Director Robert Weide Talks
WOODY ALLEN: A DOCUMENTARY,
CURB YOUR ENTHUSIASM, and
His Kurt Vonnegut Documentary

By Adam Chitwood

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One of the most prolific yet elusive auteurs working today is Woody Allen. The writer-director is a legend, cranking out nearly one film a year for the past 43 years. Most filmmakers are lucky to make one great film in their career, but Allen’s resume sports multiple masterworks. Woody has shied away from press coverage for most of his life, but he recently granted unprecedented access to Emmy-winning director Robert Weide in order to create the definitive Woody Allen documentary. The three and a half hour film Woody Allen: A Documentary provides viewers with a comprehensive and intimate look into the life and filmography of Allen, with fascinating insights from the man himself and those closest to him. I’m not exactly a Woody aficionado, but I found the film to be one of the most comprehensive and absorbing documentaries I’ve seen in a long time.

Recently I got the chance to speak with Weide about the film. During our extended conversation, Weide talked about how he finally got Allen to agree to the documentary, compiling interview subjects for the film (including who turned him down and who was tough to get), what he learned about Allen after following him around for an extended period of time, what kind of bonus features are included on the DVD and what extra material he wishes he could have put on the home video release, and much, much more. Weide also talked about the possibility of a season 9 for Curb Your Enthusiasmand gave an update on his Kurt Vonnegut documentary, for which he’s currently seeking financing. Hit the jump to read on.

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Again, I think Woody Allen: A Documentary is a must-see not only for Woody fanatics but also for any burgeoning cinephile. The film gives some great insights into Allen’s creative process and how the director views his own work, and the extended interviews with Allen provide for some fantastic conversations. The DVD is in stores and on sale at Amazon now.

Collider: First off I just wanna say that I absolutely loved the film.

Bob Weide: Should I assume that you’ve been something of a Woody fan up until now?

I’ve been a fan, but I wasn’t necessarily a superfan. I’m not one of those that has memorized every single Woody Allen movie, so I was kind of taken aback by how intrigued I was by the whole documentary.

Weide: Well that’s good to hear because what I had always said about this film, and I think this line was even used in some of the promotions, is it’s the documentary that Woody fans have been waiting for. Being a Woody fan, I had always wanted to see this documentary and because no one had made it I thought ‘Alright well then I guess I’ve gotta do it.’ I always figured it would appeal to Woody fans, but the fact that someone who maybe has a basic working knowledge of his work and hasn’t been that much of a Woody aficionado would like it as much as you did is pleasing to hear.

How did the project come about?

Weide: I’ve been wanting to do this for about 30 years. I had a slight association with Woody through the years because my very first job in this town was as a gopher, a runner for Rollins and Joffe who were his producers/managers. I was 21 at the time when I went to work for the Rollins-Joffe office in Los Angeles, but soon after that I produced by first documentary on the Marx brothers. Because of the association with the Rollins-Joffe guys I was able to get to Woody and he agreed to do an interview for the documentary so I actually first met him way back in December of 1981, so that’s more than 30 years now.

I later went back to work for Rollins and Joffe as a director of development and then years after that I was gone and came back again as their VP of development. I worked mainly in Los Angeles, but occasionally I would be in New York and Woody would sometimes be in the office, he had a production office upstairs at the time. So there would be sort of a casual nod in the hallway kind of thing, and over the years if I went to his screenings, if one of his films screened and he was there we always chatted a bit. So it was a very cursory—I wouldn’t call it a friendship at all but an acquaintanceship.

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But more importantly, he got to know my work because we share so many of the same heroes. Here I had done this film on the Marx brothers whom of course Woody loves—and he’s in that film as I said—I also did a documentary on W.C. Fields who’s a Woody hero, I did a documentary on Mort Sahl who’s a big Woody hero, and I did one on Lenny Bruce and although Woody isn’t a Lenny Bruce fan per se, he knew that that was a well-received film, in fact I got an Oscar nomination. So he knew my work, he knew that there’s a certain level of quality to my work, that I was a professional and I wasn’t going to do a hatchet job. The point is that Woody has never wanted anything like this done; he’s been offered time and time again and he always turns these things down. Now there have been some Woody documentaries that haven’t been nearly as comprehensive as this, in fact Richard Schickel who’s an old friend of Woody’s who used to write for Time Magazine did something in 2002 that wasn’t nearly this comprehensive and Woody was the only interview in it, and it was only him talking about his films.

