A Too Short Day in New York with Woody Allen

Let someone look at you like David Trueba looks at Woody Allen in the interview he did with him in New York, available since last Saturday on Movistar Plus+. It is a look of rapture, with which you can see that the Spaniard has always looked at the New Yorker. You don’t have to go far to confirm it: a few years ago Trueba told this newspaper how, since he was 15, he has religiously gone to see each of Allen’s premieres at the cinema on car day. “Maybe that’s why I also perceive his films as a meeting with a friend, a friend you don’t see often, who has been married and separated several times, who has children from different marriages and has changed jobs and cities where he lives, that friend whom you often have to defend from the criticism and attacks of others and who has sometimes fatigued or irritated you yourself.” The text was titled A friend.

Trueba and Allen review the latter’s career, share their predilection for The Purple Rose of Cairo and they investigate that let it happen that the New Yorker practices with his actors — I remember that Penélope Cruz said in an interview that her way of getting him to start talking to her was by talking to him about medical symptoms. Allen is not very optimistic about the future of cinema. Who can blame him.

In 2019 Trueba, but the oldest, Fernando, chatted with Woody Allen to The world. The first third of the text consisted of a first-person account about the influence of Allen’s cinema on Trueba. And when the conversation came, at times it was more Allen who asked Trueba. I’m also interested in Fernando Trueba, but hell, I had come here to read more about Woody Allen. None of that happens in the 40 minutes that we see David chatting with Woody. And, paradoxically, the fact that the conversation focuses on Allen speaks more and better about David than all the texts he could write telling how his films have influenced him. The importance of knowing your place. The main flaw of the interview is that it is too short. One would like to have one of those long conversations within reach like Truffaut’s with Hitchcock or Cameron Crowe’s with Billy Wilder. And, by request, let it end with David muttering: an admirer, a friend, a slave, a servant.