually an agent got in touch and asked him to spend a few hours each day after school writing one-liners for their celebrity clients, for which they would take the credit. He went to NYU, majoring in film, but was kicked out after he failed to show up to classes. No matter, as he was already working in comedy writers’ rooms and making more money than his parents did. He decided to change his name (he was born Allan Konigsberg), something he never regretted aside from the time a saleswoman at Bloomingdale’s asked: “Will that be all, Mr Woodpecker?”

Self-deprecation is Allen’s default setting and his bleak humour can be winning. He recalls drunkenly daydreaming with his second wife, Louise, about their preferred method of suicide – “Her preference was to go by pistol shot, mine by placing my head in the dishwasher and pressing Full Cycle.” Looking back on the biggest flop of his film career, he says: “The filming of Shadows and Fog came off without a hitch except for the movie.” When the lights went up after the screening for the film’s financial backers “the four or five suits sat immobile as if they had all been paralysed by curare”.

 

Allen routinely plays down his talents, but wastes no opportunity to list the luminaries who have showered him in praise

Elsewhere, however, egotism tramples wit. He routinely plays down his talents, and wants us to know how little his films returned at the box office, but wastes no opportunity to list the luminaries who have showered him in praise. It’s also a familiar Allen routine to wonder why any woman would give him, a self-anointed schlemiel, the time of day romantically, but here they are rated ruthlessly on their looks. Even his mother doesn’t escape judgment – she was “loving and decent but not, let us say, physically prepossessing”, he writes, before observing her similarity to Groucho Marx.

You might think that a man dogged by dark accusations would take extra pains to avoid coming over like a creep around young women. Yet 17-year-old Stacey Nelkin, who appeared in Annie Hall, and who the 42-year-old Allen briefly dated, caused him and the screenwriter Marshall Brickman “to spin around each other like electrons”. Talking about Scarlett Johansson, he observes “when you meet her you have to fight your way through the pheromones. Not only was she gifted and beautiful, but sexually she was radioactive.” He carps that much has been made of his dating much younger girls when “it’s really not so”, offering as evidence his first wife, Harlene, who was just three years younger than him. Given he was 20 when they married, it would have been a grave matter had the age gap been any wider.

Woody Allen

Aged 56, apparently marooned in a chilly relationship with Farrow, he says he was “ripe for the plucking” when he began an affair with the 21-year-old Soon-Yi; his revelation that “we couldn’t keep our hands of each other” is, frankly, too much information when discussing a woman who was, to all intents and purposes, his stepdaughter. His account of the fall-out, and the subsequent accusations regarding Dylan, pinballs between sadness and fury. He is sympathetic towards Dylan, whom he claims was coached and “brainwashed” by her mother into believing that, one afternoon in the crawl-space in their Connecticut home, her father abused her while she lay playing with trains.

He is less forgiving towards his son, Ronan, from whom he has long been estranged and who has written extensively about his father’s alleged misdeeds. Another sub-plot in the eternal Farrow soap opera is the question mark over Ronan’s paternity, and Allen can’t resist making a dig about the child support he was legally obliged to pay: “If Mia was right about [Ronan] being the son of Frank Sinatra, then I was really being bilked.” But he saves most of his vitriol for Mia, whom he claims told him: “You took my daughter, now I’ll take yours.” He paints her as bitter, damaged and cruel, a woman who shopped for adopted children as if she were collecting ornaments, and then neglected and physically abused them. It makes for grim reading. While you can’t blame him for putting his point across forcefully, and for howling against perceived injustices, the spiteful tone helps no one.

But Allen isn’t in it to win friends, as evidenced by intermittent rants against the “Appropriate Police”, the “#MeToo zealots” and his former friends and colleagues in Hollywood who, after gauging the public mood, have publicly denounced him. He makes clear his understanding that the book is unlikely to influence those who have already made up their minds. Reflecting on his legacy, he says: “Rather than live in the hearts and mind of the public, I prefer to live on in my apartment.”

• Apropos of Nothing by Woody Allen is published by Arcade.

