Woody Allen is apparently stepping away from movies permanently. Following recent comments to Alec Baldwin in an Instagram live chat where he said “the thrill is gone,” in terms of filmmaking, the 86-year-old writer/director told Spanish newspaper La Vanguardia he intends to stop making movies after his next film, evidently titled “Wasp 22.”
“My idea, in principle, is not to make more movies and focus on writing,” Allen told the publication. Allen recently said the film would be “in the same vein as ‘Match Point,’ a sort of poisonous romantic thriller.” He also described the movie to La Vanguardia as “exciting, dramatic and also very sinister.”
Previously, Allen told the French newspaper Le Journal du Dimanche that he was aiming to relocate to Paris in September to shoot his next project (“Wasp 22”), which he said will be a French-language movie with a local cast. Apparently, financing is not yet in place.
READ MORE: The Best & The Rest: Every Woody Allen Film Ranked
“I kept a wonderful souvenir of the filming of ‘Midnight in Paris’ in 2010,” he told the paper. “I love this city very much, and I’ve visited often, discovering magical places every time.”
Allen already told Baldwin that he was considering retiring. “This will be my 50th feature … It might be the last one,” the 86-year-old director told him last month.
Allen was known for his prolific filmmaking career, making a film every two years like clockwork or even less. Still, when the #MeToo moment flared up again in 2017, allegations of sexual abuse from daughter Dylan Farrow resurfaced.
That negative publicity essentially blacklisted him quickly. Amazon Studios canceled his $68 million four-film deal, and the filmmaker’s recent films have all had a difficult time finding distribution, some of them barely screening in the U.S. Reviews for all the movies since didn’t help and have been rather scathing.
To top it all off, Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering’s four-part HBO docuseries “Allen v. Farrow” seemed to nail the coffin shut on what was left of Allen’s reputation. The doc focused on Farrow’s allegations, and it’s clear that even his most staunch supporters knew how damaging the doc was. Allen doubled down on his denial of the allegations and called the docuseries a “hatchet job.”
Allen’s most recent film was “Rifkin’s Festival,” which premiered at Spain’s San Sebastian Film Festival in 2020 before getting a limited release in the U.S. If this is indeed the end for Allen and he concentrates on books from here on out, it will undoubtedly be a sad whimper to what was once an intensely celebrated, respected and Academy Award-winning career.