Whit Stillman was so much a part of my ’90s filmgoing experience that he’s one of the primary names that pops up in my head when I am asked to consider that cinematic decade. His first film, METROPOLITAN was released in 1990, the year I graduated from college and moved (briefly) to New York City from Chicago. I remember seeing the film that summer, after it had debuted at Sundance and played the Directors' Fortnight at Cannes. There was something so European about his approach to profiling young, upper-crust New Yorkers that it felt like I was watching people living halfway around the world, instead of just a few dozen block from my apartment in the Village.
Stillman followed that calling-card work with BARCELONA and THE LAST DAYS OF DISCO, the latter of which starred Chloë Sevigny and Kate Beckinsale in two of their finest performances. The filmmaker essentially went silent for more than 10 years, emerging in 2011 with DAMSELS IN DISTRESS, starring Greta Gerwig, and suddenly Stillman was productive again, and I eagerly anticipated his next work, which came in the form of an Amazon Studios pilot, “The Cosmopolitans,” which he is currently reworking.
Stillman also finally adapted a long-beloved Jane Austen novella “Lady Susan” (released after Austen’s death) into his current release LOVE & FRIENDSHIP, which reunites Beckinsale and Sevigny in a story about a master manipulator (Beckinsale), who is attempting to secure her fortune and that of her disagreeable daughter, whom she hopes to match with a numbskull. The film is devilishly funny, smart, and far more wicked than we’ve come to expect from an Austen story. I had a chance to sit down with Stillman at Sundance in January to talk about his place in the American film landscape, his obsessions with Austen, what he plans next, and even the prospect of opening up his previous works thanks to an aggressive reissue campaign via The Criterion Collection. Please enjoy my chat with Whit Stillman…
Capone: I realized when I was watching the film last night that I want to live in a time where flirting can ruin someone’s reputation.
Whit Stillman: [laughs] I think if you went to a party with your friends and someone’s flirting with a husband, there’d be consequences.
Capone: Yes, but it’s not going to ruin a reputation, to the degree where you might not marry somebody as a result. The stakes seemed much higher in this period.
WS: This is true.
Capone: This was an era about behavior, mannerisms and how much was riding on gestures and the right words. What was it about that that you like so much, and do you see modern equivalents?
WS: Well, one of the things about feminism sometimes is the idea women weren’t at all powerful until recently. In fact, when some of my friends talk about their mothers and grandmothers, they are just really quite intimidated by how successfully manipulative and controlling these people were. They were able to call all of the shots without having a credit card or bank account, but they still did all the spending. So I think that this does go back and it has been in some people’s lifetimes, and it goes back to the 18th century too.
Capone: The first thing I wrote in my notes after the movie was “Men control the money, the property, the government, and the women control the men.”
WS: Yes. They’re intermediaries.
Capone: So why did you want to tell this story now?
WS: Well, it’s a question of something being finished. So I saw this in the early 2000s. I love Jane Austen. For me, as a writer/director, it’s very interesting because I don't want to reduce the masterpiece of hers that I love to a 90-minute film, which is like making it a visual novella that she wrote. In this case, we could add to it and complete something that she had left, on her terms, incomplete. It’s concluded—she had a conclusion to what she wrote, but it’s obviously just tacked, on and she hadn’t really finished it. So we could finish a Jane Austen [story] and put it on the screen.
It’s also the most comic thing she wrote. It’s very like Oscar Wilde-ian, and everyone likes Oscar Wilde. And this was essentially before him. So for me, it was very, very appealing that way. Then I knew I was going to work on it off and on when I was free from other assignments, and that’s when I wanted to do it. I knew it was a slow process of recasting and distilling it; it couldn't be used in the form it was. It had to be a different format. I had to get the original out of my head, not just something else. It took a long time. Otherwise, at a certain point, things went swimmingly ahead.
Capone: The humor is so biting, and it makes it possible for Kate Beckinsale to give the best performance she’s ever given. That has a lot of dialogue, and it’s delivered exactly right.
