Allen regrets foray into television

Filmmaker says series due to come out next year will be a ‘cosmic embarrassment’

CANNES, FRANCE: Award-winning filmmaker Woody Allen fears his first attempt at directing for the small screen will be a disaster, saying he should never have signed up to make a television show for Amazon.com. Amazon announced in January it had secured a deal for Allen to write and direct a series of half-hour episodes for its streaming TV service.

“It’s a catastrophic mistake,” the 79-year-old Allen told a news conference in Cannes, where he was presenting his latest movie Irrational Man. “I’m doing my best with it. I’m struggling with it at home. I should never have gotten into this.”

Allen feels his TV series will be a “cosmic embarrassment.” He admitted, “I’m struggling with it, I’m not good at it … I don’t watch any of those television series really, so I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m floundering. I expect this to be a cosmic embarrassment when it comes out.”

Allen said he expected shooting 30-minute episodes would be a stroll but it was turning out to be very tough. “It’s very hard for me. I thought it was going to be easy. Doing a movie is a big, long thing but to do six half-hours, I figured would be a cinch. I do a half-hour, I do another half-hour ... but it’s very, very hard and I just hope I don’t disappoint Amazon,” he said.

Filmmakers, such as Martin Scorsese, Steven Soderbergh, David Fincher and Guillermo del Toro, have made recent forays into TV, helping end the stigma that used to be attached to small-screen productions in the eyes of the cinema greats. Allen’s online series is due to come out next year. 

Published in The Express Tribune, May 18^th,  2015.

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