Woody Allen on Ronan Farrow's shoddy "journalism"

Ronan Farrow

From an interview with Woody Allen in the UK Telegraph. Allen discusses his horrible son, Ronan Farrow, Timothee Chalamet and more. This except starts with his comment on Farrow:

“Up until a couple of days ago I would have said ‘Gee, this is great, he’s done some good investigative journalism and more power to him, I wish him all the success in the world,” [Allen] says. “But now it’s come out that his journalism has not been so ethical or honest. Now, I found him to not be an honest journalist in relation to me at all, but I write that off because, you know, I understand he’s loyal to his mother. But now people are beginning to realise that it isn’t just in relation to me that his journalism has been kind of shoddy, and I’m not so sure that his credibility is going to last.”

Dispassionate doesn’t quite capture Allen’s tone as he talks about this. Extreme nonchalance is more like it. The emotional drawbridge was clearly hoisted up years ago, and though he happily and fully answers any question you put to him, it still feels as if you’re standing on the far side of the moat, throwing stones at the portcullis. The same equanimity comes into play when he talks about the actors who have publicly disowned him since the revival of Dylan’s accusation, including Colin Firth, Greta Gerwig, Ellen Page, Kate Winslet (more opaquely), and now Timothée Chalamet, A Rainy Day in New York’s leading man.

Meanwhile, Scarlett Johansson, Javier Bardem, Diane Keaton and Jeff Goldblum are among those to have spoken out in his defence, while last year, Michael Caine walked back his earlier disavowal, describing the allegation as “hearsay”.

In A Rainy Day in New York, Chalamet plays the now-familiar figure of the Allen stand-in – here a bookish gadabout called Gatsby Welles, whose romantic trip to Manhattan with his girlfriend Ashleigh (Elle Fanning) goes whimsically awry. Like many of Allen’s late-late films – and this is a good one – much of it feels beamed in from 50 years ago. Though it’s set in the present, Chalamet croons a Chet Baker number at the piano, and cracks wise about Lerner and Loewe’s Gigi. That it works as well as it does comes down hugely to Allen’s three vivacious young leads: Chalamet, Fanning, and Selena Gomez, who plays a young actress on the rise.

Both Fanning and Gomez have artfully deflected attempts to extract apologies for appearing in the film. But in a January 2018 Instagram post, Chalamet said he’d come to realise “that a good role isn’t the only criteria for accepting a job” and he would donate his salary to charity, adding that he didn’t “want to profit from [his] work on the film”.

In his book, Allen explains away Chalamet’s mea culpa as pre-Oscar nerves. (In the end Chalamet was Oscar-nominated, but lost to Gary Oldman.) “He made a mistake,” Allen says. “He was nervous about wanting to win it, and it turned out to be a poor decision because he didn’t win it… Perhaps when he’s older he won’t feel that way. I can only say that I had a wonderful time working with him, and I liked him, and I was surprised when he denounced the project – well, not the project, but me. I found it hard to believe that he felt that way, having worked with him closely for a couple of months.”

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Did he ever worry that he was finished? Today he says not; he’s finding the allegation “hasn’t resonated in any real practical or detailed way” away from the media churn. “I still make my movies, I still get my plays produced. My following has never been huge but it’s always been loyal, and has remained for the most part intact. Every now and then there’s an annoying little glitch when an actor says they’re not going to work with you, but I just get a different actor. Not the end of the world.”