WS: She’s sensational. I think it was like a dam breaking, in a sense that she’s done these very commercial, very successful films; she’s been a Hollywood star. It’s no accident that she played Ava Gardner [in THE AVIATOR] because she has that kind of star status. But probably her greatest talent is playing this kind of piece. She’d done it really well in COLD COMFORT FARM, the John Schlesinger film. She’d done really well in a mini series of EMMA, an adaptation of Jane Austen’s Emma. She did it, I feel, in our film THE LAST DAYS OF DISCO, and I think there’s some other things she did. But then for a number of years she's been doing a number of other projects, and this is her coming back to something she’s incredibly good at and incredibly special at. There’s no one else. When we were doing the casting, we considered other possibilities, other discussions, but from beginning to end, it always seemed that this was the Kate Beckinsale part.
Capone: Did you sit though the film last night?
WS: I did.
Capone: I was noticing that she is talking so fast sometimes that the audience was playing catch up. There was an extra beat before they realized, “Oh, that was really funny,” and they’d start laughing. It was actually kind of great.
WS: I thought the screening this morning was better, because we were all tired last night. But last night was fun. The tweets were good [laughs]. It’s so funny at the end of the film now, you see all the phones light up. When it’s a good screening, it’s cool.
Capone: Was the original Austen novella as biting? Was the humor the same? I’m not familiar with her doing that type of writing.
WS: I think the reason why it hasn’t caught on, the novella, I think it’s just a little too heartless. Lady Susan doing all this terrible stuff all the time, all the time. I think one of the things she probably would have done, which we have done, is leaven that with other things, make it lighter, differentiate, and have more characters.
Capone: With the Sir James character, it’s funny that we, the audience, have a very similar reaction to him that the people in the film do. We first think he’s basically a buffoon, but we find his qualities as the film goes on. His charm comes through, and people start to take to him a little bit.
WS: He’s happy. Happily oblivious. I think they’re all happy, actually. I think every character gets a happier resolution, I believe. I think that’s the way it should be in this kind of piece. They should be happiness for everyone.
Capone: That is very Jane Austen. Was there anything different about your approach to this material since you were working from material that you didn’t write?
WS: Yes, it was strangely liberating. You know that dictum that some directors quote? There’s a famous screenwriting teacher at USC who used to ask the question of his class, “As the adaptors of a literary piece, how much do you owe to the original?” And the class is supposed to shout out, “Nothing!” It’s a bit of a bind, because I think one of the hard-working errors that some critics do who were probably pushed by their editors is that if an adaptation is being made of an important piece, they read it before they go to the screening of a movie, which is like the fatal way to see it, because no [audience member] has read it right before. Somebody might have read it like three years before. So it kills the movie, because why should the movie change things? The movie has to exist on its own. But in this case, her material was so funny. It was just a question of having it dramatized and working as a fluid comedy drama.
Capone: Tell me about your history with Jane Austen.
WS: My history with Jane Austen is, I originally read one of her novels in college and hated her. I told everyone that she was overrated [laughs]. So I went around that way for awhile. That’s a college student attitude. But I read the wrong thing and I read it in the wrong mindset. I read “Northanger Abbey,” and I wanted to see finally when I got to like Jane Austen, if I would like that any better, and I went back and read it again. I do like it. It’s good. It’s just it’s much less good than everything else, but it’s still good. It’s fun. But I didn’t get it at all. Then, I think my sister pushed me to read something else. My sister always pushes me to read new books. So I read either “Sense and Sensibility” or “Pride and Prejudice” and really liked it, and then read everything else.
Capone: You mentioned last night about this relationship you have with Amazon Studios, who helped put this together. Tell me about that relationship.
WS: I think it was one of the first deals they did as Amazon Studios before anyone knew about them was they optioned my first film METROPOLITAN as a remake. And they offered it to wanna-be filmmakers to take the script and do whatever they wanted with it, like adapt it to another group of characters. But I think they ran into problems with the guilds. They didn't like that, people writing for free. So it was never announced, but I had a nice relationship with the head there.
Capone: But you liked the idea?
