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Woody Allen doesn’t watch ‘Mad Men’ and regrets Amazon streaming deal

Woody Allen doesn’t watch ‘Mad Men’ and regrets Amazon streaming deal

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Well we know that someone isn’t losing sleep over what will happen to Don Draper and company during the series finale of Mad Men this week.

In an interview on Thursday with Deadline, acclaimed writer/director Woody Allen opened up about his move from movies to television after he signed a deal with Amazon earlier this year to create a six-episode series for the streaming company. It seems like Allen is definitely having second thoughts on the whole ordeal.

“I have regretted every second since I said OK. It’s been so hard for me. I had the cocky confidence, well, I’ll do it like I do a movie…it’ll be a movie in six parts. Turns out, it’s not. For me, it has been very, very difficult. I’ve been struggling and struggling and struggling. I only hope that when I finally do it — I have until the end of 2016 — they’re not crushed with disappointment because they’re nice people and I don’t want to disappoint them,” he said.

“I am doing my best. I fit it in between films, so it’s not like, no film this year, I’m doing Amazon. It’s a job within my usual schedule. But I am not as good at it as I fantasized I might be. It’s not a piece of cake; it’s a tough thing and I’m earning every penny that they’re giving me and I just hope that they don’t feel, ‘My God, we gave him a very substantial amount of money and freedom and this is what he gives us?’”

The whole reasoning sounds like classic Allen and I wouldn’t be surprised if this wasn’t just a scene from one of his upcoming movies instead of his actual thoughts on doing the series for Amazon. He went on to discuss how he really isn’t a big television person and that he hardly knows what streaming even means.

“I don’t even know what a streaming service is; that’s the interesting thing. When you said streaming service, it was the first time I’ve heard that term connected with the Amazon thing. I never knew what Amazon was. I’ve never seen any of those series, even on cable. I’ve never seen The Sopranos, or Mad Men. I’m out every night and when I come home, I watch the end of the baseball or basketball game, and there’s Charlie Rose and I go to sleep. Amazon kept coming to me and saying, please do this, whatever you want. I kept saying I have no ideas for it, that I never watch television. I don’t know the first thing about it. Well, this went on for a year and a half, and they kept making a better deal and a better deal.

Finally they said look, we’ll do anything that you want, just give us six half hours. They can be black and white, they can take place in Paris, in New York and California, they can be about a family, they can be comedy, you can be in them, they can be tragic. We don’t have to know anything, just come in with six half hours. And they offered a lot of money and everybody around me was pressuring me, go ahead and do it, what do you have to lose?”

That doesn’t surprise me that Allen just goes home and watches Charlie Rose before going to bed. It will be interesting if he does go through with this or if he really wants to back out. The idea sounds interesting and would allow him to flesh out an idea that he may have felt wasn’t enough for just a movie, but who knows.

Allen’s latest film, Irrational Man, starring Emma Stone and Joaquin Phoenix opened at Cannes and has so far garnered mix reviews. Variety called it “a darkly funny, intellectually rigorous campus comedy” while The Wrap said that “all in all, there is nothing to hate about Irrational Man, nothing to passionately love, but it should hit the Woody demographic just fine and that demographic is shifting away from the film nerds and over to the senior citizens who turn out in droves to see this kind of delightful arthouse fare.”

Irrational Man opens in theaters on July 17.

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