Woody Allen is preparing to shoot his 50th feature film, “Wasp 22,” in Paris next month, but the 86-year-old filmmaker is ready to step away from the camera.
In a new interview with Spanish newspaper La Vanguardia, Allen revealed that the upcoming film, a thriller shot entirely in French, will be his last. Little plot detail is known about the film, though Allen compared it to “Match Point” and described it as “exciting, dramatic, and also very sinister.”
Once one of Hollywood’s most prolific directors, Allen’s film output has slowed down due to renewed interest in Dylan Farrow’s long-standing sexual abuse allegations against him. Disavowed by many of the A-list actors who used to work with him, Allen has primarily worked in Europe in recent years, releasing the Spain-set “Rifkin’s Festival” in 2021.
Allen said that he plans to focus on writing books after retiring from filmmaking. He recently released his fifth collection of short fiction, “Zero Gravity,” and expressed interest in writing a full length novel in the near future. His memoir “Apropos of Nothing,” was published in 2020. Both “Apropos of Nothing” and “Zero Gravity” had trouble finding publishers due to the allegations against him.
This is far from the first time that Allen has discussed retirement. In a recent Instagram Live appearance with Alec Baldwin, Allen explained that the film industry’s increased emphasis on streaming and shorter theatrical release windows have made filmmaking less appealing to him.
“I’ll probably make at least one more movie. A lot of the thrill is gone,” he said at the time. “When I used to do a film it’d go into a movie house all across the country. Now you do a movie and you get a couple weeks in a movie house. Maybe six weeks or four weeks and then it goes right to streaming or pay per view… It’s not the same… It’s not as enjoyable to me.”
He added: “I don’t get the same fun doing a movie and putting it in a theater. It was a nice feeling to know that 500 people were seeing it once… I don’t know how I feel about making movies. I’m going to make another one and I’ll see how it feels.”
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