He’s always hesitated to do something like this for the simple reason that he just never felt he was a worthy subject for this kind of documentary, because he really does have that self-deprecating streak; that’s not an act, it’s for real. He doesn’t think of himself as a real artist (laughs) who warrants this kind of retrospective or this sort of look at his work. So I over the years would write to him, because prior to Curb Your Enthusiasm I had produced one feature but I was primarily a documentary filmmaker. Probably three times in the last 25 years I wrote him asking him if I could make this kind of a documentary and he always politely turned me down. It was October of 2008 when I wrote to him again and this time I was determined to get him to say ‘yes.’ I just basically wrote him a really effective letter and I really made the case in the letter that it was time for this to be done and I was the guy to do it. He and I also know a lot of mutual people, and I don’t know if he vetted me with anybody but he certainly had the opportunity to because we have a lot of the same friends and he could have just asked anybody what they thought of me and I’m sure he would’ve gotten a glowing report. In any event, my feeling was if he said anything but “No, get lost” I would make this work. In other words, if he left the door even slightly ajar I would push it open. So sometime after I sent the letter I got a call from his assistant saying, “Well Woody wants to know if he were to do this,” and as soon as I heard the word “if” I said “I’m in” because he wasn’t closing the door, he was leaving it open.

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As it winds up, his questions were totally reasonable, they were very practical. It was how many days would I need him for, would I want to film a lot of interviews with him, would I need to come on the set and watch him work, what would I need access to? He also had a big question about where would the film be shown, who would finance it and who would show it, and I suggested American Masters the PBS series to him because I have a relationship with them, I’ve done things with them before and I knew that Susan Lacy who heads up American Masters would die for this film. So when I said “American Masters” he liked that, I mean that put him at ease because he knows the series and he knows it’s a quality series. So very practical questions to work out and then he gave me a provisional “yes” and I was on my way except I had no financing. PBS, as much as they wanted the film, they really don’t have much money these days so I knew I would still have to arrange for the financing independently which eventually I did, but from that point forward he was nothing but giving and accessible and available to me. That was a very long answer.

Given his apprehension, how did you get to film something so personal as inside Woody’s home with his typewriter and everything?

Weide: My feeling was, you know the first couple of interviews I did with him were in a screening room. It’s funny you should ask that because that actually came out of a very pragmatic vs. journalistic need of mine. It was simply that the first couple of interviews I shot with him I shot in a screening room at his office and it’s very dull, it’s a very dull background everything is kind of this eggplant color and there’s nothing in the background. Of course when you interview Woody Allen what you’re watching for is the content of what he says cause he’s an interesting guy so the background doesn’t really matter, but I didn’t want every time we saw him to be in that ugly background so I wanted to get some different places to shoot him. Eventually I did, and of course there’s all the verite stuff when we’re traveling around Brooklyn and all that, but I just asked him one day if we could film an interview in his house for something different. So there’s the lovely shot of him in his sort of living room and you see the windows behind him and the fact that it’s snowing which makes it really pleasant. And then when we were in the house I said “Can I see where you actually work?” and he said “Sure” he didn’t hesitate for a second.

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I think the big hump to get over was his authorizing this in the first place, again there were no issues of control or creative content or final cut or anything like that, it was all just his hesitation about being the subject of a film. It’s the same reason he doesn’t go to the Academy Awards, same reason he turns down the AFI award and all this other stuff, he just can’t stand people making a fuss over him. So that was the difficult part, once he agreed to that I think part of him understood he could either not be accessible to me and have it be a mediocre documentary or he could give me all the things I needed to make a great documentary, and the primary thing I needed was access to him, so that may have been on his mind.

The fact is, also, we hit a stride early on, we fell into a very comfortable rapport almost from the beginning. I think it’s like when you’re doing a narrative feature film, it’s the same thing with actors and directors: the actor either trusts the director and is willing to fall back in your arms a little bit or else they’re gonna be skiddish the whole time and you’re in trouble. I think the same is sort of true with a documentary filmmaker and his subject; the subject’s gotta trust the filmmaker at a certain point and get over his nervousness about how they’re gonna be portrayed. I think once Woody just got over that hump then he was willing to let me film anything I wanted to film.

