‘I can always separate the art from the artist’

As Woody Allen’s 48th comedy tops the global box office, he tells Robbie Collin why scandals won’t stop him making films

‘For my entire life my films have struggled commercially,” says Woody Allen. “Now we’ve finally found out that all it really required for one of them to do big business was, you know, a major catastrophe.”

The 84-year-old director, on the phone from New York, is reflecting on the news that his rose-tinted romantic comedy A Rainy Day in New York has topped the global box-office chart during the coronavirus outbreak. In the only voice I’ve ever heard that can twinkle with despair, Allen says he’s hopeful this lucky streak will continue, and the release of his next film coincides with nuclear war, or an asteroid hitting Earth.

Since 1966, Allen has averaged almost one film per year, and was supposed to be shooting his 50th this summer. Then the pandemic struck and all there is for him to do is potter: practise the clarinet or go for “brief, defensive walks” around the neighbourhood with Soon-Yi, his wife of 22 years. He’s also written a new play – on the Olympia portable typewriter he’s been using since he was 16, when he spun one-liners for Broadway columnists from his parents’ kitchen table in Brooklyn – which he’ll “throw in a drawer until life returns to the planet”.

The New York the world knows is in part an Allen creation. It’s the city of Annie Hall, Hannah and her Sisters and Radio Days; the natural habitat of the urbane, neurotic, sexually ambitious Jew in corduroy and tweed. But the toll the pandemic has taken on his home town has been “a complete curse out of science fiction; perhaps the worst thing I’ve ever witnessed”. He says the city feels even less like itself than it did in the aftermath of 9/11.

Allen lost a close friend to Covid-19 last month, banjo player Eddy Davis, who led the jazz band with which he has played clarinet for some 35 years. “It was a tragic thing,” Allen says. To the average onlooker, he might not appear to have many long-standing allies left to lose. In 2014, while the director was being honoured at the Golden Globes, his estranged son Ronan Farrow, then embarking on a career as an investigative journalist, took to Twitter to call him a paedophile. “Missed the Woody Allen tribute,” began Ronan’s tweet, which has since been deleted. “Did they put the part where a woman publicly confirmed he molested her at age seven before or after Annie Hall?”

The woman in question was Ronan’s sister Dylan, whom Allen was accused of sexually abusing in 1992 at the height of a bitter custody dispute with Mia Farrow, his partner of 12 years and the star of some of his best films. The claim was investigated at the time by the Child Sexual Abuse Clinic at Yale New Haven Hospital and the New York State Department of Social Services – which independently concluded that Dylan had not been sexually abused – and no charges were ever brought against Allen. But his subsequent loss of the custody trial left wisps of suspicion lingering over the case, and his relationship with the then-21-year-old Soon-Yi – Mia’s adopted daughter from her marriage to André Previn – only thickened the fog.

Decades later, when the MeToo movement had caught fire, a revised account of the assault from Dylan seemed to many people to fit all too well with the other bales of dirty showbusiness laundry that were being heaved into the light. In 2018, Amazon Studios terminated Allen’s four-film deal three films early, which led to a now-resolved £52million lawsuit and the company’s