At 72, a superstitious Woody Allen is still working hard, but is terrified of the void, the 'meaningless flicker' of life.By Jennie Yabroff | NEWSWEEK
Woody Allen cuts his banana into seven slices each morning. Six slices, or eight, and something bad might happen. "I know it would be total coincidence if I didn't slice it into seven pieces, and my family were killed in a fire," he says. "I understand that there could be no correlation, but, you know, the guilt would be too much for me to bear, so it's easier for me to cut the stupid banana."
Despite the odd superstition (he also avoids haircuts while shooting a movie), Allen has devoted his career to making films that consistently assert the randomness of life. That they do so in a variety of genres— comedy, drama, suspense, satire, even, once, a musical—only partially obscures the fact that, in Allen's eyes, they're all tragedies, since, as he says, "to live is to suffer." If there were a persistence-of-vision award for life philosophy, Allen would be a shoo-in.
Still, it's tempting to wonder if there's been a shift in recent years. After the glare of attention in the early 1990s surrounding his relationship with Soon-Yi Previn, the adopted daughter of his former girlfriend Mia Farrow, the director largely disappeared. Sure, he surfaced to play his clarinet at the Carlyle on the Upper East Side, and maintained his relentless pace of a film a year, but he has not been a topic in the public conversation. It became possible to imagine that old age, combined with a seemingly stable relationship (he stopped going to therapy after he got together with Soon-Yi; the couple has been married 11 years, and they have two adopted daughters) had given him a rosier outlook.
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