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Whit Stillman is ready for television.
As it turns out, Stillman is still trying to makeThe Cosmopolitanshappen, though in slightly different form.
It hasnt been by choice.
Both are a testament to Stillmans easy brilliance.
Five years ago, you made a pilot forThe Cosmopolitans.
I told them when Im called to do an outline, it doesnt turn out very good.
But I find if I do that, I come up with cliches and things which are ultimately uninteresting.
Then I went off to doLove & Friendship, then I wrote the novelization.
When I came back to doThe Cosmopolitans, something struck me.
Id long wanted to do a film set in Europe dealing with geopolitical intrigue.
Howd they receive the change in direction?They said, Great, spies!
Its the spy genre.
Theres a place for true adventure right now.
There are countries under siege by authoritarian forces its a bit like the 1930s, as has been observed.
Its really rich material for one of those great 30s comedy-adventure films, likeForeign Correspondent.
Things with that comic spirit.
Weve been jokingly calling it Seinfeldwith swords or Friendsagainst fascism.
It has to be the nextGame of Thrones.
Spies and adventure is a bit of a change for you.I got into it a little bit inBarcelona.
Theres a shooting; one of the lead characters almost dies.
AndBarcelonaplayed really well across the United States.
The distributors were shocked that it was doing so well in places like Dallas.
I assume youre abandoning the original pilot and starting from scratch?Yes, exactly.
We were calling itThe Cosmopolitans: The Plot Against the Prince.
The first eight episodes will be about the plot against the prince.
It could have been calledParis Knights.
Now its looking like it will be calledKnights Without Armour.
Satire is not something I do.
I just dont do satire.
And not try too much to process it or dumb it down or explain too much.
And I do like them.
Since Ive made so few, its good that I still like them.
Youve said thatDamsels in Distressis your favorite movie of yours.Its my favorite movie.
I feel very close to that movie.
Its loads of fun.
It wasnt as well-received as your other films.
Why do you think that is?Its like a retro college utopia.
Its a little like a musical.
I dont know, people who are into naturalism arent into this.
But I had a lot of support for the movie in France.
That actually made it possible to makeLove & Friendship.
Your first three movies are pretty well beloved.
If youre alive a lot of good can come of it.
Actually, Criterion coming out withThe Last Days of Discoin 2009 helped me makeDamsels in Distress.
There were really cool screenings when it came out.
It really helps, having those screenings and releases, to get younger generations to know the films.
Andrew Bujalski and Joe Swanberg and the Duplass Brothers and of course Greta.
Also, more enunciation.
I suppose there were people influenced by you in the 90s as well.
Noah Baumbach?I think the list is Noah Baumbach and Noah Baumbach and thats it.
It was definitely a one-off thing in the 90s.
Everything then was Tarantino and guns and cool stuff.
All those talky gun movies.At least theyre talky.
Good dialogue is good dialogue, even if there are guns.
TheLethal Weaponfilms have very good dialogue.Raiders of the Lost Arcis full of humor and incisive remarks.
Thats important for the films lasting.
I had no idea how to get there.
I had done some journalism.
I wrote some comedy stuff for theCrimson.
I thought maybe Id get a job in banking and write novels on the side.
So I went into the Doubleday training program.
I was secretary at the Doubleday Crime Club doing crime novels.
Then I became an assistant to a senior editor.
I signed up books and got stuff published.
I never made associate editor, but I was editing.
Id get off work at 2 a.m. Where can you get a drink at 2 or 3?
And at some point you moved to Europe?I went to Barcelona to get married.
The Spanish film industry was very casual, very porous.
I played an American psychiatrist in a Spanish comedy and got to observe the shoot.
Instead, I decided to do something that I could shoot in a single room.
It was going to be social pornography, all about the class system.
Characters people will hate.
So I shifted to that from theBarcelonascript.
So you were hammering outMetropolitanwhile working abroad?I was writingMetropolitannights and weekends.
Sometimes Id get a weeks vacation and Id think, Ill write a lot of this script.
I love drinking coffee and getting revved up on it, but sometimes it goes astray.
Eventually, I finished the script.
Id saved some money.
It was a great sort of Cinderella experience.
Three hundred people showed up to the first mornings auditions.
Chris Eigeman was the first person who showed up.
He put up the sign-up sheet.
The movie premiered at Sundance.
What was the response like?Our problem was distributors had already seen the movie and turned it down.
But after Sundance, the movie started to grow in reputation.
We had no distribution deal for the United States until the press screening for New Directors/New Films at MoMA.
The critics were laughing it up.
There was this weird commotion in the back of the theater, people coming in and out.
I thought, Why are they doing this?
Why wont they just sit down?
It turned out they were seeing the critical reaction and making bids on the film.
Did it help that you were nominated for the best screenplay Oscar?It helps people explain things.
Now youre the Oscar-nominated Whit Stillman.
They put that in the notes and it probably does something.
I dont know quite what.
Its definitely a thing that they say.
Oh, hes Oscar nominated.
you’re able to take it to the bank.I wish.
I had never had bank financing.
I made the mistake of saying that in Madrid, and everyone said, Oh, itsfacha.
Its glorifying the military.
Anything positive about the military in Spain in that period wasfacha.
And for us, its a wonderfully corny, great romantic film set in this world of navy pilots.
I met with them, but I didnt pay it enough attention.
The script didnt quite have soul.
It was a learning experience, maybe too late: Dont judge a project too quickly.
It can be improved.
It can be changed.
But I think I disqualified myself from doing other peoples scripts.
How did Chloe Sevigny come to be cast inLast Days?That was the editor ofMetropolitanandBarcelona.
He was aware of Chloe and he said I would really like her.
The casting people I was working with were very dismissive.
Shes not a trained actress, shes just a downtown person, blah blah blah.
But I really wanted to meet her.
She came in and was fantastic and seemed like a long-lost relative.
Id been under a lot of pressure to have stars in the movie.
We had offered it to Winona Ryder.
There was a long gap betweenDiscoandDamsels.
What happened?I entered this really bad period of flailing around.
Someone said I had done these films eccentrically.
They said I should work in theindustry way.
That meant signing up for these deals where theres some book involved.
I was going to adapt the book, and there were producers and a studio, things like that.
I would be really reluctant to take on an adaptation of a book under copyright.
What were you adapting?This is going to sound odd.
It was a novel based on the cultural revolution in China.
Really?I was obsessed with the events of 1979.
It was the first account of the cultural revolution in China and how horrible it was.
It was calledRevenge of Heaven.
The author and British publisher titled itRed Guard.
It was a really important book.
Its a beautiful book.
He called up John Calley, the studio executive, and they asked him who they had attached.
Off the top of the head, he said, Whit Stillman.
So we started working on that too.
And that project fell apart as well?We started working on it with Film4 in London.
The contract was really complicated.
They had provisions that seemed really unreasonable.
It poisoned the relationship and eventually time ran out.
But he went to China and learned he couldnt shoot it there, so he lost interest.
You were also attached to a Jamaican movie at some point, right?Yeah,Dancing Mood.
I have this whole crazy Jamaica idea, which I still hope to do.
I was working with BBC on that.
Its about comedy angels.
I really like the whole tradition of angels and demons in comedy.
Like aHeaven Can Waitsort of thing?And lots of things.
I went to Jamaica to work on it.
Then there were some … contretemps.
Identity politics was going on back then, too.
It will have miracles and angels and demons and comedy and music.
Does it really matter that the director is a New York preppie?
