Woody Allen on Inspiration

http://thebrowser.com/interviews/woody-allen-on-memory?print

As I said before, I do think we live in a nightmare and I feel the same way that Blanche Dubois feels: I want magic; I don’t want reality. I want the paper lanterns hung over the bare light bulbs, like she did. And if there is any way to escape reality, I’m all for it.
Unfortunately, there isn’t any real way. You can distract yourself. You can go to baseball games and concerts and plays and have sex and get involved in all kinds of endeavours that obsess you, and you can even create problems for yourself, where they don’t exist, to avoid thinking about the bad problems. But, in the end, you’re caught. And reality inevitably disappoints you.
Elia Kazan: A Biography Elia Kazan: A Biography
Finally, let’s flash forward to Richard Schickel’s biography of Elia Kazan. Tell us about it.

I’m a great compartmentaliser. I always feel one has nothing to do with the other. You can watch Triumph of the Will – it’s a magnificent work of art – and you can still hate Leni Riefenstahl because she was a Nazi. You can listen to Wagner’s music – it’s magnificent, and he was a terrible person.
The same thing is true here. I’m not saying Kazan was a terrible person. Those issues were extremely complex and the easiest thing to do was just to remove yourself and self-righteously make criticisms. Some of those criticisms might be very justified when you argue them out, I don’t know. That’s a different argument.
But the films that he did, the plays that he did – his creative work was wonderful. Whatever you think of Kazan politically, it has nothing to do with the fact that the guy was a great director.