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When you’re beginning to compile your list of interview subjects, was there anyone you knew was crucial to the documentary or anyone that you had trouble getting

Weide: Almost everybody said “yes” up front. There were a couple people I didn’t get solely because of scheduling. I wanted to interview Drew Barrymore just to talk about the singing in Everyone Says I Love You because I was told—I don’t know if this is true—I was told when she was cast she didn’t know it was a musical and that she would have to sing (laughs). I wanted to talk about that and Drew wanted to do it, we just couldn’t get our schedules together.

The one person that I approached to do an interview who turned me down was Spike Lee, I thought it would be interesting to have Spike in the film because when he first came out, all the publicity surrounding his first film was referring to him as the black Woody Allen, and I wanted to get his take on that. He’s said some things in the past that were sort of critical of Woody, and I thought it would be good to have a touch of that in the film. The fact that he’s also a New York filmmaker who loves the Knicks, I just thought he’d be a good subject. He turned it down and I never pursued the question of “Why?” It’s like when a girl turns you down on a date, you don’t wanna say “Why?” you just move on.

Diane Keaton was one person whom I knew that I needed, and she was very reluctant only because—despite the fact that she just wrote a memoir, which is very personal in many ways—she’s a very private person, has never really talked much about Woody in any meaningful way, and she hates interviews. She hates interviews even for books and press, and she was never comfortable talking about Woody. I was aware of this going in and sure enough she was quite reluctant. In fact I remember I got a funny email from her assistant saying, “Diane wants to know if she can do the interview over the phone?” and I said “What? It’s a movie! Do I just put the speaker on the phone and film the phone? How does that work exactly?” (laughs). So I went back to Woody and I said “I don’t know that I’m gonna get Keaton.” He wrote back and he said “Well you have to tell her that a film about me without her makes no sense,” and I said “Believe me, I’ve made the case. I’ve said it all,” so he wrote back and he said “Well let me talk to her and tell her she has to do this,” and then the next day there was a call from Keaton’s assistant about setting up a time to do it.

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She wound up being great, I mean she gave me a really great interview. I think maybe she was feeling a bit protective of Woody and their privacy as a couple or as colleagues, and I think once Woody said “No, no, no, do it,” she was fine. But for the most part people were really happy to do it, and really wanting to do it. The bigger concerns were scheduling concerns; Penelope Cruz was a little hard to nail down, Owen Wilson was a little hard to nail down, but they all made it clear that they wanted to do it, it was just a matter of scheduling it.

One of the more fascinating aspects of the documentary comes when Woody reveals that he wasn’t as happy with Manhattan and Hannah and Her Sisters as everyone else was, which was kind of shocking. Was there anything else that surprised you about Woody after spending some time with him?

Weide: I think how consistently self-effacing he is is sort of interesting, if not a surprise. It’s interesting ‘cause there’s also a duality at work, because you’ve got a guy who—usually people who don’t think much of their own work, the tendency would be to label them insecure, and Woody is not insecure he’s extremely confident. You just can’t have the kind of output that he has and take the risks that he takes and have such a relative indifference to the commercial aspects of your work without being entirely confident. He’s confident on the set, he’s totally secure, there’s no yelling; it’s a very calm, very confident set. Actors love him because he’s just so comfortable, and that speaks of a certain kind of confidence. I found it interesting the sort of combination of the self-deprecation about his work but the confidence in the process.

woody-allen-diane-keaton-annie-hallEverybody always asks me what the big surprises were that I discovered about Woody and I never have a good stock answer for that, I never know quite what to tell them other than generally that he’s much less neurotic and quirky than I would have expected. For the most part, to me he came across as a pretty normal guy.

I realized that there were two things that surprised me, these aren’t big insights into his personality or anything, but one is that he’s a huge fan of Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye. You don’t think of Woody as being a Catcher in the Rye nut, but he considers it one of his favorite books ever. And when you ask him about films that he likes and dislikes, he didn’t think Casablanca was a big deal (laughs), he didn’t think On the Waterfront was a big deal, he actively dislikes the film Some Like it Hot which everybody loves. So his taste in films are very discriminating, he doesn’t go for the obvious classic stuff that everybody loves.

The funny thing is on one of his lists—somebody sort of forced him to make a list of favorite films and he would list the movie and what he liked about it, or qualify it somehow—but he included the musical version of the film Oliver, which I think came out in 1969. I was like 10 years old when that came out but I loved that movie, maybe five years or so ago I got the DVD and watched it again and it was very nostalgic for me and reminded me of how much I loved it as a kid. But that was like the last kind of film I would expect to see on a list of Woody Allen’s favorite films, a 1969 musical adaptation of Oliver Twist. So those are little surprises.

