On a muggy spring day the tower bells of the stately Rockefeller Chapel chime "New York, New York" in mischievous homage to the renowned arch-neurotic Woody Allen. No one ever had a bigger crush on the Big Apple. ("I have a weak spot for New York City and I fantasised about it as I grew up," Allen confesses. "A New York of penthouses and white telephones that never really existed anywhere except on film.") But this is the cerebral stronghold of the University of Chicago, where a long queue for a free sneak preview of Woody Allen's annual flick - his 33rd in 34 years - spills outside an ornate Gothic hall.
Small Time Crooks, co-starring Tracey Ullman as low-life thief Allen's entrepreneurial wife and Elaine May as their ditzy accomplice, is a sure thing, laced with wonderfully funny lines and saturnine plot twists. It's the kind of film that those vulture-like fans in Stardust Memories demanded that the harried artist churn out: Hey, don't make pretentious dramas (Interiors) that don't work, make pretentious comedies that do.
Despite the heat Allen wears light brown corduroys, a green pullover, brown shoes and those black-rimmed glasses without which he says he feels existentially naked ("like Groucho Marx minus the moustache"). Although he complains about a hearing loss, you want to tell him that hypochondria and neuroses as comic stigmata must agree with him because he looks great and you can't believe he is 64. Allen speaks genially and lengthily about scriptwriting, the decline of comedy, the blight of "factory-made" films and theatre, and his deceptively varied body of film work ("I'm always seen as doing the same thing. It's like Chinese food - many different dishes but it's all Chinese food.")
Once again, in Small Time Crooks, Allen plays a dim-witted hustler surrounded by a motley crew of low-IQ louts and lasses. Why the attraction? "There are two things that I can play, apart from a sperm and an ant. I can play an intellectual. I get credit for appearing to be an intellectual because I wear big dark glasses. But I'm closer to the dimwit in Small Time Crooks. You should see me at home. I'm not hunched over a copy of Heiddeger making marginal notes. I'm sitting with a beer in my hand watching the Knicks. I can play dim-witted characters because that's who I grew up around. I can play Broadway Danny Rose, and the character in Take the Money and Run and I can play this character. I have an affinity for them."
So why does Allen seem so sadly condemned to comedy? "I wish that I had been born with the talent to be serious. My favourite artists are Chekhov, Tennessee Williams, Ibsen, Eugene O'Neill, Arthur Miller. Ingmar Bergman in film. These are the people I idolised. I just don't have what it takes to be that kind of artist. So I struggle and I try to make that work every now and then. But I sweat and huff and puff and maybe sometimes it's OK and sometimes maybe it embarrasses me. Whereas when I'm working in comedy it comes very gracefully for me. It's just an accidental fate that I was born with that kind of gift.
"People at the box office line up for what I call the neanderthal style. In Small Time Crooks I liked the notion that people want to rob a bank and that their cookie business - that they use to rob the bank - takes off and makes them rich. That element of wit is what attracted me to it. But many contemporary comedies come out with relentless toilet jokes because there's a big market for it."
So are audiences today dumber than they used to be? "I never believed in the dumbing down of the country. It can't be that - because every generation has got to feel that their generation was the cultivated and sensitive one, and the new generation is Philistine. Culture has gotten more informal and more relaxed. The time I saw A Streetcar Named Desire it was clear that Blanche was the heroine and Stanley was the nefarious, sinister, unruly brute. But after you look at it over the years you start to feel that, you know, she's crazy. She comes into his house and she's stiff and she's formal - and the world has gotten more informal and so now we understand Stanley's position more.
Now you have a more American sensibility that's expressed in a general loosening up of the culture and it is reflected in films. In comedy, though, the films got more - I don't know - infantile. The big test for me is : Does the film go any place? All the writers I know have a million good ideas that don't go places. When I wrote Purple Rose of Cairo, the guy coming off the screen was a funny idea but it didn't go anywhere. I got 50 pages out and the thing drops dead. I put it in the drawer. But six months later it occurs to me that if the actor in Hollywood comes into this small town and then the guy comes off the screen and falls in love with a girl who has to choose between fantasy and reality - and she chooses reality and it hurts her - well, I knew I had something.
"Same thing with Bullets Over Broadway. The idea of the gangster as a playwright who really did have talent was a funny idea. But it dropped dead halfway through. Only when the idea occurs to me that the gangster realises that the actress is screwing up his dialogue and he kills her, did I realise I had someplace to go with the movie. With Small Time Crooks. The fact that they rent this cookie store next to the bank and the cookie store hits it big - that's a nice idea. Only when I had the idea that money changes them and they start putting on airs and becoming pretentious did I really have something.
"Comic ideas are cheap but ideas that flower, that develop into something are not so easy to find. It's laborious to plot out things; when you get that idea you tend to rush ahead too rapidly and you force the ending. There is no shortage of film companies that will see a funny idea and they won't care that it doesn't go any place. They'll give it to a movie star who will do it because they see themselves getting a lot of laughs but never realising it isn't going any place and then they find it is a disaster."
Why did he not try his hand more at theatre than films? "I wanted to be a playwright originally. When I was a young man the theatre was much more significant than film. What happened was the influx of these great foreign films started to wake American film-makers up. Suddenly American movies improved and grew up a little bit. Coupled with that the American theatre got more and more into these factory-made spectacles and got away from the great things it had. I wish the theatre was thriving as I knew it in New York when I grew up."
The experience of helplessly watching his first script, What's New Pussycat?, undergo a severe mangling was traumatic and inspiring: "I stood there with no clout whatever because it was my first job. Peter O'Toole and Peter Sellers were nice people but it was a film that was motor-powered by studios. So I decided I would never work in film again if I could not be the director." Ever since Allen has always secured "the power of final cut. My films are financed in advance. So when I pull the script out of the typewriter, I'm in business. I call up my production manager and we start." Does he really pay no heed to critics and reviews? "The critics will either tell you that you're a genius or that you're a fool. It doesn't do you any good. You still go out next time and make the only film that you can make. So it's no help. It's just a distraction. Being an ostrich, in certain ways, has worked positively for me. You pay a price for it but it also has its compensations."
As for the physical labour of writing, Allen doggedly works with his trusty portable Olympia typewriter, purchased at age 15. "I don't have a word processor. I'm not technological at all. I write on a yellow pad and I type it up myself. You get used to things, you know, and that is part of my particular personality, which is desperately resistant to change. I see change as symbolic of approaching death. I resist change in any form."
Small Time Crooks will be released later this year. Woody Allen's Sweet & Lowdown is out on June 9
