It is a glorious New York spring day: blue skies, clear air, a fresh breeze. A day to skip along the pavement and feel happy to be alive. Just not in Woody Allen's world. Where it's a day, like every other day, ie, one in which to sit in a darkened room and ponder the futility of all human existence and the absence of meaning. Allen's own special brand of nihilism, as expounded in his films, is, of course, well known – equal parts despair and a sort of despairing joy – but entering his office makes me wonder if this is more than an intellectual choice; if he simply has a different physiology from the rest of us.
Because outside the birds are singing, the trees are about to burst into bloom, and yet his office, where he's worked for years, seems to be some sort of black hole, exerting a force field so powerful it swallows all light. The lobby, a gloomy marble sarcophagus, gives way to a suite of rooms lit only by dim puddles from low wattage bulbs. He's like one of those deep sea creatures who have simply evolved differently; the human equivalent of the Antarctic icefish, which has no red blood cells, or the vampire squid with a metabolic rate so low it's practically dead.
At the back is a screening room, which is gloomier still, decked out with a mossy green carpet and Draylon chairs that look like they last saw daylight sometime back in 1972 – but, then, it could be any time of day or night, any point in the past 40 years. There's a record player and a collection of jazz albums, and there, suddenly, in the gloaming, is Woody himself, who, give or take a whitening of the hair, and slight hunching of the shoulders, seems equally timeless. Even at 75 he looks pretty much as he's always looked, the spectacles in place, his eyebrows a cartoon question mark.
The reason for the interview is the UK release this week of You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, the fourth film he's shot in Britain, and probably the best yet (if you can get over the shock of the opening scene in which Bridget Jones's mother is talking to Shirley Valentine. In a Woody Allen movie). In it, Alfie, played by Anthony Hopkins, leaves his wife, Helena, because "she became old and I wasn't prepared to accept it", and takes up with a twentysomething prostitute instead.
They are all here, the familiar subjects of Allen-esque despair. The feeling, as Alvy Singer explains at the beginning of Annie Hall, that life is nasty, brutish and cruel. But also too short. That death dominates life. And that nothing works out, ever. It's not a film a young man could have made. "No. I wouldn't have thought of it when I was young. It requires years of disillusionment, this is true," he says. The only happy characters in the film are the deluded ones, and the more powerfully deluded they are, the happier they seem. Helena, who takes up with a fortune teller and dabbles with the occult, is grinning like a loon by the end of the film.
"But then I've always felt that if the delusion works, it's great. I always think that people who have religious faith are always happier than people who do not. The problem is that it's not something you can adopt. It has to come naturally."
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