There's one member of Hollywood whose spent his whole life dealing with one preoccupation...
Woody Allen is known for his obsessive preoccupation with death. His aim to release a film every year, a schedule he's keeping to pretty well, doesn't come from a space of infinite creativity (not purely at least) but primarily as a means of avoiding those pesky and pervasive realisations of his own mortality. This preoccupation with death doesn't just affect his ridiculous amount of production, but also the content of his projects. It feels like you haven't really watched a classic Allen offering until one of the characters, even if it's only one passing line, muses over his own extinction. It permeates everything he works on, and probably always will.
"It’s much more pleasant to be obsessed over how the hero gets out of his predicament than it is over how I get out of mine."
I was introduced to Allen by my dear old Pa, when I was too young to really get the gist of a lot of what was happening, and instead took my cue from whatever made my Dad chuckle. But as I grew up, and started watching the films on my own, I feel in love with Woody all over again. Add to that his obsession with death, and he's a man after my own heart.
A lot of us will remember that moment of recognition, that we're not going to be around forever - I can still see myself standing by my mum's bedside in the middle of the night, blubbering on about how "I don't want you to dieeeee" with tears and snot streaming down my face. So I can totally relate to how poorly this fact of life sits with Allen, and just as his creating of his films offers him a rest-bite, the watching of them offers me some well needed enlightenment and humour on the subject.
"It’s not that I’m afraid to die, I just don't want to be there when it happens."
