Irrational Man, the new film written and directed by Woody Allen, is set to be released in the UK in two weeks. We got a new UK poster, and now a new lengthy interview has run in the UK Telegraph newspaper. Most interestingly, Allen talks about the origins of his new film with Robbie Collins.
On where the idea of murder came from.
I ask where the idea for murdering a family court judge came from, and Allen tells an in-depth story of a friend who struggled to sue a dodgy building contractor. “Which was unfair and frustrating, but so feeble compared to losing your children,” he says. Changing the story to involve a custody battle, he says, was a decision borne of dramatic expediency, rather than a personal grudge.
On Allen’s interest in the book Irrational Man, and how philosophy entered his life.
Its title comes from a philosophy manual from the Fifties – a kind of Nihilism for Dummies – which he describes as “a very, very enjoyable reading experience of my youth”.
Woody Allen says he discovered existentialism via his first wife, which sounds like the set-up to a Woody Allen joke. He married Harlene Rosen, his teenage sweetheart, when he was a 19-year-old freelance gag writer and she a 16-year-old philosophy student: she would spread her textbooks across the dinner table in their tiny apartment.
Amazingly, philosophy was front of mind for Allen when
He recalls visiting Paris for the first time in 1965 during the production of What’s New Pussycat?, his first film as screenwriter, and spending most of the trip trying fruitlessly to engineer a meeting with Jean-Paul Sartre.
“Finally I met one man who said for a very good price he could bring the two of us together, but I couldn’t afford it,” he says with a straight face.
The whole interview is at the Telegraph. There is a lot more about Emma Stone and Allen’s history.
We don’t know if there is going to be any red carpets for Irrational Man in Europe, as Stone is shooting another project (‘La La Land‘), Parker Posey is in Allen’s 2016 Film and Joaquín Phoenix just kinda doesn’t do many of those things. Either way, we are looking forward to more European press to come.
‘Irrational Man‘ opens in the UK on 11th September.
