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“This is the Woody doc everybody has been waiting for, and I am delighted that this creative giant is finally assuming his rightful place in the American Masters library,” says Susan Lacy, series creator and executive producer of American Masters, an eight-time winner of the Emmy^® Award for Outstanding Primetime Non-Fiction Series. The series is a production of THIRTEEN for WNET, the parent company of THIRTEEN and WLIW21, New York’s public television stations, and operator of NJTV. For nearly 50 years, WNET has been producing and broadcasting national and local documentaries and other programs to the New York community.

“Woody Allen was always the big ‘get’ for me,” says Robert Weide, best known for his long-term directing/producing stint on Curb Your Enthusiasm, which earned him Emmy^® and Golden Globe^® Awards. “The prolific nature of Woody’s output has provided me with an embarrassment of riches. In fact, Woody will have made three features just in the time it’s taken me to make this one documentary.”

Beginning with Allen’s childhood and his first professional gigs as a teen — furnishing jokes for comics and publicists — American Masters – Woody Allen: A Documentary chronicles the trajectory and longevity of Allen’s career: from his work in the 1950s-60s as a TV scribe for Sid Caesar, standup comedian and frequent TV talk show guest, to a writer-director averaging one film-per-year for more than 40 years. Weide covers Allen’s earliest film work in Take the Money and Run, Bananas, Sleeper, and Love and Death; frequent Oscar^® favorites such as Annie Hall, Manhattan, Zelig, Broadway Danny Rose, Purple Rose of Cairo, Crimes and Misdemeanors, Husbands & Wives, Bullets Over Broadway, and Mighty Aphrodite; and his recent globetrotting phase with Match Point, Vicky Christina Barcelona, and this year’s commercial success Midnight in Paris.

Exploring the ultimate “independent filmmaker’s” writing habits, casting, directing, and relationship with his actors, Weide traveled with Allen from the London set of You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger — a major coup “considering Woody has never allowed so much as an EPK [Electronic Press Kit] crew on his sets,” claims Weide — to the Cannes premiere of Midnight in Paris this May. He also filmed Allen at home, in the editing room and touring his childhood haunts in the Midwood section of Brooklyn. New interviews provide insight and backstory: actors Antonio Banderas, Josh Brolin, Penelope Cruz, John Cusack, Larry David, Seth Green, Mariel Hemingway, Scarlett Johansson, Julie Kavner, Diane Keaton, Martin Landau, Louise Lasser, Sean Penn, Tony Roberts, Chris Rock, Mira Sorvino, Naomi Watts, Dianne Wiest, and Owen Wilson; writing collaborators Marshall Brickman, Mickey Rose and Doug McGrath; cinematographers Gordon Willis and Vilmos Zsigmond; Allen’s sister and producing partner Letty Aronson; producers Robert Greenhut and Stephen Tenenbaum; longtime managers Jack Rollins and Charles H. Joffe; casting director Juliet Taylor; pal Dick Cavett; and Martin Scorsese; among many others.

American Masters – Woody Allen: A Documentary also touches on Allen’s contributions as a writer for the theater and his casual pieces for The New Yorker, as well as his frequent moonlighting gig as a clarinet player with a New Orleans-style jazz band. “He never refused a request and he never declined to answer a question,” says Weide.

Woody Allen: A Documentary is a Whyaduck Productions, Rat Entertainment, Mike’s Movies, and Insurgent Media production in association with THIRTEEN’s American Masters for WNET. Robert Weide is director, writer, producer, and co-editor. Michael Peyser, Brett Ratner, Erik Gordon, Fisher Stevens, and Andrew Karsch are executive producers. Susan Lacy is the series creator and executive producer of American Masters.

American Masters is made possible by the support of the National Endowment for the Arts and by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Additional funding for American Masters is provided by Rosalind P. Walter, The Blanche & Irving Laurie Foundation, Rolf and Elizabeth Rosenthal, Cheryl and Philip Milstein Family, Jack Rudin, Jody and John Arnhold, Vital Projects Fund, The André and Elizabeth Kertész Foundation, Michael & Helen Schaffer Foundation, and public television viewers. Funding for this program is provided by Miriam and Sam Blatt.

