With thirty-five years of personal film-making behind him, Woody Allen is one of the most distinctive, uncompromising and accomplished of all American directors.

One of the great practitioners of film comedy, Allen progressed from the slapstick of Take the Money and Run and Bananas, through the sophisticated Freudian one-liners and existential pratfalls of Annie Hall and Manhattan, to the complex moral studies of Crimes and Misdemeanours and Husbands and Wives. In the meantime Allen's own angst-ridden on-screen persona has entered the folklore of the movies to the same degree as Chaplin's tramp or Groucho Marx's cigar-toting know-it-all.

This ... Read morecandid, thoughtful and humorous career-length interview with Stig Björkman - editor of a similar volume on one of Allen's own heroes, Ingmar Bergman - traces the path of his career, his motivations and inspirations, and of course his nigh-legendary anxieties. Newly updated, the book contains extended discussion of such recent Allen triumphs as Bullets Over Broadway, Mighty Aphrodite, Deconstructing Harry and Sweet and Lowdown.