Woody Allen: ‘Amazon series a catastrophic mistake’

Film director Woody Allen has said moving into TV series with an original comedy for Amazon has been a ‘catastrophic mistake’ and he expects the resulting series to be a “cosmic embarrassment”.

Allen was speaking at the Cannes film festival where he was promoting his new movie Irrational Man. The noted auteur was, according to reporters at his press conference, speaking with “a mix of irony and genuine anxiety”.

The six-part series was announced in January, and working with the filmmaker was considered to be a big coup for Amazon. “It was a catastrophic mistake for me,” Allen said about his Amazon project, of which little detail is known.

In Cannes, Allen added: “I never should have gotten into it. I thought it was going to be easy. You do a movie and it’s a big long thing; to do six half-hours you’d think would be a cinch. But it’s not: it’s very, very hard.”

In a separate exclusive interview with Deadline, Allen said he had not seen any SVOD series and did not even know what a streaming service was. He added he had also not seen any high-end cable series such as The Sopranos or Mad Men.

The notoriously angst-ridden filmmaker added that Amazon had been courting him for 18 months with increasingly lucrative deals that gave him complete creative freedom before he signed on.