EL PAÍS

Apropos of Nothing review / Woody Allen's times and misdemeanours

Apropos of Nothing review – Woody Allen's times and misdemeanours

Dropped by the original publisher after a staff protest, the film-maker’s autobiography can be brutally honest but also a bore, and neither he nor Mia Farrow come out of it well

Rachel Cooke
Sunday 10 May 2020

T

hough I see what he was getting at, I don’t quite agree with Hilaire Belloc, who once wrote that just as omelettes are either admirable or intolerable, and nothing in between, so it is with autobiography. Most memoirs, alas, struggle over the same things: fame, for instance, is often less interesting (or perhaps simply harder to describe) than the struggle to achieve it; the central irony of autobiography is that it’s far easier to be truthful about other people than it is to be honest about oneself. Such books tend, then, to be patchy: utterly delicious at times, but at other moments, stodgy and in need of seasoning.

If Woody Allen’s Apropos of Nothing was an omelette, you’d scoff down two-thirds of it pretty smartish, I think, after which – sated, to a degree – you’d mournfully scrape what remained on your plate into the bin. Later, you might be troubled by a hint of indigestion; even a little light queasiness. But in the morning, contemplating the Alka-Seltzer, I’m not sure you would be full of regret, let alone inclined to avoid omelettes for life. What I’m trying to say is that Allen’s autobiography is a mixed bag. If he can write (obviously, he can), and if he is, at points, surprisingly honest (eye-poppingly so, on occasion), then he can also be a bore and a self-deceiver. Of course, if you’re one of those who, disgusted by what you regard as his moral failings, has vowed never to watch Annie Hall or Manhattan again, then you’re unlikely to want to embark on Apropos of Nothing in the first place – and fair enough, that’s up to you. But I’m not in that camp. Nor can I comment on Allen’s alleged abuse of his adoptive daughter, Dylan, a crime of which he was first accused in 1992 (two police investigations into this have come to nothing). What I will say, however, is that I regard it as both disgraceful and alarming that Hachette, his original publisher, gutlessly dropped his book following a walkout by some of its staff – and that though I was sometimes repulsed by it myself, I was also fascinated, even entertained. So, shoot me. Again, that’s your choice.

Like Salinger’s Holden Caulfield, Allen “doesn’t feel like going into all that David Copperfield kind of crap”. But even so, he’s good on his Brooklyn childhood: smart and beady and occasionally funny. His parents – his father was a bookmaker; his mother worked in a florist – were, he tells us, as “mismatched as Hannah Arendt and Nathan Detroit”, disagreeing on everything save for “Hitler and my report cards”. As a boy, he loved magic, fell hard for jazz, courtesy of the great Sidney Bechet, and found his most adored pal in the form of his cousin, Rita. Most readers will know already about the early career: the gags written for the tabloids, the work for radio and as a standup. What surprises in this account is the relative ease with which he became a writer and director (Take the Money and Run, in 1969, was the first proper film). He presents it here so casually: the equivalent of moving from, say, working in a bank to working in an estate agent’s office.

Woody Allen: ‘he can be acute when it comes to actors’.
Photograph: Arnaud Journois

He’s straightforward about his movies. He knows, mostly, which of them work and which don’t (or maybe it’s just that he agrees with me) – and he can be acute when it comes to actors, too. Plenty has been made already of his remarks about, among others, Scarlett Johansson (“when you meet her, you have to fight your way through the pheromones”), and I’m not about to defend him on this score. Yuck. The book is dedicated to Soon-Yi, the stepdaughter he seduced when she was 21 and who is now his third wife (she is 35 years his junior): “I had her eating out of my hand and then I noticed my arm was missing,” he writes, a line that could not be more tone deaf if it were Florence Foster Jenkins.

But reviewers have also quoted selectively, and while one doesn’t cancel out the other, it’s kind of great how much he admires the talent of, say, Judy Davis, Barbara Hershey and Dianne Wiest – precisely the kind of women Hollywood likes to make invisible. His account of the mental illness suffered by his second wife, Louise Lasser, is unsparing to the point of cruelty. But the warmth he feels for her is obvious; they’ve remained friends. Ditto Diane Keaton, a woman who, as he puts it, dressed “as if her personal shopper was Buñuel” (sidebar: people tend to forget that Keaton was no longer his girlfriend by the time they made Annie Hall).

OK… I’m coming to it. Allen devotes around 100 pages – extremely energetic, committed pages: by turns angry and whiny, disingenuous and sometimes just plain baffled – to his relationship with Soon-Yi Previn and its discovery in 1992 by her mother, his then partner, Mia Farrow, courtesy of some “erotic” Polaroids; to the subsequent allegation, made initially by Farrow, that he had abused their adopted daughter, Dylan; and to his later estrangement both from Dylan and his son, Ronan (the latter has always supported his sister; however, their brother, Moses, as Allen notes, has since taken the side of his father). None of this is edifying, to the point where I will avoid repeating the worst of it, British libel laws being somewhat stricter than in the US. However, Allen would have been equally damned had he said nothing at all on this score.

