Whit Stillman came to the attention of moviegoers in 1990 with Metropolitan, a witty look at the young generation of a dying social breed of upper-class New Yorkers. That film, somewhat unexpectedly, earned an Oscar nomination for best original screenplay, an honor that only heightened anticipation for Stillman's next movie. Barcelona, the story of two young Americans abroad confronted with anti-American attitudes in the '80s, took four years to arrive and was unfairly dismissed by some as a retread of its predecessor. There's something about Stillman's literate, funny, and highly mannered dialogue that has a tendency, if you're not paying attention, to obscure everything around it. His latest, The Last Days Of Disco, is a look at the lives of a handful of characters during the period its title describes. Chris Eigeman, the quintessential Stillman actor, returns and is joined by a handful of up-and-coming stars. The film finally completes what Stillman refuses to call a trilogy featuring variations on similar themes. Next up is a possible adventure film set during the American Revolution, about which Stillman is somewhat tight-lipped given the spate of forthcoming discocentric movies. ("Castle Rock announced The Last Days Of Disco four years ago, and then lo and behold...") Stillman recently spoke to The Onion about what disco means to him, among other things.
The Onion: When people hear the title The Last Days Of Disco, a lot of them will expect you to go for the throat with kitsch. You really didn't do that.
Whit Stillman: We were trying to do something else. We were trying to do one of our films set in a disco. I think that there is a phase people go through when they're rediscovering a period, and it's all kitsch and overstatement and a few semi-hackneyed observations on the period strung together. And I think that in independent film, we have the freedom to detail what we feel were particular aspects of a time and not have to just refer to the popular conception of it. I wanted to talk about a particular aspect of the world, a corner, and have the characters sort of exist truthfully in that corner. So it has the same music as in other movies, but a different feeling.
O: With this film, you have a larger cast of main characters. What were the difficulties with that?
WS: Finding actors to play the parts. We got lucky there. I really like having a large cast of characters. For me, it makes it more interesting to write. They all have their different angle, and there is a multiplicity of voices, so I think it avoids the monotony of a particular voice that is the whole film. They all have their voices and their points of view, and the complications of the roundelay—romantically and in terms of friendship between them—become more varied and textured.
O: How did you find your cast?
WS: I think we have a high-end cast, in the sense that Kate Beckinsale, Chloe Sevigny, and Matt Keeslar are kind of breaking out. Then there's Chris Eigeman, who I've worked with before. Mack Astin and Kate Beckinsale, I knew their work through films, and I was very interested in them just from their film work—Kate Beckinsale from Cold Comfort Farm and the TV version of Emma, and Mack Astin for his role in In Love And War, the Richard Attenborough film. Then we did the usual casting process of meeting the people, like Robert Sean Leonard, Matt Keeslar, Chloe [Sevigny], Michael Weatherly, David Thornton, and many others. That's the usual New York casting thing, and I went to L.A., too. One of the big issues was whether Chris was going to be in the film or not to play the Chris Eigeman character.
O: I'm surprised that was an issue.
WS: There was huge opposition to working with the same people.
O: It worked so well before, and naturally you don't want to repeat yourself...
WS: I actually don't care about repeating myself. I think "Don't repeat yourself" is a bugaboo that... I mean, there are certain aspects of repeating oneself that are perfectly fine, and actually almost called-for. But there was this idea that [changes voice], "Well, what would it be like to have some other actor play the Chris Eigeman part." And maybe, from his point of view, there would be the risk of being typecast.
O: But did you get people telling John Ford not to cast John Wayne?
WS: You probably did. "Oh, John Wayne again?" [Laughs.] But it's absolutely great. Chris and I had a chance to work on the Homicide show. And that was different territory, a little bit, and he was wonderful. He's so much better than anyone else auditioning for this. He actually came to help us with the rehearsals before he had decided whether or not he was going to do it. And it was really fun.
O: Well, you referred to it as "the Chris Eigeman part," and it's hard to imagine anyone else playing that. You would probably get accused of casting another Chris Eigeman if you cast someone else.
WS: I think it's the same thing Woody Allen has to face when he doesn't play the lead.
O: One general complaint about movies is that there are too many movies with young people sitting around talking. Your movies are different in some ways. What do you think sets them apart?
