Woody Allen on his path changes

After “Interiors,” Woody Allen’s sober-sided follow-up to the Oscar-winning “Annie Hall,” met with critical and box-office indifference, Allen responded with “Stardust Memories,” a comic grotesque in which a director’s fans beg him to make films like his “early, funny ones.” Although Allen denied the film was autobiographical, critics took it as an attack on his audience, and on them, and responded in kind. Does Allen resent those audience expectations?

“When you do a certain kind of film and it’s successful, people psychologically want you to do that [again]. And when you stray from that, you’re fighting a losing battle. But your alternative is to do the same kind of film, so I resisted that, and because I resisted that, I had any number of films that were either critical or, more likely, box-office failures. People were annoyed. I did the film in good faith. They thought it wasn’t. I was trying to make a serious film, and either you think it came off or you don’t think it came off. I can understand their point of view. I was always a great fan of Bob Hope’s, and when I see a Bob Hope movie, I want to see Bob Hope do that thing that I adore. If I suddenly saw Bob Hope doing a serious role, I would get annoyed, just like people got annoyed with me. I understand that completely.

“There is some kind of tacit agreement, a contract that nobody formalizes, but it’s there, and the deal is that you make these comedies, we come and we laugh. You go home and make another one, we come and we laugh. Someone asked me, ‘Why, after “Manhattan,” do you think your audience left you?’ I said, ‘That’s not what happened. I left them, and they didn’t want to go along.’ They were fine, and if I had continued to make movies like ‘Manhattan’ or ‘Annie Hall,’ they would’ve been there. They did nothing wrong. It was me that had more hubris. I was saying, ‘I want to make different kinds of films,’ and they were saying, ‘Too bad! We want to see this, and we’ll pay to see this, but we won’t pay to see the other because that’s not what we’re interested in from you.’ And they didn’t.”

—Sam Adams