A Long Lucky Streak

For this scene, Woody Allen won't be on the couch.

After all, he's 10 years into a loving marriage now. He's crazy about his kids. Every day he brings them to school, takes a turn on the treadmill, then sits down to write. Almost every night there's dinner with friends.

It's all happy and healthy, and besides, for this session he has chosen to sit on the bed. Suddenly our national embodiment of neurosis is saying things like: "I think I'm the luckiest guy in the world, because I've had only good breaks."

It will sound sacrilegious, but here goes: Woody Allen, at 72, seems awfully well-adjusted.

Maybe he was never really quite as crazy as Alvy Singer led us to believe.

"I'm not. I think I'm an underrated actor and I've played the neurotic skillfully over the years . . . but if you use your common sense, I can't be that neurotic if I've been around for that many years and I've been productive," he says, in a stream of witty revelations that will go on for 40 minutes.

It almost goes without saying that "productive" is an understatement. He's on the phone -- ostensibly -- to chat about "Cassandra's Dream," the 38th film he has written and directed in 41 years.

This is another dark one, in the vein of 2005's well-received "Match Point." Again set in London, it trails two brothers, played by Ewan McGregor and Colin Farrell, as they try to improve their humble existences and, in doing so, find themselves becoming hit men for a wealthy uncle. (See review on Page 25.)

Allen fans, especially loyalists of his early comedies, will inevitably question the direction he has taken, both in tone and location. They're welcome to overthink it; he's already over it.

Europe? Well, that's logistics: The money men offered him funds to shoot there. And the wife and kids rather like summering abroad. The brooding material? Listen, that was the idea that came to him, the story he wanted to do at that moment.

And he has already moved on, having shot a romance in Barcelona last summer, getting ready to do a comedy in New York come spring.

"So 'Cassandra's Dream' is old hat to me. I have no interest in how it's regarded or what it makes or anything," he says. "It's ancient history. I haven't seen the film in a year."