Oscar-winning director Woody Allen, who has been ostracized from most of Hollywood over renewed allegations of sexual abuse by his daughter, Dylan Farrow, says he’s done with movies.
Allen, 86, announced in a new interview Saturday that he plans to retire from making films after his next one, his 50th.
“My idea, in principle, is not to make more movies and focus on writing,” he told Spanish newspaper La Vanguardia.
Little is known about the upcoming movie, “Wasp 22,” but it is a French-language flick with a local cast, set to begin shooting in Paris later this year. Allen compared it to “Match Point,” his 2005 psychological thriller starring Jonathan Rhys Meyers and Scarlett Johansson.
In June, Allen echoed similar comments to Alec Baldwin, saying “a lot of the thrill is gone.”
“When I started, you would do a film and it would go to movie houses all over the country and people would come,” the filmmaker told Baldwin during an appearance on Instagram Live, promoting his collection of humor stories, “Zero Gravity.”
“Now you do a movie and you get a couple of weeks in a movie house, maybe six weeks or four weeks, and then it goes right to streaming or to pay-per-view. ... It’s not the same thing as when I went into the movie business. And so, it’s not as enjoyable to me.”
But Allen’s boredom coincidentally came at the height of the #MeToo movement, when Farrow, now 37, wrote an op-ed for the Los Angeles Times in December 2017, then made the same allegations on “CBS This Morning” in 2018, accusing him of molesting her when she was a child.
The “Annie Hall” director denied the allegations, but renewed interest also came into his relationship with Soon-Yi Previn, Mia Farrow’s adopted daughter.
Since then, Amazon Studios shelved his 2019 film “A Rainy Day in New York,” starring Timothée Chalamet, Elle Fanning, Selena Gomez, Jude Law, Diego Luna and Liev Schreiber; the movie was eventually released last year on Prime Video. Hachette also canceled the publication of his memoir, “Apropos of Nothing,” but publisher Arcade picked it up and released it anyway.
His most recent movie, “Rifkin’s Festival,” got just a limited release in the the U.S. That cast included Wallace Shawn, Elena Anaya, Louis Garrel, Gina Gershon, Sergi López and Christoph Waltz.
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