Interview

Actor Director Screenwriter

Woody Allen’s Philosopher Fetish in Five Films

Woody Allen’s latest film, Irrational Man, is likely to elicit groans or worse from Allen’s detractors. The movie stars Joaquin Phoenix as Abe Lucas, a floundering philosophy professor for whom things get better after he enters into a relationship with a student, Jill Pollard (Emma Stone). He also considers murdering a judge — who, at least, is corrupt — which also lifts his spirits. Murder and May-December relationships aside, the film’s biggest non-surprise is that Allen finally put a philosopher,

By  |  July 23, 2015

Interview

Director

Workaholic Woody Allen: Five Decades & Counting of Unparalleled Production

In 1966, China became the first nation to synthesize Insulin, Walt Disney died, the first Star Trek episode “The Man Trap” aired, England won the World Cup (they haven’t won one since), and a young director by the name of Woody Allen released his first feature film, What’s Up Tiger Lily?

In the 47-years that have followed, Allen has essentially made a movie a year. He came along right when a slew of young directors were on the make—Steven Spielberg,

By  |  July 26, 2013

Interview

Editor

Editor Alisa Lepselter Talks Blue Jasmine, Her 15th Woody Allen Collab

After working as an Assistant Editor on movies for the likes of Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, and Nora Ephron, and getting her break cutting Nicole Holofcener's first feature Walking and Talking (1996), Editor Alisa Lepselter, A.C.E. got the job of a lifetime—she cut Woody Allen’s Sweet and Lowdown (1999). Fifteen years later she is on her fifteenth collaboration with Allen for his newest movie, Blue Jasmine,

By  |  July 25, 2013

Interview

Actor Director Producer

Eli Roth on Aftershock, Learning to Love Horror, and Woody Allen

Brilliant, demented horror master Eli Roth — the Frank Sinatra of The Splat Pack — is ready to make the next round of moviegoers barf, thanks to Aftershock, a shock fest that chronicles the hell-on-earth circumstances that befall coastal Valparaiso, Chile, after an earthquake levels the town. While the film is helmed by Chilean director Nicolás López, Roth produces and stars, playing a hapless American who goes from partying and chasing girls to worrying about collapsing nightclubs and escaped prisoners. 

By  |  May 10, 2013

Interview

Actor

Sony Pictures Classics Gives Woody Allen’s Latest To Rome With Love The Blu-ray Treatment

There is a scene in Robert B. Weide’s 2012 American Masters special, Woody Allen: A Documentary, in which Allen, sitting casually atop a bed in an unassuming guestroom that betrays the elegant townhouse on Manhattan’s Upper East Side that contains it, takes out an array of paper scraps encompassing a career’s worth of film plots. Or, for the most prolific force in cinema, releasing a movie a year for the past four decades,

By  |  March 5, 2013