Woody Allen doesn’t do that many interviews considering how frequently he’s been on the press circuit with his prolific output. Woody Allen also doesn't do that many interviews during which he discusses his scandal-rooted marriage and those sexual-abuse allegations that have plagued him over the last few decades. But in a new interview with NPR, the filmmaker surprisingly opens up about both subjects.
“I started the relationship with [wife Soon-Yi Previn] and I thought it would just be a fling,” Allen tells Sam Fragoso about Mia Farrow’s adopted daughter, whom the filmmaker started dating while still in a relationship with Farrow. “It wouldn’t be serious, but it had a life of its own. And I never thought it would be anything more. Then we started going together, then we started living together, and we were enjoying it. And the age difference didn’t seem to matter. It seemed to work in our favor actually.“
“She enjoyed being introduced to many, many things that I knew from experience, and I enjoyed showing her those things,” he continues. At a different point in the conversation, Allen discusses how his and his wife’s age difference affects their marriage dynamic.
“I'm 35 years older, and somehow, through no fault of mine or hers, the dynamic worked. I was paternal,” he explains. “She responded to someone paternal. I liked her youth and energy. She deferred to me, and I was happy to give her an enormous amount of decision making just as a gift and let her take charge of so many things.”
The statement goes directly against what both Previn and Allen said to press in the early 1990s. “To think that Woody was in any way a father or stepfather to me is laughable,” Previn told Time. “She’s probably more mature than I am,” Allen said in a separate interview. Farrow, meanwhile, told Vanity Fair that she learned of the duo’s relationship when she discovered a stack of Polaroids taken by Allen of her daughter—a college student at the time—in full-frontal nudity. (Allen maintained the pictures were taken because Previn was interested in modeling.)
Asked whether he thinks the sexual-abuse allegations from his adopted daughter Dylan Farrow—which she detailed in a 2014 open letter—have affected the size of his film audience, Allen replies, “I would say no. I always had a small audience. People did not come in great abundance and they still don't, and I've maintained the same audience over the years.” He adds that the speculation has “no meaning in the way I make movies, too. I never see any evidence of anything in my private life resonating in film.”
Throughout the interview, Allen paints himself as a somewhat boring person who has never tried drugs (“I can barely bring myself to take two Extra Strength Excedrin”), “lead[s] a very sensible life” and has the same daily routine, down to the route he takes during his afternoon walk.
Maureen Orth’s 2013 investigative report about Mia Farrow and the scandals that have plagued her, however, paints a very different picture of Allen and his relationship with Previn. Click here to read the full feature, which includes accounts from eight of Farrow’s children.