No, he doesn’t come out of it well. But nor does Farrow (his twisted partiality is one thing, but facts are another, and it has to be said that it took her an awfully long time – about 40 years – to turn on her friend, Roman Polanski, who in 1978 pleaded guilty to unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor). To return to where we began, here’s another thing about omelettes: you can’t make one without breaking eggs. This is a horrible, painful and, above all, highly opaque story, and it always will be – up to, and including, the day it is inevitably mentioned in the first paragraph of a long newspaper obituary.

• Apropos of Nothing by Woody Allen is published by Arcade (£24.71).

THE GUARDIAN

Woody Allen / "The Heart Wants What It Wants"

Woody Allen and Mia Farrow

"The Heart Wants What It Wants"

By WALTER ISAACSON

Sunday, June 24, 2001

Q. How could you get involved with someone who was almost a daughter?

A. I am not Soon-Yi's father or stepfather. I've never even lived with Mia. I've never in my entire life slept at Mia's apartment, and I never even used to go over there until my children came along seven years ago. I never had any family dinners over there. I was not a father to her adopted kids in any sense of the word.

Q. But wasn't it breaking many bonds of trust to become involved with your lover's daughter?

A. There's no downside to it. The only thing unusual is that she's Mia's daughter. But she's an adopted daughter and a grown woman. I could have met her at a party or something.

Q. Were you still romantically involved with Mia when you became interested in Soon-Yi?

A. My relationship with Mia was simply a cordial one in the past four years, a dinner maybe once a week together. Our romantic relationship tapered off after the birth of Satchel, tapered off quickly.

Q. What was your relationship with Soon-Yi when you first started going over there to visit your children?

A. I never had a single extended conversation with her. As a matter of fact, I don't even think she liked me too much. The last thing I was interested in was the whole parcel of Mia's children.

Q. Why did you want to have children with Mia?

A. I didn't. She adopted Dylan, I didn't. But a month after she was there, I found myself bonding with her. She was just the greatest little girl. Suddenly I got tuned into the joys of parenthood. When Mia said it would be nice if she had someone else, I think I'll adopt another child, I said great. And coincidentally she got pregnant shortly after that. I was delighted.

Q. But then what happened to your relationship?

A. The relationship was starting to wane anyhow. Dylan's arrival sort of resuscitated it for a while; we had something in common, co-parenting the kids. But when Satchel came along, it drifted down to a polite and cordial end.

Q. But didn't you become a father surrogate to the children she had adopted with Andre Previn?

A. I was not involved with the other kids. They had their own father. I didn't spend much time with them, particularly the girls. I spent absolutely zero time with any of them. This was not some type of family unit in any remote way.

Q. Soon-Yi never treated you as a father figure?

A. Not remotely. She never said two words to me. For years I thought Soon-Yi was studying to be a nun. She was going to Sacred Heart, so I thought, well, I had no idea what she was doing. I was only interested in my own kids.

Q. Don't you worry about what the children might feel when their dad is sleeping with someone they consider a sister?

A. I don't think they think of "sleeping with." They only know what is constantly drummed into them. And I don't think my children feel any lack of affection or any rivalry. Soon-Yi and I will be very, very cognizant of their situation and feelings.

Q. Is Soon-Yi mentally handicapped in some way, as some have said?

A. No! Am I going to spend my time with a mental deficient? I mean, use your head. What would be the interest? She is not a mental deficient in any remote way. She goes to college, she is a psychology major, she has a B average.

Q. No learning disability?

A. Yes, a learning disability. I don't know what. She came here when she was seven and didn't know the language.

Q. How did your relationship with her begin?

A. One night, just fortuitously, I was over at Mia's, and I had no one to go to the basketball game with. And Soon-Yi said, I'll go. And so I took her, and I found her interested and delightful. This was a couple of years ago. Mia had encouraged me to get to know her. She would say, Take a walk with Soon-Yi, do something with her. Try and make friends with her, she's not really as hostile to you as you might think. Mia thought it was fine I took her to the game.

