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"You equate retirement with death," Woody Allen's character is informed, by his psychiatrist wife, in the opening minutes of his new comedy To Rome With Love. The line is blatant self-diagnosis on Allen's part. In December, the director will turn 77 – well past the point at which "death enters your basic timeframe", as he puts it – and this morning finds him in his editing suite on Park Lane, Manhattan, dressed in khaki slacks and khaki shirt, toiling hard to keep the reaper at bay. In a week or two, he'll finish shooting his 2013 movie, which doesn't yet have a title; then, while he edits that, he'll start mulling ideas for 2014's, poring over the scraps of paper on which he scribbles stray thoughts and keeps in a drawer. Outside, New York is oppressively humid, but thanks to air-conditioning and a total lack of windows, Allen's workspace is a chilly cavern. ("I have an intense desire to return to the womb – anybody's," he once told Time.) Against the dark carpet, dark walls and dark furniture, Allen stands out: a small, beige presence, labouring.

To Rome With LoveProduction year: 2012Directors: Woody AllenCast: Alec Baldwin, Ellen Page, Jesse Eisenberg, Penelope CruzMore on this film

A surprisingly persistent misconception, to this day, is that the real Woody Allen must be broadly the same as his movie persona: the fretful nebbish, plagued by hypochondria, beset by existential terrors, anxious to the point of paralysis. But that Woody Allen, of course, could never have written and directed at least one feature film a year, as he has done, with only two exceptions, since 1966. The offscreen Allen exudes single-mindedness of purpose; he's guardedly friendly, and these days a little deaf. The hypochondria part is real enough, though – as is the fretting. The movie he's wrapping up now – a "serious drama" set in San Francisco, starring Cate Blanchett – is proving a disappointment, he says. But that's always the way.

"I have an idea for a story, and I think to myself, my God, this is a combination of Eugene O'Neill, and Tennessee Williams, and Arthur Miller … but that's because [when you're writing] you don't have to face the test of reality. You're at home, in your house, it's all in your mind. Now, when it's almost over, and I see what I've got, I start to think: what have I done? This is going to be such an embarrassment! Can I salvage it? All your grandiose ideas go out the window. You realise you made a catastrophe, and you think: what if I put the last scene first, drop this character, put in narration? What if I shoot one more scene, to make him not leave his wife, but kill his wife?" These fusillades of self-criticism, you sense, aren't false modesty, nor real terror, but something else: the musings of a veteran who has long since come to terms with the fact that his creative process will always be a long slide into disillusionment. Nine times out of ten, he says, when he leaves the screening of the first rough cut: "The feeling is: OK, now don't panic." The other 10% of the time, it's: "OK. That's not as bad as I thought."

You needn't undergo 37 years of psychoanalysis, as Allen has, to see that all this activity fulfils a therapeutic function. Every few movies, it throws up a gem, too. Last year's Midnight In Paris was Allen's best in years: a purely entertaining fantasy in which Owen Wilson, playing a Hollywood screenwriter on holiday in France, is transported, via a time-travelling Peugeot, to the Paris of the 1920s, where he receives relationship advice from Ernest Hemingway and editorial tips from Gertrude Stein. (For Wilson's character, who romanticises that era, it's a dream come true – but the Parisians of the 20s are themselves nostalgic for the 1890s. That's the problem with longing for the past, Allen is saying: we long for it because it's the past.) The film became Allen's highest-grossing in North America ever, outstripping Hannah and Her Sisters. Even the French loved it, which isn't how things usually go with Allen's late-period Euro movies: British reviewers gave the otherwise acclaimed Match Point a chilly reception, while the Spanish hated Vicky Cristina Barcelona. But then Allen has always been loved by the French, who, he once said, make two mistakes about him: "They think I'm an intellectual because I wear these glasses, and they think I'm an artist because my films lose money."

Woody Allen directing Flavio Parenti and Alison PIll in To Rome With Love.

