French moviegoers “loved and supported the young foreign director” he was in “Take the Money and Run” (1969), Allen recalls in an interview with the Journal du Dimanche weekly.
“When I dared to do more experimental projects, they followed me and encouraged me more than the American public,” he adds.
“New York is not a very nice place anymore, I’m glad to get some fresh air somewhere else,” says the 86-year-old director, who saw the American film industry turn its back on him when his adoptive daughter, Dylan Farrow, told him accused of sexually assaulting her when she was a child.
Allen rejects these accusations. Neither of the two investigations launched against him yielded results.
The filmmaker described “Wasp22,” his first film shot in French — a language he doesn’t speak — as “a detective film, a serious story of crime and punishment. With a dose of romance, of course.”
Allen is aware that the film is likely to “make less money in the United States” because, according to him, “audiences there don’t like subtitles.”
The New Yorker, winner of four Oscars, says he already has “a script in mind” for his next film, but if he cannot “make another feature film after this one” he will dedicate himself to the theater or “write books.”
“I have always found people who finance my films, but nowadays it is difficult: the public now consumes films at home, in their bed (…) It is no longer so exciting,” he says.