With twenty-five years of personal film-making behind him, Woody Allen is among the most distinctive and uncompromising of all American directors.As one of the greatest practitioners of film comedy he has progressed from the slapstick of Take the Money and Run and Bananas to the sophisticated Freudian one-liners and existential pratfalls of Manhattan and Annie Hall.Meanwhile, Allen's own angst-ridden screen persona has entered the folklore of the movies to the same degree as Chaplin's tramp or Groucho Marx's cigar-toting know-it-all.Stig Bjorkman, a Swedish film journalist and film-maker in his own right, interviewed Allen over several weeks for this book. The result is the most candid account of the director's life and work to date.Displaying humour and vulnerability, Allen discusses his motivation, his inspiration and the anxieties of the artist in the modern world.