‘Whatever Works’ is not based on me, says Allen

As Woody Allen prepared for the UK release today of his May-to-September romance Whatever Works, he rejected suggestions that the tale has autobiographical undertones.
 
The movie tells the story of an embittered and elderly nuclear physicist, played by Curb Your Enthusiasm star Larry David, who embarks on a romance with a naive runaway, 50 years his junior. The parallels with Allen's life are obvious. The comic famously married Soon-Yi Previn, the adopted daughter of his former girlfriend Mia Farrow, in 1997. She was 27 at the time, he was 61.
 
However, Allen's answer to the suggestion that Whatever Works is based on his own experiences seems watertight. He originally came up with the idea and wrote the script in the mid-1970s - "many, many years before I met my wife."
 
Allen, who is now 74, claims the idea that any of his films are in any way autobiographical is a misconception, and also denies that he is an intellectual. He says he would rather watch baseball or basketball than read a book and told  the Sunday Telegraph's Adam Higginbotham: "I don't have any profound thoughts on anything."
 
What is indisputable is the fact that his lead characters are frequently neurotic and guilt-ridden - and that is a trait they most definitely do share with their creator. Allen runs on a treadmill before breakfast every day and practices the clarinet for at least an hour, but freely admits he does so only because he feels immense guilt if he breaks the routine.
 
"I hate the treadmill like rat poison," reveals Allen, but says the guilt is "too punishing" if he misses a session. The same emotion stops him eating meat more than twice a year. "The guilt afterward is not worth the pleasure of the meal," he says.
 
He is famously critical of his own work and says that he cannot bear to watch his films. After completing Manhattan - now seen as a classic - he was so appalled by the end result he told the studio he would make them another film for free by way of an apology.
 
These days, paradoxically, he considers himself lazy and says the only people he sets out to impress with a new film are a small band of friends including his former muse Diane Keaton. "That's the fun that I get: to sit there with Keaton, or my friends, and amuse or delight them with it. That gives me a kick. After that it doesn't matter to me."
 
And it seems he doesn't care much for the efforts of his contemporaries either. "I haven't seen anything I loved recently, and I've seen a lot of pictures," he says - before admitting that he has yet to see James Cameron's Avatar. "The last 3D movie I saw was House of Wax," he says. ·