I’m assuming you had a ton of footage to mine through. Did you have an outline in mind when you started of how you wanted to frame the documentary?

Weide: No I really, I guess I sort of do this with most of the documentaries I just jump in and get started. These kinds of documentaries are made in the editing room and fortunately in the documentary world when I’ve gotten financing I haven’t had to lay out specifically what’s going to be in the film, because when you’re applying for grants and that kind of thing they really want you to outline the film, and I’d be at a total loss because I just have to get into the editing room and see what emerges. But what I strive to do is to just pull in as much information as possible, in other words interview as many of the key witnesses as possible and milk them for as much information as possible. I’ve worked with both live subjects and deceased subjects, and live subjects are easier because you can walk them through their lives and have them sort of provide the narrative spine of the film, and in Woody’s case I just started with childhood and we went on up through the present, so that was helpful.

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With Woody, there’s such an embarrassment of riches with the films themselves, there’s 42 features I guess just as writer/director and then there’s 10 years of stand-up comedy and all the years of when he was doing the talk shows, there’s just so much material. And then of course all the stuff that I shot, with him in Brooklyn and going to Cannes with him twice, being on the set of You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger in London, I’ve just had so much material, and all the other interviews, so it was really going in the editing room and figuring it out.

Where I was lucky, when I started doing this I really thought the whole thing would be something under two hours, and then once I started digging into it I just realized “There’s no way,” and I made a somewhat panicked call to Susan Lacy at American Masters and I said “Would you consider showing this as a two-parter, ‘cause I’m gonna go over two hours and maybe the second part would be an hour and a half but I think I need about three and a half hours,” and to my relief she said “Sure.” Basically where I got screwed was the budget wasn’t going to expand with the expanded length of the film so I had to make a three and a half hour film for what was originally budgeted at two hours, so that was tough. Once I started to do that, I just had a feeling that Part One would end on this cliffhanger when he did Stardust Memories, which really caused a critical backlash in some quarters. Up until then he was a Golden Boy who could do no wrong who was just leaping from one success to the next, and then Stardust Memories was the first chink in his armor, and I had this feeling that that would be a good almost cliffhanger to leave Part One on.

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And then Part Two, I wanted to deal more with his creative process, because Part One doesn’t do that, Part One is a fairly straight chronology of his life and his first few films. Part Two I wanted to deal with his writing process, his casting process, his shooting and directing process, his editing process, and then actually see a film being released out into the world. I was on the set in 2009 of You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, filmed him working there, filmed him in the editing room cutting it, and then filmed him at Cannes for the release of the film. Obviously Part Two would still have to follow the chronology and pick up where Part One left off, but I’d also have to weave in his creative process as well. That thought started to emerge in the editing room and the rest of it was just going by instinct rather than any kind of preconception about how to manipulate the narrative.

What kind of bonus footage or special features can we see on the DVD?

Weide: You know I really had this dream of doing like—the film’s on two DVD’s ‘cause it’s a two-parter, I really wanted to do like a 3 DVD set with Part Three just being chock-full of bonus material, and the problem was that when I finished the film, they really had to get the DVD out fast. I only delivered the film like a week and a half before it aired on PBS, I mean it was dripping wet so to speak when they put it out there. They have to at the end of the film announce “To order a DVD of Woody Allen: A Documentary call this toll-free number” so they had to get the DVD out simultaneous. So the initial DVD that was released had no bonus material on it, it was just the film. Then we were told that in February we’d have a release that we could do some bonus material and so I said “Okay great, I can really dig into this now,” this is at the end of November and they said, “Well except we’re gonna need that material next week,” and I said “How can that be?” and they explained that to have the DVD come out in February just back-timing when it had to be manufactured and everything else, that basically all the material had to be in by the next week.

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So I’m happy to say yes, there is bonus material on the DVD that’s going wide in February, it’s not nearly as much as I’d like to do. I’m hoping maybe they’ll consider a Blu-ray down the road that will really let me dig in and put a lot more stuff on. But there’s some more footage of Woody in Brooklyn, showing some of the movie theaters that he went to as a kid. There’s this thing I did with him called “12 Questions” that’s kind of a rapid-fire, silly Q&A, there is Mariel Hemingway telling this great anecdote about when Woody flew out to Idaho to visit her with her family and it’s a total fish out of water story that she told really well, there’s a little bit more interview footage with his mother, and there’s an interview with me, so I don’t know I think it’s about 35 minutes of stuff that’s on the DVD. It’s a disappointment only in terms of knowing how much more stuff there is that I would’ve liked to put on, but it’s definitely a bonus. For somebody who really loves Woody and wants to see as much stuff as possible, I think they’ll like the bonus material.