Q. So then you started secretly dating her?

* A. No. I took her to a game again, maybe a month later. And this happened on a few occasions. And we struck up a relationship. It was strictly -- I don't want to say an intellectual relationship, because I'm not saying we were discussing Kant or anything, but we chatted about different things.

Q. Did you talk about Mia?

A. Well, yes, I'm not sure I want to get into that too deeply, but she told me things that were surprising to me about the family, and that it was not exactly as happy as I thought it was. She and other kids had problems with their mother. Soon-Yi did not have a good relationship with her, and we spoke about that. She said her mother had been very cruel to her.

Q. Physically?

A. Physically, and mentally. Mia was very impatient with her. She had hit her with a brush. She had written English words on her hand because she couldn't learn them, and made her go to school with them on her hand, and that humiliated her. I believe also she threatened to put Soon-Yi into an institution because she was impatient with her for having trouble learning the language. There were many other things. But I don't want to say, because I don't want to get anybody in trouble. But if I do have to say them someday, I will.

Q. But she may have been telling you these things because she was interested in you or trying to get back at her mother. How do you know they were true?

A. Because when I made it my business to check about it, I found out. She was worse to Soon-Yi because she stood up to her. And there was a definite difference in the way she treated the adopted children and her own children.

Q. How did your sexual relationship with Soon-Yi come about?

A. We'd chat when I came over to Mia's house. It started to become hotter and heavier late last year, very late. We had a number of conversations, saw a couple of movies, and you know it just -- well, I can't say there was any cataclysmic moment.

Q. But you fell in love with her?

A. Yes, yes. My flair for drama. What can I say?

Q. She fell in love with you at the same time?

A. That's hard to say. My guess is after. She returned my feelings.

Q. But didn't it occur to you, worry you, that her feeling had something to do with her resentment of her mother?

A. I did not think that. I never think of those things. When you're having a nice time, you don't look for those motivations.

Q. Weren't you worried that the emotions and motivations were too complex for a young girl?

A. No. Because if you knew her, you'd know that's not true. She's a sharp, grownup person. She's probably more mature than I am. I really mean that.

Q. Your movies always explore these types of emotions and motives. You must have sat up one night and thought about the problems you might cause dating the daughter of a previous lover, a mother she doesn't like?

A. I didn't think about her not liking Mia. I did think that, well, she is the adoptive daughter of my previous girlfriend, but that didn't mean anything to me. It didn't manifest itself in any significant way. She was a grown, sophisticated person. She was raised in New York.

Q. You're a guy who can find moral dilemmas in a broken DON'T WALK sign. Didn't you see some here?

A. I didn't find any moral dilemmas whatsoever. I didn't feel that just because she was Mia's daughter, there was any great moral dilemma. It was a fact, but not one with any great import. It wasn't like she was my daughter.

Q. Did you ever discuss with her, "What is Mom going to think of this?"

A. Mom would have thought more or less the same thing if it had been my secretary or an actress.

Q. Come on!

A. There is a different psychodynamic here, without any question, but the difference is one of small degree. If I had said to "Mom" -- it was actually "Mia" that she called her -- I'm in love with my secretary, there would have been some version of the same thing.

Q. But you didn't tell Mia before it blew up, right?

A. I wanted to make sure this thing was going to take off. For all I knew I might have just been a little footnote in Soon-Yi's life, and then she would later say, Well, I had a little flirtation with my mother's boyfriend at the end of their relationship.

Q. Did you talk to your analyst about how this would affect a child?

A. It wasn't so complex. It doesn't have that quality to it that you think.

Q. What about how it would affect her siblings?

A. These people are a collection of kids, they are not blood sisters or anything. If Mia did not keep them whipped up and enraged these days, telling them how to react, I don't think they would have cared two seconds.

Q. Did you really take nude pictures of Soon-Yi?

A. Yes. Soon-Yi had talked about being a model and said to me would I take some pictures of her without her clothes on. At this time we had an intimate relationship, so I said sure, and I did. It was just a lark of a moment.

Q. What did Mia do when she found them?

A. She hit the ceiling. I said, Look, our relationship has been over for some time. We should go our separate ways. The important thing is that we do what is right for our children. She was too angry. She instantly brought all the kids in on it, told all of them. This was Jan. 13. It was a dreadful thing to do. She phoned people saying I had molested her daughter, raped her daughter.

