‘Bleak outlook’: Woody Allen feels ‘there is no truth in the fact that justice prevails’

“I’ve always had a bleak outlook,” says a sometimes vilified Woody Allen, whose new movie, Coup de Chance, might be his grimmest story yet.

When Woody Allen arrives at his Excelsior Hotel suite for our chat, it’s the day after the premiere of his new movie, Coup de Chance, at the Venice Film Festival. The 87-year-old director, today sporting a brown corduroy bucket hat and those trademark glasses, cut a tiny figure against the backdrop of the heaving crowds.

“I was floundering around, my family was floundering around,” he chuckles. “It was a hysterical operation, the red carpet. Not like real life.”

That there were protesters there too reminds of the fact that Allen, the director of Annie Hall and Manhattan, is still vilified in some quarters. Accused of molesting his adopted daughter Dylan, it’s something he’s always vehemently denied. He likely feels the same way about them as he does the actors, like Colin Firth and Rebecca Hall, who turned around and said they’d never work with him again.

“I understand what they’re thinking. They’re just making a mistake. This is not a capital crime,” he says.

Woody Allen and wife Soon-Yi Previn at the red carpet of the movie Coup de Chance presented out of competition at the 80th Venice Film Festival. Picture: Gabriel Bouys/AFP

Away from his controversies, Allen’s received some of his best reviews in a decade for Coup de Chance – his 50th feature film as writer-director and his first entirely in another language. Working in French was not so difficult, he says.

Woody Allen directing his new film Coup de Chance in France.

“It’s like making an American film. The only time I had any issue … if they were improvising, which I encouraged them to do, and I didn’t know what they were saying, I had to ask someone there that spoke French. Was it OK? Did they get the point across that I’m trying to make in the story?”

That certainly seems to be the case. When the film played in Venice, the brilliantly executed finale was greeted with a huge roar of approval from the usually-jaded critics.

Set in Paris, this nimble thriller follows an illicit affair between a married woman (Lou de Laâge) and a former high school friend (Neils Schneider) whom she encounters in Paris quite by chance. When her husband (Melvil Poupard) senses she is being unfaithful, a bloody chain of events unfold – in what might be Allen’s grimmest story yet.

Neils Schneider and Lou de Laâge in Coup de Chance.

“I’ve always had a bleak outlook,” he admits.

“When I wrote Match Point, the murderer got away with it. Killed two people and went on to live his life with his wife. And when I did Crimes and Misdemeanours, the murderer got away with it.

“I do feel that there is no truth in the fact that justice prevails … but I grew up in the cinema, where justice always prevailed. And you would look around and think this is not the way the world is. There’s many, many people walking around who do terrible things. And they live perfectly fine lives.”

Allen’s fatalistic approach to life doesn’t simply revolve around crime and punishment. Ask him what’s important to him and he answers “trying to find a reason” to live.

“You’re in life. And there’s no meaning to it. It’s an empty experience that ends badly for everybody automatically. And you have to think, what rules can I give myself? What reason can I give myself to have some meaning in my life?”

Coup de Chance is in cinemas on Boxing Day