Take the Bananas and Run

Woody Allen cuts his banana into seven slices each morning. Six slices, or eight, and something bad might happen. "I know it would be total coincidence if I didn't slice it into seven pieces, and my family were killed in a fire," he says. "I understand that there could be no correlation, but, you know, the guilt would be too much for me to bear, so it's easier for me to cut the stupid banana."

Despite the odd superstition (he also avoids haircuts while shooting a movie), Allen has devoted his career to making films that consistently assert the randomness of life. That they do so in a variety of genres— comedy, drama, suspense, satire, even, once, a musical—only partially obscures the fact that, in Allen's eyes, they're all tragedies, since, as he says, "to live is to suffer." If there were a persistence-of-vision award for life philosophy, Allen would be a shoo-in.

Still, it's tempting to wonder if there's been a shift in recent years. After the glare of attention in the early 1990s surrounding his relationship with Soon-Yi Previn, the adopted daughter of his former girlfriend Mia Farrow, the director largely disappeared. Sure, he surfaced to play his clarinet at the Carlyle on the Upper East Side, and maintained his relentless pace of a film a year, but he has not been a topic in the public conversation. It became possible to imagine that old age, combined with a seemingly stable relationship (he stopped going to therapy after he got together with Soon-Yi; the couple has been married 11 years, and they have two adopted daughters) had given him a rosier outlook.

On the surface, his latest film, "Vicky Cristina Barcelona," a breezy romance strewn with picnics in the country and Gaudí architecture and flamenco guitar, would suggest a softening of his world view. Juan Antonio (Javier Bardem), a self-assured painter, exudes a joie de vivre that seems miles removed from the anxiety-racked neurotics Allen and his stand-ins usually portray. Cristina (Scarlett Johansson), a vacationing free spirit, and Maria Elena (Penelope Cruz), Juan Antonio's intense ex-wife, embrace the pleasure principle as well. The three enter into a blissed-out ménage à trois that is presented, rather appealingly, as just another lifestyle choice.

But go to meet the director in hopes of a "Tuesdays With Woody"-style affirmation of late-life contentment, and you will be quickly disabused of that illusion. At 72, he says he still lies awake at night, terrified of the void. He cannot reconcile his strident atheism with his superstition about the banana, but he knows why he makes movies: not because he has any grand statement to offer, but simply to take his mind off the existential horror of being alive. Movies are a great diversion, he says, "because it's much more pleasant to be obsessed over how the hero gets out of his predicament than it is over how I get out of mine."

Allen is speaking in a screening room in his production offices on Park Avenue on a swampy day in July. The theater is cool and dark, with velvet chairs and a pleasant hush. Dressed in khakis and a button-down shirt, he looks like he does in his movies, with a little more white hair and minus the lustful grin he wears in his early comedies. He is polite, sincere, affable—in fact, his demeanor is so at odds with his morbid outlook, it seem like a gag from a Woody Allen film: the Angel of Death disguised as your kindly Uncle Morty.

A similar sense of the terror lurking beneath a veneer of banality nibbles at many of his films: there is the grandfatherly character who butchered and ate his family in "Deconstructing Harry"; the genteel neighbor who may have murdered his wife in "Manhattan Murder Mystery." It's not just the possibility that an upstanding citizen could harbor the heart of a killer that terrifies him; it's that the killer could get away with it, as he does in "Crimes and Misdemeanors" and "Match Point." Allen says the indifference of the universe has obsessed him since he was a child. "My mother always said I was a very cheerful kid until I was 5 years old, and then I turned gloomy."

He can only attribute that shift to an awareness of death, which he claims to remember from the crib. "Now, maybe I stayed in the crib longer than other kids," he adds, with the well-timed cough of a former stand-up comedian. And there it is, that little spark of wryness, suggesting that the nihilism is just shtik. But it soon becomes apparent that when he says he agrees with Sophocles' suggestion that to never have been born may be the greatest boon, he means it. He is, however, cautious not to infect his loved ones with his pessimism. "I don't prattle on about this at all to my daughters," he says. "I bend over backwards to be very positive and not in any way express this to them."