Allen, totally serious, on film

Of the iconic American filmmakers of the last half-century, Woody Allen has suffered mightily for his professional and personal proclivities. The sheer weight of his output -- nearly 40 films in the last 40 years -- dwarfs his peers, but the results have varied wildly. Allen was once a touchstone of comic brilliance (“Annie Hall”) and innovation (“Zelig” and “The Purple Rose of Cairo”), but in the last decade he’s stumbled frequently, resulting in an increasing amount of unwatchable dreck (“The Curse of the Jade Scorpion” and “Melinda and Melinda”) broken up by the occasional dramatic revelation (“Match Point”) that raises hope for a return to creative prominence.

When his personal life came under fire in the early 1990s for his relationship with (and eventual marriage to) Soon-Yi Previn, the adopted daughter of Allen’s longtime girlfriend Mia Farrow, it was inevitable that he’d struggle for traction with moviegoers and that his entry in the lexicon of American cinema threatened to become more salacious than sagacious. Woody Allen had finally done the one thing he probably never wanted: obscured the art with the artist.

But just as “Match Point” opened up Allen to a new generation of moviegoers and brought him a return to critical relevance, so too should Eric Lax’s “Conversations With Woody Allen: His Films, the Movies, and Moviemaking.” Compiled over 36 years of interviews, conversations and experiences one could only glean from gaining Allen’s confidence and respect, “Conversations” is essential reading for aspiring filmmakers and those who wish to eventually put finger to keyboard in hopes of telling a story, but it is no less intriguing for simple cinephiles. Broken into eight sections -- “The Idea,” “Writing It,” “Casting, Actors and Acting,” “Shooting, Sets, Locations,” “Directing,” “Editing,” “Scoring” and “The Career” -- “Conversations” details not only the creative process but also the psychic burden of the divide between comedy and drama.

“There’s no question that comedy is harder to do than serious stuff. There’s also no question in my mind that comedy is less valuable than serious stuff. It has less of an impact, and I think for a good reason,” Allen told Lax in 1972, during the filming of “Sleeper.” “When comedy approaches a problem, it kids it but it doesn’t resolve it. Drama works through it in a more emotionally fulfilling way. I don’t want to sound brutal, but there’s something immature, something second-rate in terms of satisfaction when comedy is compared to drama. And it will always be that way. It will never have the stature of ‘Death of a Salesman’ or ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’ or ‘A Long Day’s Journey.’ None of it, not the best of it.”

It’s an issue that torments Allen throughout the conversations he has with Lax and one that has manifested itself in the choice of films he’s made, bouncing from the madcap of “Bananas” to the middle ground of “Manhattan” to the darkness of “Interiors” as if he’s constantly searching for some larger sense of meaning beyond making people chuckle. It’s not enough to make people laugh; he wants to make them feel too.

“[M]y genetic gift or whatever it is that I have goes in a different direction, and so I have to work to try and write something serious, and I haven’t been as effective with it over the years as I have been with comedy. But it doesn’t mean that I intend to stop trying,” he told Lax in 2005, after the completion of “Match Point.” He went on to say, “I’m not a comedian who wants to play Hamlet. I haven’t the slightest interest in being a dramatic actor. . . . It’s different for me as a writer. . . . I have a personal preference and put a greater value on a successful dramatic piece than on a successful comedy piece.”

Strangely, though, after putting the final touches on his films, Allen admits he rarely watches them again. Even still, he retains an encyclopedic knowledge of their process, from idea to execution to final color adjustments to the complexities of the score, and Lax is able to elicit this information with just the slightest question. “[Y]ou abandoned using [Miles] Davis and instead asked Philip Glass to write a score [for the soon-to-be-released “Cassandra’s Dream”]. What happened with Davis? And what made you think of Glass?” Lax asks, and the answer is long and digressive but contains the very essence of Allen’s philosophy on scores: “It seemed like it wouldn’t be a Hollywood score, it would be a score full of feeling that was appropriate to the story. . . . It’s still easier for me to use recordings, but then you don’t get to work with a genius.”

Lax wisely gets out of Allen’s way throughout this work, though this makes for a lack of pointed discussion at times. It’s not from a position of fear on Lax’s part, certainly, as his 1991 biography on Allen asked probing questions of the man, his past and the influence of his own life on his films, but Lax could have hit harder here with his questions. He is seemingly loath to challenge Allen on his failures and overeager to play up the obvious successes.

The most surprising aspect of the work remains Allen himself. His thoughts on his own craft are forthright and compelling and, almost uniformly, not funny. That’s not to say Allen isn’t entertaining, because he certainly is throughout this work, only that in his role as interviewee he’s serious and polite, unwilling to dish or pump himself up, preferring instead to speak of the struggle and praise his actors.

Headline-grabbing revelations are slight here -- apart from an interesting tidbit concerning his inability to cast Robert Downey Jr. and Winona Ryder as leads in “Melinda and Melinda” as well as Allen’s admission that he can’t write a good novel -- but that’s no condemnation. It’s nice to read about the cow and not the meat.

Equal parts genius and obsessive in this spiraling decades-long conversation with Lax, Woody Allen in the end comes across better than many of his films, which is to say he’s complete from beginning to end.

Tod Goldberg is the author, most recently, of the short story collection “Simplify.”