TORONTO - Woody Allen is widely regarded as a cinematic legend, but the famously self-deprecating director insisted Wednesday that he's not a "dedicated filmmaker" and that his movies take a back seat to his clarinet playing, his family and his passion for basketball and baseball.

"I want to shoot and go home and get on with my life," Allen told journalists at the Toronto International Film Festival while promoting his latest effort, "Cassandra's Dream."

The film stars Ewan McGregor and Colin Farrell as two working-class brothers whose lives begin to unravel after their wealthy uncle (played by Tom Wilkinson) asks them to commit murder.

The two heartthrobs were also on hand Wednesday to discuss the movie, but Allen was clearly the centre of attention, brushing off questions about his notoriously quick shoots by saying he's simply a lazy guy and that filmmaking is not the "end-all be-all" of his life.

"When I made my first film 'Take the Money and Run,' you know, it was a nightmare. People saying 'hurry up, hurry up, you're wasting money' and 'we have 10 more minutes and you've got to make two more shots,' " he said.

"I started to think to myself: 'This is crazy, I only went into films for the most shallow reasons - to meet women (and) so I wouldn't have to have a really arduous life of drudgery ... I went into it not with the highest aspirations but with base motives. I thought to myself after the first film: 'This is ridiculous, I don't want to work late to get a shot and miss the basketball game,' or 'I'm seeing friends for dinner tonight, I don't want to have to work late.' "

"Cassandra's Dream" is the third film in a row that Allen has made in London rather than in the New York City landscape that has defined much of his work. The reasons he shoots abroad, he says, have to do with artistic and economic freedom, joking that there's also a side benefit: it's allowed him to realize his dream of being a foreign filmmaker like his idols Ingmar Bergman and Federico Fellini.

Most recently, he's been shooting in Spain.

"I suddenly found myself this past summer working with Javier Bardem and Penelope Cruz and I was a foreign filmmaker all of a sudden and it was like the fulfilment of my young adulthood fantasy," he said.

"Cassandra's Dream" revisits themes of conscience and crime that the director has explored previously in "Crimes and Misdemeanors" and "Match Point."

Still, Allen said he never goes back and looks at earlier films and doesn't dwell on the finished product.

"I could probably do a little better work if I was a little more careful or a little more conscientious," he said.

"I'm not a perfectionist. I like to do a film every year and throw a lot of stuff up on the wall and what sticks, sticks and what doesn't, doesn't. I don't like to make a big production of every film and dine out on the successes and brood over the failures. I just like to make them and get the money and move on with my life."

But could it really be true that Allen, the poster-boy for neuroticism, doesn't brood?

"I don't brood about films, no, I brood about other things," he said Wednesday.

"Films keep me from brooding. I get obsessed with how to get a joke to work or how to get a scene to work and that keeps me from brooding about terrible things that I have no control over. But I don't brood about films because it's not worth it ... there are many, many more painful things in life than films."