Life story that’s off-script

For this scene, Woody Allen won’t be on the couch.

After all, he’s 10 years into a loving marriage now. He’s crazy about his kids. Every day he brings them to school, takes a turn on the treadmill, then sits down to write. Almost every night there’s dinner with friends.

It’s all happy and healthy, and besides, for this session he has chosen to sit on the bed. Suddenly our national embodiment of neurosis is saying things such as: “I think I’m the luckiest guy in the world, because I’ve had only good breaks.”

It will sound sacrilegious, but here goes: Woody Allen, at 72, seems awfully well-adjusted.

Maybe he was never really quite as crazy as Alvy Singer led us to believe. “I’m not. I think I’m an underrated actor and I’ve played the neurotic skillfully over the years . . . but if you use your common sense, I can’t be that neurotic if I’ve been around for that many years and I’ve been productive,” he says.

It almost goes without saying that “productive” is an understatement. He’s on the phone -- ostensibly -- to chat about “Cassandra’s Dream,” the 38th film he has written and directed in 41 years.

This is another dark one, in the vein of 2005’s well-received “Match Point.” Again set in London, it trails two brothers, played by Ewan McGregor and Colin Farrell, as they try to improve their humble existences and, in doing so, find themselves becoming hit men for a wealthy uncle.

Allen fans, especially loyalists of his early comedies, will inevitably question the direction he has taken, both in tone and location. They’re welcome to overthink it; he’s already over it.

And he has already moved on, having shot a romance in Barcelona, Spain, last summer, getting ready to do a comedy in New York come spring.

“So ‘Cassandra’s Dream’ is old hat to me. I have no interest in how it’s regarded or what it makes or anything,” he says. “It’s ancient history. I haven’t seen the film in a year.”

In a year -- since he wrapped. Likewise, he hasn’t seen “Take the Money and Run” since 1968, a year before it hit theaters. Hasn’t watched “Annie Hall” in 30 years.

Because if there is a compulsion, it’s not -- as one might expect -- to obsess. It’s to just move on. To write the next thing, start the next project.

“If I didn’t, I would just sit home and brood. When I finish a film, I sit home for a couple of days and, you know, nothing happens. . . . And three days later I’m champing at the bit to start writing again, because I have nothing to fill my time -- nothing interesting to fill my time,” he reasons.

Allen says he writes the way some guys collect stamps and others fool around on their boats. Everybody gets their kicks somehow. His come through the page, through the process.

He spent a good long time working on a novel a few years back. Finished it, showed it to some folks and decided it wasn’t good enough. “So I dumped it. And had no regrets or problems doing that. It was fun writing it. The fun was in writing the thing,” he says.

So seven days a week he’s at it, and yet “I feel I’ve never worked a day in my life, actually.”

Over four decades, two categories have been born of that continual impulse to create: good films and not-so-good films.

Naturally, Allen and his critics don’t always agree which is which. Nor does he care where they, or anyone else, draw the line. Allen notoriously declines to read his reviews. He doesn’t frequent award shows or look at box office numbers. In terms of whom these films are intended to entertain, even the audience is a distant second.

“I always like it if someone says to me ‘I enjoyed your film’ as I’m walking down the street. You know, yes, I think that’s nice. But I would never do anything to elicit that response from them,” he says, slightly aghast. “I think when I’m making it, I want to please myself, really.”

It’s an attitude that goes back to 1965, when Allen wrote his first film, “What’s New, Pussycat?” Someone else directed, and it became a huge hit -- one of the most successful comedies of its time. Allen hated it, hated the experience of it “and vowed that I would never do another movie unless I could be the director.” Three years later he was given $1 million to make “Take the Money and Run.”

And, ever since, he has had “complete artistic control over [his films] in every way” -- not just writing and directing but often acting in them as well.

So maybe it was self-absorption that led to mediocre movies. But it’s probably the same condition that has liberated him to move beyond “Annie Hall,” no matter how loudly everyone clamors for him to produce another of those. And another and another.

“It’s very important to please yourself,” he says. “ ‘Cause if you please yourself, you get something out if it. If you don’t please yourself, even if the film is critically or commercially successful, you don’t get any fun out of it, and it’s not an enjoyable memory.”

Those pesky critics he ignores have wondered publicly whether the man even has another “Annie Hall” in him. The brilliance of those first few films was in their thorough intimacy, their ability to wallow in a moment and a place and a generation. Woody Allen was intellectual New York, circa 1978.

It’s not clear he can be that in 2008.

But even the question may be missing the point; it’s the critics doing the wondering, not the filmmaker.

“I do feel disconnected [from today’s culture]. And I don’t want to be connected there, because I don’t like it,” he explains. “The culture, at the moment, is not one that inspires me.”

Allen doesn’t subscribe to the theory that successive generations are getting dumber, but something has changed. Something that has put him at odds with young audiences. When he was 20, 21, he reminisces, there was a hunger for sophistication, for discerning tastes that led to foreign films and avant-garde ideas.

Now what he sees among twentysomethings is film illiteracy and an adoration of locker-room humor.

On any given Saturday night, Allen complains, he’s hard-pressed to find a quality new piece of American cinema, “once you see the three or four good ones of the year.” The rest, he continues are “stupid and formulaic and toilet jokes and moronic and infantile and unoriginal.”

Allen can envision the day when he decides to be done with the camera. Sure, he’ll go on writing every day, but it will be plays or New Yorker stories. Maybe another crack at a novel. But the thought of it isn’t so tempting while opportunities, and funds, keep presenting themselves.

“The hardest part of making a film is getting the financing, and as long as people want to finance them, you know, I feel, ‘Why not make them?’ Because there will be a time, I’m sure . . . when people will say, ‘Enough with this guy. He’s a loser.’ ”

If the sheen is off his zeitgeist and the neurosis never really was, then what remains is Allen himself: a cinematic legend who would never admit as much. (“I don’t feel I’ve been an influence . . . and don’t think that I’m in a class with, you know, my gifted contemporaries.”)

By now, though, after all these years, he must at least be comfortable with his place in the cinematic canon?

“My place? My place is, I’ve been lucky beyond all measure,” he quickly fires. “I feel I’m a modest talent who’s been very lucky and has made, you know, the most of what little talent I’ve had.”

There is less equivocation about his other place in life -- the one at home in Manhattan, with a treadmill and wife and two daughters ages 9 and 7. The wife, you’ll recall, is Soon-Yi Previn, the adopted daughter of Mia Farrow, Allen’s former partner of 12 years. Previn was 21 when Farrow discovered a nude Polaroid of her on Allen’s mantle. Allen calls the public battle that ensued “really the only conflict I’ve ever had in my life.”

Perhaps most surprising is what sprung from it: quiet, contented domesticity.

“I came to it late in life,” Allen says. “I’m very grateful, and I am happy that in the most absurd and unpredictable way, I met someone that became my wife, and I have a family with her and have had many years now of great happiness.”

This chapter unfolded with twists even he would deem outlandish, but there it is: life conspiring. Karma or the unconscious, or maybe it’s kismet.

He will call it all luck.

Whatever it is, it’s keeping Woody Allen off the couch.