Woody Allen is the founding father of the genre of intellectual comedy and one of the most iconic characters of modern cinema, director of such recognized film hits as “Everything you always wanted to know about sex, but were afraid to ask”, “Love and Death”, “ Annie Hall”, “Manhattan”, “The Purple Rose of Cairo”, “Bullets over Broadway”, “Curse of the Jade Scorpion”, “Match Point”, “Sensation”, “Cassandra’s Dream” and many others (more than thirty to date films). From the very beginning of his directorial career, he preferred to act in the leading role himself - and created for himself in cinema an easily recognizable image of a bespectacled “smart guy, a neurotic New Yorker and an ever-reflexive intellectual who urgently needs a psychoanalyst. Allen is the winner of such honorary awards for cumulative merits as the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival (“For his contribution to the art of cinema”) and the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival (before him, only Ingmar Bergman had received this award), as well as the Prince of Asturias Award , which is called the “Spanish Nobel”, and in Oviedo, the capital of Asturias, a monument was even erected to Allen. The book, which spans Allen's career from his 1960s cabaret comedy routines to his September 2008 film Vicky Cristina Barcelona starring Scarlett Johansson, Penélope Cruz and Javier Bardem, collected his conversations with the prominent Swedish cinematographer and film critic Stig Björkman, already known to Russian readers from a book of interviews with Lars von Trier.