To Rome With Love, unfortunately, embodies the other result of Allen's shoot-it-and-move-on approach. Trundling on a cheesy tourist trail around the Italian capital (the Trevi fountain, the Spanish Steps), it tells four whimsical stories that never intersect, meaning that its most watchable stars – Alec Baldwin, Penélope Cruz, Roberto Benigni and Allen, appearing in one of his movies for the first time since Scoop, in 2006 – never interact. Benigni, for example, plays a Roman office worker who leaves home one morning to find himself inexplicably hounded by paparazzi; the funniest scenes involve Allen, as a retired opera director, discovering that his daughter's Italian fiance's father has the ability to sing like a world-class tenor, but only in the shower. A tour of opera houses follows, featuring a shower cubicle on stage. But none of it really goes anywhere. The film, as Christopher Orr wrote in the Atlantic, has "a tossed-off, rough-draft quality … it's as if Allen had a handful of early ideas kicking around, couldn't settle on any one of them, saw his psychological nuclear-countdown clock ticking toward the one-year mark, and threw together what he had." The film-a-year schedule, Orr wrote, "increasingly seems less a choice than a compulsion" – a reading with which, meeting Allen, it's hard to disagree.

Given the picture's claim to be a love-letter to Rome, did it bother Allen that Italian critics argued that it showed Rome through the eyes of an outsider – and a pampered celebrity outsider, familiar only with its five-star hotels, at that? "My experience has been, with one exception [Midnight In Paris], that when I do a film in a foreign country, the toughest audience for me is that country," he says. "In Italy, they said: 'This guy doesn't understand Italy.' And I can't argue with those criticisms. I'm an American, and that's how I see Barcelona or Rome or England … If the situation was reversed, and somebody from a foreign country made a film here, I might very well be saying: 'Yeah, it's OK, but this guy really doesn't get New York.' And I'd be right. And I'm sure they're right."

It's a curious truth, though, as Allen points out, that his movies – even the New York classics, pre-eminently Manhattan, in which he starred alongside Diane Keaton in 1977 – have always been outsider's views to some degree. Born Allan Stewart Konigsberg in Brooklyn in 1935, the son of a jewellery engraver and a deli worker, "my view of Manhattan was largely gleaned from Hollywood movies," he says. "Where I grew up, we didn't have sophisticated penthouses. Nobody mixed martinis or popped champagne corks or had white telephones. These things were only in Hollywood movies."

Perhaps it's because Allen is, these days, a pampered celebrity – "everything is done for you by minions," he says of the film-making process – that celebrity is the one subject on which To Rome With Love feels authentic and personal. He has been here before, most obviously in 1998's Celebrity, but in the new film he seems far more reconciled to life in the public eye. When Benigni's character's fame evaporates as suddenly as it arrived, he misses it badly. Allen's message, such as it is – and to non-fans, it will doubtless seem a little smug – is that wealth and fame are pretty fun. "There are lots of nice advantages that you get, being a celebrity," he says. "The tabloid things, the bumps in the road, they come and they go. Most people don't have as big a bump as I had, but even the big bump – it's not life-threatening. It's not like the doctor's saying: 'I looked at these x-rays of your brain, and there's this little thing growing there.' Tabloid things can be handled. I just don't want a shadow on my lung on the x-ray."

