Woody Allen has revealed that he is not the 'great artist' that he thought he was going to be at the start of his career.
I'm not the great artist that I was certain I would be when I was younger.
Allen is back in the director's chair this week with his new movie Whatever Works, which he also wrote, while You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger is due for release later this year.
Despite picking up three Oscars during his career, two for writing and one Best Director for Annie Hall, Allen believes that he is not the filmmaker that he hoped he would be.
Speaking to The Daily Telegraph he said: "You always start out with great hopes. When I'm writing, laying at home in bed, where you don't meet the test of reality, you know, you're in your own home, and, 'That's great' and 'Oh, this scene's going to be fabulous' and 'Wait till they see this' and 'This is like Citizen Kane'.
"Then, you've got to put up or shut up. You shoot and you make mistakes. You put the camera in the wrong place. And some of the scenes you wrote at home that you thought were so brilliant are not so brilliant. It's always disappointing."
"When we go from that [editing] room into this room, with the first cut of the picture, and put it up on the screen for the first time, it's always like a cold shower. And all your grandiose ambitions reduce themselves to, 'How can I save this from being an embarrassment?'.
"I'm not the great artist that I was certain I would be when I was younger. I still delude myself sometimes and think, 'Well, maybe I’ll get lucky and something will come out like that'. But you know, after 40, 41 films, whatever - you start to realise, it's just not there."
Whatever Works is released 25th June.
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