There’s some stuff I would’ve loved to include. Woody famously never keeps outtakes and deleted scenes, he just incinerates them or destroys them; he’s not sentimental or nostalgic about that stuff at all. But the one thing that he did hold on to—which even he didn’t know where it was when I asked him about it and then we found it together—was a deleted scene from Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex with him and Louise Lasser. Louise Lasser’s a black widow spider and Woody’s a common house spider, and it’s this sketch where Woody in the spider outfit crawls into the net and they make love and then she proceeds to wrap him up so that she can eat him and kill him. I think the question being answered is “Why do some men become homosexuals?” and that was the answer to the question in the scene.

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I knew it existed, I knew it was the one thing he had never thrown out. When I asked him about it he completely remembered the scene and he said, “I don’t even know where it is anymore, last I heard somebody had actually seen it was maybe 25 years ago.” So we were in his home and he was actually going through a drawer looking for something else to give to me and there’s a 35mm film can in there, and he says “Huh, what’s this?” He was kind of looking at it and he takes off his glasses to try and read the label and he hands it to me and says “Here, see what this is,” and it said “Spider Scene, Sex” and I said, “Woody! This is the scene with Louise,” and he said “Oh, that’s where that is.” And then there’s’ another can too that was the sound, it was a double system so one was the film and one was the audio. I brought it to a post house in New York and made a videotape of it and would’ve loved to include that on the DVD but I felt it needed context. I interviewed Woody about it, I interviewed Louise about it, I had photos, I had script pages. I didn’t wanna just throw it on the DVD, I would’ve wanted to make sort of a little sequence around it, and I just didn’t have time for that.

Anyway that’s just a little example of things that I have in my vault. I mean there’s a little interview snippet of his mother in the film, and then there’s another little snippet on the DVD, but I’ve got the entire 3 hour interview with his mother. Not that anyone should be forced to watch the whole thing, but there’s plenty of stuff in there that’s interesting. People are always wondering “Where did Woody’s neurosis come from and where did his somewhat skewed view of the world come from?” and you sit and watch a 3 hour interview with his mother and some things come into a very sharp focus (laughs). So I thought that’d be interesting, but in any event that’s for another day, another time.

kurt-vonnegutSwitching gears for a minute, are you finally close to crossing the finish line on your long-in-the-works Kurt Vonnegut documentary?

Weide: No there’s no being close to the finish line, what I’m trying to get close to is the financing line. I’m hoping just from the heat of the Woody film which was so well-received, and I just won this DGA award for the Curb Your Enthusiasm episode “Palestinian Chicken”, I thought you know strike while the iron’s hot now’s as good a time as any to strike with the Vonnegut film. So I’ve got what I’m calling a presentation reel, which is like an hour and eight minutes of footage that I’ve already shot and have put together just showing sequences and chapters of the film, there’s no real narrative flow to it it’s just an example of some of the material. I’m just gonna take that out now and try to sell it.

I first approached him about it in 1982 so that’s 30 years ago. In fact, there’s a letter that I have where I wrote to him saying “If you authorize the documentary,”—which he did, he authorized it a month later—I told him I thought I could have the financing within the year, and that was 30 years ago. I started filming him in 1988 and filmed him right up until maybe a year or two before he died in 2007, so it’s quite comprehensive. I have so many people asking me when it’s gonna be finished or when can they see it because people have been hearing about this thing for years, especially Vonnegut fans who know I’ve been working on this are just eager to see it, so I’ve just got to convince somebody who can write a check that this film is gonna have quite an audience. We’ll see. There’s a few things I’m gearing up to do over the next year, but the Vonnegut film is the top priority.

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Are you headed back into features anytime soon or are those other documentaries that you’re looking to do?

Weide: No the Vonnegut film is the really the only documentary that I’m actively trying to do. Some of the other things I’m hesitant to talk about only because when things are in the development stage I just don’t like to talk about them until they’re a certainty. Suffice it to say, there’s a series that I may be creating actually for British television for someone whom I won’t name but who’s a big deal in England. I like the idea of doing a British series because A) even though there’s no real money in it, like the money you can make here, they pretty much leave you alone creatively, which I like, and basically you know six or seven episodes and you’re out, that’s a season. I like that kind of workload, instead of the insanity of doing 23 shows a year here. I really don’t know how those shows that do a full season for the network survive the creative process. I mean we would do 10 episodes a year on Curb and that was plenty enough.