WS: Well, umm... I don't know. I hadn't heard that criticism, actually. I see that a lot of these screenplay books say it's very bad if you find the scenes through dialogue. And I don't know how it goes again, but there's some rule that Robert McKee has; I was just thinking that I have to do it the other way, the way he says you're not supposed to do it. I find the characters through their voices. They start talking and have some sort of valid, autonomous character of their own that's usually sort of comical. Then they start operating and create the scenes, and from the scenes, they create the story. And then you sort of shift that, and move it around, and try to get it to work properly. There's kind of an organic process to creating the world of the movie and the characters and voices in that world. I think there's a way of being kind of rigorous about what you're letting in and what you're excluding, and taking the time to winnow out the things that are not pertinent. Generally, in the dialogue, two things are always happening: There's something they're saying, and maybe there's something funny about that, but there's also something else happening. In the course of their talking, the story is progressing in a way. And what I really love is when it seems like there are three things happening at the same time. It requires a certain kind of relaxed paying of attention on the part of the audience, and not jumping to conclusions about a scene. Like, in one scene, we show a character who's just flown off to Spain, and then he's suddenly back in New York again. If people are watching and wondering, "Oh, what's that about?" it could kind of upset them, but I think that by then, they should be used to this process of letting this information that's occurred off-screen filter into the scenes. Sometimes there are three sets of information in a scene: There is what is actually occurring in that scene; there's what's occurred between scenes that we haven't talked about, and is just being found out in the course of the scene; and then there sometimes is a past story that occurred before characters started a movie that's also being revealed and coming into play. Also, when I see the films that I think you're talking about, that have been criticized as just young people talking, I watch and think, "My God, this is my first draft. If I made my first draft, this is this movie." But I'm spending two more years after that on it.
O: What goes into shaping your characters?
WS: There's a voice. Normally, there are certain biographical facts of various people that can be put together. It's really a great advantage as a writer, I find, to be 46 years old. I've seen so many stories of people from keeping up with them. It's probably about people of the generation of my class at Harvard, and now we're heading back into our 25th reunion, which is a big deal at Harvard. I mean, the great things about Harvard, I think, are when you get the letter of acceptance and when you go back for your 25th reunion. [Laughs.] In between, it's not really so marvelous.
O: So, why disco?
WS: Disco... I'm enthusiastic about disco. I feel, like Josh [Matthew Keeslar's character] felt, that the potential of the disco moment was great, and it was actually realized. There were these great places that were really fun and really dramatic and interesting, and that we are an impoverished nation as far as our night life normally. It's not what interests us. It's not what we consider important: It's normally our day life, our working life, and then the family, the children, and all those pieties you hear Bob Dole talking about. Which sort of exclude night life. In this century, there have been two periods that I know about when night life became front-page news, and became really interesting: [One is] The Roaring '20s. I loved all the movies about The Roaring '20s, and I think the Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers movies of the mid-'30s are essentially recreating the '20s on Hollywood sound stages with people singing and dancing. Then the disco era became mass night life, and at the end of the disco era, you had the advantage that styles got good. I remember thinking, as the '80s dawned, that, wow, things are looking good. Good haircuts. Cool clothes. Dark colors. Natural fabrics were back in. A lot of these were also the criteria, the door policy, of the elite Manhattan red-velvet-ropes clubs. I later read that natural fabrics were a part of... No polyester was kind of the rule, and also dark colors. I retrospectively remembered how lucky I was, because I had this one dark blue suit that I thought was a cool, well-cut suit that would get me into Studio [54]. And it turns out that that actually was their criterion. It was true. It wasn't just a kind of superstitious illusion. And so we're trying to do some things stylistically different with disco than the other films by recording the last gasp of it. But they didn't know it was the last gasp: They thought it was the most exciting part of it, but then, voom, it's over. I think I'm looking for the films to find things that are dramatic and poignant, and have some sort of emotional content. Because sometimes, in trying to avoid pandering and avoid the obvious, I can get too far away from emotion, and I want to try to build into the story potential for emotion and poignancy. I think if you have an ironical view toward a lot of things, people can misunderstand and believe you're being ironical in a cold way, when we're trying to be ironical in a warm way about things. The ideal quote I'd love to see in a review of any of these three movies is "funny and moving." That's what you want. You want it to be funny, and yet it's moving. And it takes more effort for people to get into what's moving about the story.
O: I think it's clear that you have a real affection for your characters.
WS: I do. But I still want to leave movies open to those who, for class-conflict reasons, really are invested in hating the characters. I like it when people can come and hate the characters and still enjoy the movie.