The bump to which he is referring, of course, is the scandal that for some people overshadows all his achievements before or since: his split in 1992 from Mia Farrow, after she discovered naked photos he had taken of Farrow's adopted daughter, Soon-Yi Previn, then aged 20, whom Allen subsequently married. There followed a long and acrimonious battle for custody of Farrow and Allen's three children, which Allen lost. (Allen was never Previn's legal father.) Two decades later, there's little more to be said about it. Either you side with the still-seething Farrow camp – "happy father's day, or as they call it in my family, happy brother-in-law's day," Allen's estranged son Ronan Farrow tweeted earlier this year – or you buy Previn's argument that Allen was "never any kind of father figure to me", in which case it's just another May-to-December movie-world marriage. By all accounts, the Allen/Previn union is a tranquil one; the couple have two adopted children, reportedly aged 12 and 14. (Soon-Yi, Allen maintains, still hasn't seen most of his earlier movies, though it's unclear if this is through lack of interest or an aversion to exploring her husband's earlier romances.) Does it bother him, I ask, that for a sizeable minority of his audience, the scandal still defines him? "I think that's true," he says, thoughtfully. "To have been the lead character in a juicy scandal – a really juicy scandal – that will always be a part of what people think of when they think of me. It doesn't bother me. It doesn't please me. It's a non-factor. But it's a true factor."

Owen Wilson and Rachel McAdams in Midnight in Paris, Woody Allen's biggest American hit. Photograph: Sony Pictures Classics/Sportsphoto Ltd/Allstar

What preys on his mind infinitely more – this won't come as a surprise – is ageing. In one sense, this is nothing new: Allen has been confronting the horror of mortality, he says, since he was five, which means that by the time he wrote the part of the death-obsessed Alvy Singer in Annie Hall, back in 1977, he had already been worrying for 37 years. Now actually getting older, though, he finds grim satisfaction in being proved right: "It's a bad business. It's a confirmation that the anxieties and terrors I've had all my life were accurate. There's no advantage to ageing. You don't get wiser, you don't get more mellow, you don't see life in a more glowing way. You have to fight your body decaying, and you have less options." In 46 years as a director, he hasn't budged on his position that there's only one response: watch a basketball game, play the clarinet. "The only thing you can do is what you did when you were 20 – because you're always walking with an abyss right under your feet; they can be hoisting a piano on Park Avenue and drop it on your head when you're 20 – which is to distract yourself. Getting involved in a movie [occupies] all my anxiety: did I write a good scene for Cate Blanchett? If I wasn't concentrated on that, I'd be thinking of larger issues. And those are unresolvable, and you're checkmated whichever way you go."

Plus, he adds, leaning forward: "If you're a celebrity, you can get good medical treatment. I can get a doctor on the weekends. I can get the results of my biopsy quickly."

He doesn't envisage ever stopping making films. "But this can be taken out of my hands in a number of sinister ways." These relate to health, but also to money: the real explanation for Allen's recent filmic tour of European capitals has been the willingness of British, Spanish and Italian funders to step in where US studios won't. "You'd think that after a hit like Midnight in Paris – made a lot of money, not by Dark Knight standards, but by my standards – there would be some companies that would want to do a film with you. But I didn't get a single offer. Not one … and then an Italian company I'd been talking to for years was willing to put up money." Soon-Yi, he says, has been "bothering me relentlessly" to travel to south-east Asia; he'd make a film anywhere, he says, providing he could find the right idea.

Allen still holds, as he's often done, that he's never made a "great" film, though it no longer seems to trouble him. "I'm just trying to be objective and honest," he says. "If you were having a 10-film festival and showing Citizen Kane on Monday, Rashomon on Tuesday, The Bicycle Thief, The Seventh Seal … I don't think anything I've ever made could be placed in a festival with those films and hold its own." If he's exercising on the treadmill and Annie Hall or Take the Money and Run comes on the TV, he says, he switches channel instantly; the same even applies to his personal favourites, The Purple Rose of Cairo and Husbands and Wives. "More than likely, if I stopped to watch it, I'd think: 'Oh, God, can I buy that back?'"

Now and then, an exasperated critic will demand Allen's retirement, as if it's somehow an offence against cinema to keep making films that don't, on the whole, measure up to his earlier triumphs. But they misunderstand his motivation. "Making films is a very nice way to make a living," he says. "You work with beautiful women, and charming men, who are amusing and gifted; you work with art directors and costume people … you travel places, and the money's good. It's a nice living." And the perfect distraction from the abyss. As long as you have the means to keep going, why would you stop?

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