So there’s this BBC series I’m looking at, and there’s a feature film that I’m attached to, a script that’s going through a rewrite right now based on a memoir. That script was sent to me by producers who are very viable and get a lot of difficult material made. The problem is finding material you love. I was determined to do a pilot this season and I just kept reading pilot scripts that did not impress me. My criteria generally is, for a feature what I’ve always said when I read these scripts is if I wouldn’t wanna spend two hour watching this film, why would I wanna spend two years making it? I find that with the pilots too that I’ve been reading. There are a couple things that I read that were very good, but you know those better scripts have become very competitive when it comes to directors who are looking to do pilots.

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In any event, with all the stuff it comes down to material and I’ve read a lot of shitty scripts along the way but I read this script that really caught my eye, so hopefully that’ll be something over the next year. It’s the process for me of, as it is for a lot of people, you throw 10 things against the wall and see what sticks. So I’ve got a number of things in different stages of development, we’ll see what actually takes hold over the next few months.

Do you have any desire to return to Curb Your Enthusiasm should Larry decide to do a 9th season?

Weide: I would never return full-time as an EP. For the first five years I was a producer and the principal director, I would do five or six out of the 10 episodes every year, and those days are over. I left that gig and Larry and I remain friends, I mean we’ve been friends since the mid-80s so we were friends long before the show started up. I think the running understanding is that anytime he comes back and does another season I’ll come back and direct an episode. So even though it’s a show that I helped develop and was in on from the ground floor, when it was me and Larry sitting in a room basically mapping out what the show would be, at this point I’m really another guest director.

“Palestinian Chicken” was incredible.

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Weide: Well thanks. That was a very fun homecoming, ‘cause I was there full-time through season 5, season 6 I came back and did one episode, season 7 I sat out entirely, so this was really my first time back in two years. But by the calendar I think it was like four years since I had been there.  So it was a really nice homecoming, a lot of new faces but a lot of the same faces both in front of and behind the camera. It was great, I read the outline and really liked it; I thought it was a very funny story but I had no idea that it would sort of get the attention that it got, so that was very encouraging that after being away from the show for so long that I could come back and do one episode and have it be such a watercooler episode as they say. And then everything else was icing on the icing, the reviews and the award and all that was quite a nice surprise. So yeah, I would always go back and direct an episode for any given season if Larry wanted me to.

Do you have any idea if Larry wants to come back for another season?

Weide: I have no empirical evidence to support this, I’m only talking from my gut instinct, but I imagine he will do a 9th. Again, that’s only a guess. I never discussed this stuff with Larry, even when I was on the show I would basically just wait for the call for him saying “Do you want to come back and do another one?” and I would say “Yeah let’s go,” I would never question him, “So are you gonna do another one?” so we don’t discuss these things. But I have this sneaking suspicion that he would like to have a nice round double-digit number like 10. I just have this feeling that he’ll do 9, and then he’ll say “Hell let’s make it an even 10.” But again if you put this in print, you must put that this is based on nothing other than my gut instinct and nobody should hold me to this.

woody-allen-a-documentary-dvd-coverYou know he has a lot of fun doing the show. For all the years on Seinfeld he was really the invisible man. No credit needs to be taken away from Jerry [Seinfeld] ‘cause Jerry was great, but I’m sure some part of Larry was thinking he’s knocking himself out doing all this writing and helping to shape the show and nobody knows who he is, and now of course he’s a celebrity; everybody knows who he is and I don’t think Larry minds that. Plus it’s not just the celebrity thing, he really has a good time doing the show. He likes doing it.

Contrary to popular belief, there is something about Larry that’s very sociable. I think he likes being on the set and having the activity around him and having the people around him and having friends around him, and being in your trailer and they say “We’re ready for you,” and then you come out and you act funny in front of a camera and people love you for it, and then you get a good seat in a restaurant because you’re known. I think he likes that, so I think he’ll maybe do this for a while longer (laughs). It’s just so amazing that he’s really, in a big way now in the world of television, he’s hit it out of the park twice. Most people don’t get a chance to do it once, he did it once, caught his breath, then he did it again. It truly is amazing.

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