Q. What did she do with Soon-Yi?

A. She locked Soon-Yi in the bedroom in her apartment -- there's a lot of corroboration of this -- beat her on numerous occasions, smashed her with a chair, kicked her, raised black-and-blue marks so the kids at school said, Where did you get those? Finally, through the intervention of, I believe, a doctor, she got out of the house and went to live up in the college dormitory.

Q. Did you talk to Soon-Yi while this was happening?

A. She called me once when she could get to a phone and told me she was fine, that her mother would say she was suicidal, but it's untrue. I love you, and I don't regret a minute of this.

Q. Why did the whole thing become public?

A. Suddenly I got a memo from her lawyers saying no more visits at all. Something had taken place. When I called Mia, she just slammed down the phone. And then I was told by my lawyers she was accusing me of child molestation. I thought this was so crazy and so sick that I cannot in all conscience leave those kids in that atmosphere. So I said, I realize this is going to be rough, but I'm going to sue for custody of the children.

Q. Did you molest your daughter?

A. I have not molested my daughter, nor would I ever.

Q. What did happen in the house?

A. It was a Wednesday two weeks ago. I came in the midafternoon for a visit. Allegedly, I took her in the attic, according to what the child-protection agency told me was the allegation, and did unspeakable things to her. But nothing at all happened. Nothing. In light-years I wouldn't go into an attic, I wouldn't even know how to find Mia's attic. I'm a famous claustrophobic. And I would not molest my daughter.

Q. Were you ever with her alone?

A. I may have been with her alone for a second, a moment or something, but I wasn't really alone with her. I am not going to, on the eve of hammering out a separation agreement, drive to Connecticut and in Mia's house, an open house, where there are two baby-sitters and people are always walking in and out, I'm not going to take her and molest her.

Q. Mia was there?

A. Of course she was there.

Q. There must have been some incident, some basis for this charge?

A. No, nothing. I was never in a private room with Dylan. I slept downstairs that night in the guest bedroom. The next morning when I was about to leave, the kids ran downstairs and were jumping all over me and playing with me. And Dylan gave me some brochure from a toy store and she had checked off some toys she wanted me to get for her. Everything was wonderful.

Q. Have you seen Dylan's videotape?

A. No. And don't you think that's strange, that Mia made a videotape?

Q. Was there any other evidence?

A. She brought the kid to the doctor, and there is no physical evidence of anything.

Q. Then why do you think Mia and Dylan made the allegation?

A. The atmosphere up there in Connecticut is so rife with rage against me. So it's possible this emerged from that. But it also could have been made up intentionally.

Q. Have you talked to Mia recently?

A. Yes, in fact she called me five times today ((Friday)).

Q. What do you say to each other?

A. She said, Can we stop this grotesque publicity circus? And I said, You have hired a lawyer, you're parading relatives and the kids on television, you leaked this videotape of Dylan unconscionably. She said, Can't we negotiate this? And I said, First you must clear my name unequivocally. And if you do that and we can agree to give Dylan some real therapy to get over the dreadful scars of this thing, and I am part supervisor of that therapy, then O.K., we can see if there's a way of toning things down.

Q. Do you use your movies to work through dilemmas you're facing in life?

A. No, people always confuse my movies and my life.

Q. But don't you confuse your movies and your life?

A. No. Movies are fiction. The plots of my movies don't have any relationship to my life. My next movie is a murder mystery.

Q. Who's going to get murdered?

A. Oh, some stranger.

Q. Inappropriate love with younger women seems to be a theme in your movies and in your life, right?

A. It's not a theme in my life. I've been married twice, both times to women practically my age. My two other relationships -- Diane Keaton and Mia Farrow -- they're not really much younger women.

Q. Will your relationship with Soon-Yi continue?

A. Yes. I'm in love with her. As soon as the reporters go away, we'll do the things we like to do. We'll walk and eat out and go to the movies and basketball games.

Q. What's your emotional bond, since it's not intellectual?

A. It's fully dimensional. I would not be interested in someone who's not interesting.

Q. Do you consider it a healthy, equal relationship?

A. Well, who knows? It's perfectly healthy. But I don't think equal is necessarily a desideratum. Sometimes equality in a relationship is great, sometimes inequality makes it work. But it's an equal-opportunity relationship. I mean, I'm not equal to her in certain ways.

The heart wants what it wants. There's no logic to those things. You meet someone and you fall in love and that's that.

TIME