A video essay about one of the greatest American filmmakers and the evolution of his directing style. Though Woody Allen is deservedly praised for his extraordinary screenplays, his enormous abilities in staging and shooting scenes deserve closer analysis.

Woody's early, funny films were "Take the Money and Run", "Bananas", "Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex * But Were Afraid to Ask", "Sleeper" and the funniest movie of all time, "Love and Death". As hilarious as they are, there is nothing remarkable about how they were directed. Show the joke, move on. That's their motto, and thanks to terrific editor Ralph Rosenblum they keep a brisk pace.

Then, in "Annie Hall", Woody hired cinematographer extraordinaire Gordon Willis (The Godfather, 1 and 2). Gordy taught Woody how to plan and prepare each shot and what emerged from that partnership is movie history.

From then on, Woody developed his two favorite types of shots, which he used, reused, fine-tuned and perfected through the years. I call these shots the "Flat Oner" and the "Walk to Walk and Talk... and Away".

We'll go through some Allen/Willis films ("Interiors", "Manhattan", "Broadway Danny Rose") to demonstrate how much he improved as a visual storyteller. Then we'll analyze scenes from Woody's three masterpieces: "Hannah and Her Sisters", "Crimes and Misdemeanors" and "Bullets Over Broadway".

00:00 How Woody Allen Became a Great Director
01:25 Early, funny, lazy.
03:50 "Gordon knew it all".
05:42 Walk to Walk and Talk... and Away.
07:41 And apartments are flats.
09:24 With all this use of space...
14:33 Blocking king of New York City.
20:27 "I forgot my mantra."

#woodyallen #videoessay #directing #cinema

Woody Allen's quotes about Gordon Willis come from his autobiography "Apropos of Nothing".

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