Woody Allen: 'I have calmed down since I got married' to Soon-Yi

Filmmaker Woody Allen says his 22-year marriage to Soon-Yi Previn has been a boon to him, and that the couple disregard controversies that have followed them since their relationship began.

"I have calmed down since I got married. I've got rid of many of my more neurotic traits, although I still won't go through tunnels and I don't like small spaces or elevators," the Brooklyn-born Allen, 84, told the Sunday edition of the U.K. newspaper the Daily Mail. He and Previn, who have raised a pair of adopted daughters now both attending college, "agree on the big stuff — raising kids, where to live, how to act with each other."

Previn, 49 — a South Korean adoptee whose exact birth date is unknown but was set as Oct. 8, 1970, by parents Mia Farrow and André Previn — "changed me," Allen said. "She gets me to go out four or five times a week. She likes the social rumble and I enjoy it, too," he added, presumably speaking of before the COVID-19 pandemic. He noted later in the interview, "Every day we go for a walk but it's not enjoyable. Everything is shut and there is an atmosphere of fear on the streets. I just want to work."

Because Soon-Yi Previn was an adopted daughter of Allen's then-partner Farrow, the new couple's relationship led to public acrimony despite Allen having no familial connection with her.

"On the surface we looked like an irrational match," Allen said. "I was much older and she was an adopted kid. It looked to the outside world that it was an exploitative situation — that I would exploit her as an older predatory male, and she would exploit me for whatever I had. That was never the case." Previn, in an interview with New York magazine's Vulture.com website in 2018, paints a similar picture, consistent with her August 1992 statement to Newsweek: "I'm a psychology major at college who fell for a man who happens to be the ex-boyfriend of Mia. I admit it's offbeat, but let's not get hysterical."

Controversy — including molestation allegations by adoptive daughter Dylan Farrow, which investigations by the Connecticut state's attorney, Yale-New Haven Hospital and the New York State Department of Social Services in the 1990s could not substantiate — have never affected his and Previn's relationship, Allen said. "We didn't let it."