WS: I liked the idea a lot, and it was great for my investors. We got this payment. I love the idea of people, you know, they’re not going to remake the same film, they’re just going to just use the general template. When I was doing DAMSELS, I started getting calls about doing a half-hour comedy for them. I wasn’t ready to do that. Then they called me and they said they had a project set in Paris. And they had a script they wanted me to rewrite and direct it. I read the script and I went “No.” I lived in Paris for a long time, and this was done by someone who had been there for two weeks. I said, I have a Paris story I could tell, but I don’t want to go with the script, and they were very happy. They were thrilled to have an original.
The thing is, I don't like to do a mini-bible going forward with something, so when we did the pilot, they were interested to see how it would go forward, and I said “No, I can't do that. I need to just try to write the scripts and see where the story goes.” So they gave me the commission to write six scripts, but because I had this, I couldn't do it. So in a week, I’m going to be plunging into the six scripts I have to write, and it’s really been great this year, because now I have an idea I’m really excited about.
Capone: So you’re talking about “The Cosmopolitans”?
WS: I’m talking about “The Cosmopolitans,” but it would be a new “Cosmopolitans.” It will have probably many of the same actors, but it’s going off in a new direction. It won’t be so much Paris, it’s Europe.
Capone: Speaking of some of your older films, I’ve been really excited that Criterion has been putting them out, and they have the box set coming out soon. The fact that someone is restoring these and treating them seriously, and with the new film coming out, it’s a chance for younger audiences to discover you, because your films feel really young.
WS: Yeah, they’re all about young people. Yeah, this is the first one where I have older characters, who make jokes about having children.
Capone: That’s what I’m saying. Talk about the prospect of people discovering or rediscovering your first films.
WS: Yeah, that’d be great, because I do see among the so-called fan base a generational thing where there’s a gap when I was doing nothing, and people don’t know about it. Some people who are much younger, if their parents liked them, they might have seen them because their parents liked them, but they’re missing the people in between the parents and kids who don’t know about them. It’s only BARCELONA that’s getting the new treatment from Criterion, but then they’re putting all three together [in a box set], because there was that idea of a trilogy because there is some overlap between the characters a little bit.
Capone: In LOVE & FRIENDSHIP, Lady Susan is wearing dark clothes at the beginning because she’s a widow, but they’re some of the sexiest mourning clothes that I’ve ever seen.
WS: She’s wearing mourning clothes in the beginning of the film, then takes it off. She’s in a bathrobe in one scene. She gets into her red bed chamber outfit when Reginald comes.
Capone: You’ve done period films before, but not this far back. Does that add an extra layer of enjoyment for you, to dress people like that and design a room like that? Talk about that aspect of it.
WS: Absolutely. The actors said they all found it very helpful. Because normally, they have to get into a part wearing the same clothes that they do in everyday life. In this case, they’re encased in these fabrics and these beautiful clothes and going around in carriages to beautiful houses. So they say it helps them be in period, and also the script was so period with the period Jane Austen dialogue. Somebody might say “bankers rolling in money” is contemporary. That’s not true That’s her phrase. All of these things are her phrases.
Capone: Where did you shoot this?
WS: It’s set in South England, but to recreate South England today—South England has completely blown up and is commercial and noisy and overgrown. Well Ireland has the 18th century rich English houses. It was the richest second of the British Empire in the 18th century, so it all has that. It’s the backlot for period films; tons of period films are shot there, so you get the most expert crews.
Capone: Did you identify with one of these characters maybe more than another?
WS: Sir James. I think we have a silly person within or a silly optimist, and this is a person who says foolish things he shouldn’t say. So I guess Sir James. And Lady Susan too, because we all have this conniving, too clever, trying to get our way, being not so nice to people sometimes. And Frederica, I guess. Frederica is the point of view in the film.
Capone: One of the things I also wrote down after the film is I love that it’s a celebration of language and the persuasive, manipulative power of just language.
WS: It’s more than just language. It’s also poses and ideas. So one of the things she does that is very clever with Reginald is when he comes to break up with her on his high horse, and she turns it and breaks up with him. She breaks up with him before he could break up with her, which is a great strategy, because people have that pride. They start thinking like “Why was this thing taken away from me?” That is a really true scene. I think that really happens.
Capone: Thank you so much. It was really great to meet you.