For Martin Scorsese, growing up in Little Italy, seeing On the Waterfront and East of Eden as a young man was a life-changing experience. Scorsese appears on and off camera throughout A Letter to Elia, taking us through Kazan’s life and through his own as well, and through his growing realization that there was an artist behind the camera, someone “who knew me, maybe better than I knew myself.” The film is about being exposed to the right movies at the right moment in your adolescent life, when you’re wide open and ready to connect, to be spurred on by the work up there on the screen, and then, maybe, to chart a course toward making your own movies.

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Composed of clips, stills, readings from Kazan’s autobiography and his speech on directing (read by Elias Koteas), a videotaped interview done late in Kazan’s life, and Scorsese’s commentary on and offscreen, A Letter to Elia takes a close look at the life of art and its creation – the work, the distractions, the inspirations, the complications, the intersections between art and experience.

A Letter to Elia, written and directed by Scorsese and his longtime collaborator Kent Jones, is a deeply personal film, a frank portrait and self-portrait, and an equally frank acknowledgement of the closeness and the distance between artists and their art.

What first got you interested in doing a film on I.M. Pei?

When Eugene Shirley, the producer of I. M. Pei: Building China Modern, contacted me back in 2003 to ask I would be interested in directing a film about Pei, I was very excited about the idea. I had seen Pei’s pyramid at the Louvre and other buildings done by him – CAA in LA, the East Wing of the National Museum of Art – and was eager to find out more about the man behind these great works.  Eugene had been directing as well as producing up until that time, but found that producing itself was more than full time, especially in China.  I was very happy to be asked to take over that role.

While making the film, did you learn anything that surprised you about Pei?

I was amazed at the sheer number and variety of buildings Pei had designed and built.  And I found the story of his exile from China very compelling.  Pei left China in 1935 at age 17 to study engineering, intending to return home at the end of his studies. For decades his return was interrupted by war and revolution, keeping him in the United States for his whole adult life. Then at the age of 85, he was asked to design an art museum for his hometown city of Suzhou.  The story of the “Return of the Native” was very compelling for me.

Are there any interesting anecdotes about the filming or the interviewees?

Suzhou Museum, Night View, I.M. Pei Architect with Pei Partnership Architects. Photo by: Kerun Ip

Filming in China presented huge challenges for the production.  We were constantly shadowed by friendly but strict representatives of the Communist Party, including our translators, so we were not able to hear any negative points of view about the museum, which after all was extremely controversial in that it required destroying neighborhoods in an area protected by UNESCO, which had designated that part of Old Suzou as a World Heritage Site.  When interviewing officials, we were required to adhere to a very strict list of questions. Filming Pei at the Louvre was a joy, however – he seemed very free and happy to be there, and that shoot provided an opening to the film that enabled audiences to enter into the story of tradition vs. modernism, our focus in China.

Please describe your approach to the film.

During interviews, I like to prepare a list of questions, but then to be spontaneous and open to following interesting threads that I may not have foreseen.  I also like to get as much verité footage of everything that is happening around the subject of the film, and then to discover the story in the footage during editing.

What were some of the obstacles in achieving your vision of the film?

This was one of the rare films that I directed but did not produce, and Eugene’s and my visions were not always the same.  I was more interested in the biographical and personal aspects of Pei’s life and how these influenced his design of the museum; while Eugene’s focus was very much on the theme of the film – tradition vs modernism – as reflected in the in the creation of the Suzhou museum.  In the end, we created a film that we are both very proud of.

Please describe your background credits, how maybe they led to this film.

Eugene contacted me in 2003 after seeing my recently completed documentary, Robert Capa: In Love and War, which I had written, produced and directed for American Masters.  Apparently, he liked what he saw there, and I had also been recommended to him by people at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Arts, and elsewhere.  The Capa film, as well as my previous film on Edward S. Curtis, which was also broadcast on American Masters, gave him confidence that I could direct a strong film about an artist and his work.