For Woody Allen, the big picture involves maintaining autonomy

So where do you think Woody Allen donated his papers? He's 70, after all, and the Grim Reaper is peering through the window. Maybe Brooklyn College -- he was born in the borough. What about NYU?

Try Princeton. Yikes. Princeton is so not Woody Allen. So not neurotic-Zabar's-Alvie Singer-Jewish-Upper West Side. So teeming with preppie eating clubs and Aryan lacrosse players.

``I couldn't think of where to donate it and Princeton is one of those colleges that's got a good reputation, so I called them up and asked if they'd be interested and they said sure," he explains over the phone from Manhattan. ``Now, it turns out, there are places that pay you a fortune of money for your papers."

We're talking angst central here. He has accumulated another mountain of stuff in the ensuing two decades or so since his first donation. Does he give it all to the Princeton Tiger or go for the large simoleons?

``If the money was astronomical, I couldn't afford to say no," he concedes, ``But it would really have to be a lot to tempt me away."

Another day, another dilemma. But then Allen is full of them. On the eve of the release of the 37th film he's directed, ``Scoop," he talks about the burden of being Woody Allen.

``I've led a life in show business of total creative freedom," he says. ``I've never been told what to write, who to cast. No one's ever seen my dailies. No one's ever read my script before I made a movie. . . . I feel there's this enormous responsibility to live up to something good because I have no one to blame but myself.

`` This is annoying because other filmmakers can often say, `This would have been a good film if the studio didn't pressure me to change my script,' or, `If the star didn't do this or if I'd only had an additional $10 million.' . . . So that's the thing that crushes me the most all the time."

Allen talks easily. He takes questions seriously and answers them directly. The only giggle occurs as he mentions his next movie, to be released next summer, starring, of all people, Colin Farrell. This bad boy seems no more of a Woody Allen actor than Turnbull & Asser does a Woody Allen clothier.

``Well," he says with nice timing, ``We'll know in a little while."

What's up with London, by the way? Filming for the Farrell flick has already begun. It will be his third in a row there, and the one after that will be made in Barcelona. This continental drift is weird. Has Woody Allen, a pillar of Elaine's , gone Euro?

``It's really because people in Europe are bankrolling me to make films there," he explains. ``People in the United States do offer to bankroll me but they want to participate. They want to read the script. They want to know who I' m going to cast. . . . `We want to give you our input.' The last thing I want is input. . . . So it's a good place for me to work, provided I'm willing to make films for $15 million, which I've always been willing to do."

The harrowing news is that Allen is back on screen in ``Scoop." Oh dear. In a certain light, he resembles Henry Kissinger -- ashen, dark frames, basset hound droop -- old. The shtick that first slayed us four decades ago seemed tired in Reagan's second term and is like fingernails on a blackboard today. What drew him back in front of the camera with the overexposed Scarlett Johansson in ``Scoop"?

``It was the script. If anything, I'd just as soon not be in any of my pictures because it liberates the film," he says. ``You know a picture like `Match Point' -- one of the reasons I could do a good job on it is because I didn't need to have a Woody Allen character in it. That immediately limits the story. . . .

``But when something comes along like `Scoop' and there's a part for a low life magician in it, I think to myself, `Who can do that better than me?' I'm a low life and I can do magic."

Allen makes movies that, for better or worse, are instantly identifiable to most of us as his. So there really is then, such a thing as a Woody Allen movie?

``I myself don't think there is, but people will talk about my kind of movie and being able to identify it, and if they're criticizing it they'll say it has a sameness and if they like it they'll say it's an auteur movie.

``The truth of the matter is to me they're all very different, but it's like Chinese food. You can eat differently every night of the year in a Chinese restaurant but in the end it's all Chinese food. . . . You're in the mood for it tonight or you're not."

Everyone was in the mood for ``Annie Hall," ranked 31 among the 100 best American movies by the American Film Institute and winner of four Oscars, including best picture and best director. Yet Allen is remote, almost dismissive, in explaining its appeal.

``It just so happens -- and again this is pure chance -- `Annie Hall' is likable to people. It's got a warm feeling in some way. Keaton is such a great, warm actress and I was perfectly effective in it. People like the dating experience, they like the relationship experience. It's about something they're interested in.

``A picture like `Bullets Over Broadway,' while I may rank it as one of my very best pictures, won't have the same personal meaning to people as `Annie Hall' because `Annie Hall' is a boy-girl relationship movie. It is not about anything unsavory."

``Manhattan" was also accessible, he adds, as were ``Hannah and Her Sisters" and ``Everyone Says I Love You." ``Whether one liked the films or not, I didn't think it was inaccessibility that you could criticize them for. I've made films that were not accessible."

Like what?

`` `Shadows and Fog' is a film that's not really accessible. People don't really care about a black-and-white German expressionist film that takes place in Europe in the ' 20s," he says. ``If I felt I brought it off, and I don't feel I did -- we knew while were were doing it, and we made the joke many times that nobody's going to come and see this, no matter how well we made it."

Here again Allen either states a fact or laments it: ``It's not what people want to see. They want to go and see an `Annie Hall.' "

The list of the films he's most proud of is brutally short. ``There are a few films I've made -- `Match Point' is definitely one of them. `The Purple Rose of Cairo' is one. `Husbands and Wives' is one.

``I've made, I don't know, 35 or 36 films and there have been just a few that I've liked. The others I've been disappointed in in one way or another. And I can't equate this with the success or failure of the films. There have been films I thought were extremely good films that were not either critical or public successes.

Like what?

`` `Hollywood Ending,' which I think is a very funny idea and very well executed and no one seemed to come to it. But a picture like `Hannah and Her Sisters,' which I felt was full of flaws, people adored. So I can't complain because it evens out."

What about ``Broadway Danny Rose"?

``That would be on my list."

Thank God.

Allen has often said he obsesses about the little things in life to escape the dread of the big ones. He may or may not believe this but it reeks of Classic Woody Allen.

``I feel that life consists of distractions. It's the only way to survive," he says. ``You've got to constantly distract yourself from the existential realities of life. You get to work on a solvable situation. I can sit home and obsess for four hours on a second act curtain line and I don't have to sit home alone and obsess about my mortality or something.

``There are a lot of nonsense problems that in the final analysis don't mean anything at all because the downside is you make a bad movie and who cares."

Sam Allis can be reached at allis@globe.com.