In a rare interview with Vanity Fair, the film-maker said that his marriage to Soon-Yi Previn, who is 35 years his junior, had a “paternal feeling to it” but “works like magic”.

“The very inequality of me being older and much more accomplished, much more experienced, takes away any real meaningful conflict,” he told the magazine. “So when there’s disagreement, it’s never an adversarial thing. I don’t ever feel that I’m a hostile or threatening person.”

The famously neurotic director denied that he had made a Freudian slip by leaving nude Polaroids of Soon-Yi, then 21, on his mantelpiece, where they were discovered by Farrow, precipitating the couple’s acrimonious break-up.

“I feel this is a case of a cigar being a cigar. It was a turning point in my life for the better,” he said. “It was just one of the fortuitous events, one of the great pieces of luck in my life.”

Now working on his 36th film in 40 years, he says that he managed to continue making movies despite the 1992 scandal because “I’m a compartmentaliser”. Indeed, Allen considered asking Farrow to play his wife in 1994’s Mighty Aphrodite. But his casting director told him: “You must be kidding.”

“The fact that Mia and I had been terribly contentious and had a terrible experience — yes, that’s true. But, you know, that doesn’t mean that she shouldn’t play the part,” Allen said. “I’m just not the kind of person that thinks, well, you did a terrible thing to me in my life, and so I’m not working with you . . . I mean, there’s a line you draw. I wouldn’t put, you know, Hermann Goering in a part, but short of Nuremberg crimes . . .”

Approaching his 70th birthday on December 1, Allen complained that ageing was a “terrible thing”. “It’s all just bad news. You deteriorate physically and die!” he said. “All the crap they tell you about — you know, dangling your grandchildren on your knee, and having a kind of wisdom in your golden years — it’s all tripe,” he said. “I’ve gained no wisdom, no insight, no mellowing. I would make all the same mistakes again, today.”

Allen, who gave up therapy after meeting Soon-Yi, said that he had lived his life in “low-level depression”. “My shrink said to me, ‘when you came here, I thought it was going to be extremely interesting and kind of fascinating, but it’s like, you know, listening to an accountant or something’.”

Allen clings to a simple routine that begins with a workout on the treadmill and taking his two children with Soon-Yi to school before spending much of the day writing on his bed.

He says that he is “definitely a pessimist”. As a film-maker, he gives himself a “B” and said he would never make a movie as good as Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal.

“I feel that level of greatness is not in me. Because I see no evidence of it, after a very, very fair try,” he said. “It may just not be in the genes, or I just don’t have the depth of humanity to do that. I’ve been around a long time, and some people may just get tired of me, which I can understand,” he said.

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