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Annie Hall (1977) can be best described under the ambiguous heading of semi-autobiographical or “loosely based on a true story”. The blurring of real life and fiction begins with superficial details like how Woody Allen and his character, Alvy Singer, share the same profession (stand-up comedians who coincidently use the same jokes…the plot thickens) and a similar 1940’s Brooklyn upbringing. Another blurring of reality and fiction comes from the title of the film. Diane Keaton, who plays the titular Annie Hall, was nicknamed Annie while her real surname is Hall.

A key real life detail that influenced the film was that Diane Keaton and Woody Allen dated for five years. Their familiarity and comfort with one another leads to an effortless chemistry in every scene they share. As actors, they draw on their unique history together to create intimate scenes and very natural and realistic moments in their relationship. The quirky chemistry of the pair displayed onscreen would not exist if their real-life actor counterparts had never dated or had known each other so well.

Aside from the superficial similarities mentioned above, both Woody Allen and Diane Keaton have had their own say on how autobiographical the film. Woody Allen has denied the rumors that the film has an autobiographical slant to it saying that “the stuff that people insist is autobiographical is almost invariably not, and it’s so exaggerated that it’s virtually meaningless to the people upon whom these little nuances are based. People got it into their heads that Annie Hall was autobiographical, and I couldn’t convince them that it wasn’t.”

Diane Keaton has taken the opposite approach and is convinced that Woody Allen wrote the film for her and that the character she plays is a more affable version of herself and a character who, like her, was “Semi-articulate, dreamed of being a singer, and suffered from insecurity”. Both stars present conflicting view points on the matter, but they both agree that the film is not strictly autobiographical but also not completely fictional as it has some basis in reality. The best way to describe Annie Hall’s relationship to its main actors is under the disappointingly non-clickbait/TMZ headline of semi-autobiographical.