The_Film_That_Changed_My_Life

Annie Hall
17
Johnson: In terms of filmmaking, I’d put it up there with 8½ in terms
of a film that personally redefined for me what film was capable of. This
was one of the first films I saw that played with form in a brave way, and
it paid off. It completely worked in the back end. It wasn’t like a [Jean-
Luc] Godard film where it was about “getting it” at the end of the film.
It wasn’t like, an “Oh wow, I see what they’re doing, and that’s incredibly
clever. I can analyze it this way and that way write a paper in film school
about it.”
This was a film that broke so many rules in terms of film narrative, and it
moved me in a way that very few other films have moved me. That’s something
that, I pray to God, if I am able to keep making movies, I can only
hope, twenty years down the line maybe, I’ll be able to approach. It’s magical
to me. To this day, I can watch the film and try to analyze it and try to
figure out how this little movie works, and it’s almost impossible. I just end
up getting lost. It’s not the sort of thing that I can analyze. For me, watching
the film is like a kid watching a magic trick.
You talked about the film breaking rules. What rules did it break, and
to what effect?
Johnson: First of all, traditional narrative. Just in terms of the timeline of
the film, it hops around and is incredibly subjective. There’s direct address
at points, but the point at which those things come seems almost random. It
doesn’t seem, on the surface at least, to have any rules. All of a sudden you
cut to an animated sequence, with the evil queen.
At one point he approaches random people on the street, and then he
approaches a horse that a cop is riding and starts talking to the horse. That’s
one of the huge contrasts that to this day astounds me that it works so well
and feels so cohesive. If you watch the stuff that’s happening in it, it’s just as
chaotic and wacky as anything in Love and Death or Sleeper, but tonally it
manages to have realism that feels very grounded. That’s a lot of what buys
it that emotional payoff at the end.
Let’s talk about a couple of the reasons why that might be. Annie Hall, of
course, the name comes from Diane Keaton, because her real last name
is Hall; it’s written for her. Gordon Willis was the cinematographer for