Cannes: Woody Allen Calls His Amazon TV Deal a “Catastrophic Mistake”

Woody Allen fans looking forward to the filmmaker’s upcoming six-part series with Amazon, announced earlier in the year, might want to rein in their expectations, as might Amazon Studio execs.

Speaking at the press conference for his out-of-competition screener Irrational Man, starring Emma Stone and Parker Posey, the director warned that making the switch to television for the first time wasn’t proving to be the smooth ride he had hoped for.

“I should never have gotten into it,” he joked, admitting that he was really struggling to get the project together. “It was a catastrophic mistake for me.”

Compared to making a 90-minute movie, Allen said he assumed that producing six 30-minute episodes would be easy.

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“I thought it would be a cinch. One half hour and then another half hour. But it’s not! It’s very, very hard, and I just hope that I don’t disappoint Amazon,” he said. “I don’t watch any of those television series, so I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m floundering. I expect this to be a cosmic embarrassment.”

Asked about the more comfortable world of filmmaking and his decision to work with Posey for the first time, Allen offered a suitably Allen-esque response.

“I’d always wanted to work with Parker Posey, because I like the name Parker Posey,” he said. “I’d seen her in all these offbeat movies and I thought: Would I ever get to go on set and say ‘ where’s Parker Posey?’ And then I got the opportunity to work with her.”

Allen may be putting out new films year after year, but given the opportunity, the director also said Friday that he’d gladly go back and reshoot his impressive back library.

“I would shoot them all over again,” he told the press conference for Irrational Man, which is screening in Cannes out of competition. “Charlie Chaplin had the luxury of shooting a whole film all the time and looking at it and studying it and shooting it again if he wanted to. Films were not that costly at that time.”

But with the expenses of modern-day filmmaking, Allen says it’s sadly no longer a possibility.

“When I make a film, I never ever look at it again once I’ve put it out. Because if you look at it again, you can always see what you did wrong, and how you can improve it and why it’s terrible as it is,” he said. “So I would shoot them all again, I’d very happily take any movie and improve it. I can improve them all.”