Quotes about Woody Allen

I am a big fan of the old Howard Hawks films from the 30s and 40s, I was a big Hepburn and Tracey fan for a while and Woody Allen films that are a very different kind of romantic comedy.

My heroes – people like Woody Allen – were stand-up comedians. Therefore, I always felt I should give it a go.

Woody Allen stayed so good because he never left New York. Howard Stern stayed so good because he never left New York – Mel Brooks when he just got out of New York was doing ‘Blazing Saddles;’ when he left New York he started doing stuff like ‘Robin Hood Men In Tights’ – he was in L.A. too long. He lost the edge.

For a long time now, movie characters have generally been articulate, even chatty. Call it the influence of Woody Allen, but we have become used to characters who are well able to explain themselves to others.

How movies are financed, it’s a world market now… I feel like, you know, the independent film way of working is something that was in my bones. It’s like being a part of a punk band, but no one’s singing punk rock anymore. Only a few bands are able to play, and Woody Allen is one of them.

The real achievement of Woody Allen was that he was making movies that felt very personal, and for a whole group of people, it spoke to them. Then he became an archetype, like Groucho Marx or Chaplin.

Probably the only way Woody Allen and I are similar is that he has a lot to say about Nietzsche.

First off, I love Woody Allen. His early movies, like ‘Hannah and Her Sisters,’ are incredible. I also love anything by Billy Wilder, Ron Howard and John Hughes. I really grew up on the Hughes films, which are the ones I go back and watch all the time, just to see how they were put together.

Through movies, I have met nearly everyone I have wanted to, except Woody Allen.

I prefer to live in the country where it’s quiet. Woody Allen movies there are dubbed into Italian.

I don’t really believe in trying to erase every Woody Allen movie from history. For one thing, that’s kind of unfair to all the people who worked on those movies or albums or whatever it is. What did they do wrong to have their work erased from culture?

But nothing beats a Woody Allen film on a Sunday night, with a glass of wine and some leftovers.

Working with Woody Allen was extremely gratifying. He has such a vast catalog of great work that doing one of his films was somewhat unreal.

Being in a Woody Allen film. I cherish it.

I’m such a big fan of Woody Allen. I once tried staying at the same hotel as him, hoping I would bump into him!

I like so many different directors: Scorsese, Coppola, Cassavetes, Jarmusch, Gus van Sant, Woody Allen and the greats like Fellini, Bergman, Tarkovsky and among current filmmakers von Trier, Ang Lee, Wong Kar-wai.

In the the late seventies and early eighties, I played background roles in thirty movies… Woody Allen movies, Scorsese films, you name it. Whatever was being shot in New York, I was doing stand-in and background work because I wanted to be close to the camera; I wanted to see what was going on.