Crime and punishment t
IRRATIONAL MAN | Woody Allen returns with an A-List cast and murder in his eye…
“If I could kill all the people I wanted to kill – I would be the only one left in the world.” Spoken by most people, such words might cause one to raise the alarm and ring the police. Fortunately, Buzz is chatting to Woody Allen.
Hiding behind those trademark blackrimmed specs, the prolific director of Annie Hall and Manhattan does not exactly strike fear into your heart. Turning 80 this December, the frail-looking filmmaker has never had the wherewithal to carry out such intentions.
“I never got carried away, only in my room,” he clarifies. “I’ve never even had a puff of marijuana in my life, I’ve never done anything… I’m a lower middle-class, non-courageous, cowardly cipher.” Still, like Hitchcock and Chabrol before him, he’s contemplated killing in his movies – in everything from Manhattan Murder Mystery to Match Point – and his latest, Irrational Man, sees Joaquin Phoenix play Abe Lucas, a philosophy professor who resolves to randomly kill a corrupt judge.
Co-starring Emma Stone as Jill, a young student enthralled by Abe, and Parker Posey as Rita, a chemistry professor who engages in an affair with her colleague, Irrational Man sets out to show how a man of reason can rationalise becoming a man of murder. Posey labels the film “feminine”, dealing “with the character of a man who is lost in a philosophical maze”, as she dubs it. “It’s so interesting – someone being so absorbed by philosophy that they get so screwed up in this maze,” she adds.
Allen certainly understands why Stone’s Jill falls under Abe’s spell. “He’s charismatic, brilliant, vulnerable and self-destructive,” he says. “And so she develops a crush on him but she’s really a middle-class girl who’d be much better off with this nice boy on the campus [ her boyfriend Roy, played by British actor Jamie Blackley] and growing up like her parents and leading a nice, normal life. She should not get involved with such an irrational, risk taking, pseudo romantic philosopher.”
While Abe wasn’t written for Phoenix, when his casting director Juliet Taylor suggested the Inherent Vice star, Allen “could think of nobody else” for the role. Still, there were difficulties. “Joaquin is a very sweet guy, but you’d never know it,” says Allen. “He’s so tortured and so complicated. If you said to Joaquin, ‘Pass the salt,’ it’s like Hamlet. He’s just so insecure.” Adds Stone, who worked with Allen on last year’s Magic In
The Moonlight: “He cares more than anything about serving the director.”
For Posey, meanwhile, it was a dream come true, working with Allen. “It doesn’t feel quite real to me, but it feels right,” she nods. “Being in his movie feels right.” The role came, by chance, after Posey met Taylor at a film festival in Poland and the casting director recommend her to Allen. “He’s been an inspiration to so many people,” says Posey. “Woody Allen is a progenitor of a seed of New York, Americana, neurosis, wit, intelligence, depth, philosophy and jazz all at once.”
Whether it’s littering the film with references to Dostoyevsky’s Crime And
Punishment or the work of existentialist philosophers like Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, there can’t be many people with Allen’s world-view working in film today. “I love that he’s reaching a new generation,” says Posey. “I would have loved this movie in high school or college because I was attracted to that material – I loved Crime And Punishment and the existentialists and the naturalists.”
With Allen already at work on his next movie – starring Posey again, along with Bruce Willis, Kristen Stewart and Jesse Eisenberg – the one thing that won’t ever change, he says, is his outlook. “I remain pessimistic,” he smiles. “My pessimism was so profound that there was nowhere to go. I can’t get more pessimistic than I was when I was growing up. I always had a very dark view of life, a very dark view of people, and I still do.”
ETA | 11 September Irrational Man opens next month.
‘I always had a very dark view of people, and I still do’ woody allen