Woody Allen feels ‘lucky’ to have wife Soon-Yi

NEW YORK — Woody Allen says his relationship with wife Soon-Yi Previn, which has a "more paternal feeling," is "one of the truly lucky things that happened to me in my life."

Allen, a two-time Oscar winner, married Previn in 1997. She is the adopted daughter of Andre Previn and Mia Farrow, Allen's former girlfriend.

In 1992, Allen was discovered to be having an affair with Previn, then 22, while he was dating Farrow. He and Previn have two daughters, ages 5 and 6.

"I'm sure there are things that I might have done differently," he says in an interview in Vanity Fair magazine, on newsstands Nov. 8. "Probably in retrospect I should have bowed out of that relationship (with Farrow) much earlier than I did."

But Allen, who will be 70 on Dec. 1, says age hasn't brought wisdom.

"I've gained no wisdom, no insight, no mellowing. I would make all the same mistakes again, today," he tells the magazine.

Despite the calamitous beginnings of his relationship with Previn, he says, "It was just completely fortuitous. One of the truly lucky things that happened to me in my life."

"I don't ever feel that I'm with a hostile or threatening person. It's got a more paternal feeling to it."

Though his separation and subsequent custody battles with Farrow over their three children was bitter, Allen says he wanted to cast her in his 1995 film, "Mighty Aphrodite." Casting director Juliet Taylor talked him out of it, and the part went to Helena Bonham Carter.

"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,'" he says. "I mean, there's a line that you draw. I wouldn't put, you know, Hermann Goring in a part, but short of Nuremberg crimes ..."

Allen will release his latest film, "Match Point," in December, a thriller starring Scarlett Johansson and Jonathan Rhys-Meyers. It has been acclaimed as a return to form for Allen, who won Oscars for 1977's "Annie Hall" and 1986's "Hannah and Her Sisters."

His screen credits also include "Interiors," "Manhattan," "Broadway Danny Rose," "The Purple Rose of Cairo" and "Deconstructing Harry."

"I'm made, oh, perfectly decent films," he says. "But not ‘8 1/2,' not ‘The Seventh Seal,' ‘The 400 Blows' or `L'Avventura' — ones that to me really proclaim cinema as art, on the highest level. If I was the teacher, I'd give myself a B."