O: You mention class conflict. One thing I've run into, when I've mentioned your name to other people, is that there are people who have hostility toward your movies because they don't like the class of people you're portraying.
WS: Yeah, it's a factor. It's okay in our country to be bigoted if it's heading in a slant we consider upward. But the same sort of attitudes and stereotyping we would consider really offensive if it they were directed toward an ethnic group are completely acceptable if you can chalk it up to hating yuppies.
O: Getting back to disco, there is sort of an acknowledgment that things aren't as great as they seem when one character says, referring to Philadelphia soul, that people don't consider it disco because it's good.
WS: There's tons of awful, awful disco. There are a lot of songs I really don't like much when they're played normally, but in a dance club, in that environment, it's an enjoyable song and fun to dance to. I revised my views of some of my music. But, yeah, it's true, there are a lot of things for people to be anti about.
O: There's sort of an acknowledgment of a purer strain of music when they go to a bar and they're playing the R&B song, I forget which one.
WS: We have "Opportunity" by The Jewels playing as they enter, and then we actually get into some '60s Jamaican music. But it's a Curtis Mayfield composition which was recorded in Jamaica in sort of the ska style. And then we go to the "Oogum Boogum" song, which is a great dance song from '68, a little bit camp, but it transcends camp. Then we have The Chi-Lites' "Here I Am," a 1975 Chicago soul song as Alice is stalking out. And we try to do that with having an R&B through-line—that's the music I love. At the time, I remember thinking that if I didn't like disco, I would like reggae, I'd like Jamaican music. But I didn't want to get into that; I just didn't want to get into a whole new thing. I didn't find punk or new wave very tempting. I started listening to it again to find songs for the outside of the club, so when they're driving off to the airport, we have another kind of cool, happy, Jamaican song.
O: And you've got Blondie, which sort of straddles the fence.
WS: Yeah, that was really good, and I tried to get them to use that on the album, because I thought that ["The Tide Is High"] is a classic dance song of the period, and for some reason, they wanted a pure disco compilation.
O: Because it would sell more records?
WS: I think we would have sold more with that, because it's a song that particularly women love. They love that. I love "The Tide Is High" because it's a big song from that period, it's a good song, and it's a cover of a '64 ska song, so it ties into our outside-the-club/inside-the-club environment.
O: Did you see the write-up you got in Spin as part of the "Spindie 50" [a power ranking of those in independent cinema]?
WS: That was interesting.
O: You're ranked 21.
WS: Yeah, I know, I went from 18 to 21. This was before the film came out. Someone said, "You know, that's good. You don't want to be number one." If you're number one, it means you don't get a release. [Laughs.] Chloe's on the list, too. That was pretty cool.
O: I saw that. It was sort of a fascinating little list. It also referred to your characters as "self-loathing WASPs," which I didn't quite get.
WS: Well, if that pleases Spin magazine, we'll pretend they're self-loathing WASPs. They are self-critical. And self-aware.
O: Do you still consider Jane Austen a major model for you?
WS: Yeah.
O: In what way?
WS: The way she sort of ironically and humorously treats emotion and her way of being sympathetic and funny at the same time, and being very precise about each character, letting the comedy come out of her precision about that character. What I hope to achieve is to be able to enjoy any review, because the critics have kind of become comic characters: I know their act, read their review—whether it's positive or mixed—and just enjoy them as funny characters being true to their own little obsessions, and their big obsessions.
O: One other thing your work has in common with Austen, I think, is that you both have likable characters that make mistakes and do unlikable things.
WS: I was worried about a speech that Alice has early in the film where she was critical of the guys at Hampshire. Because I know the audience reacts against people who are critical of other people. But I felt that... You hope your audience will do a little work, and if they just think a little bit, she's obviously talking that way because she had an unhappy time there, and she's being defensive and justifying herself, and sort of creating an alibi for her unpopularity. It's not that she's invested in denigrating people for taking the Green Hornet seriously, or for taking Spiderman seriously. It's that she had a kind of bad time there, and she, sort of with quivering voice, is trying to justify herself.
O: Kate Beckinsale's character was a little Emma-like as well.
WS: Absolutely. When I saw her in Cold Comfort Farm and in Emma, I thought she was a slam-dunk for this film, because this is sort of taking those characters and ratcheting up the level of... umm... obnoxiousness. But that thing of the friend who's always cooler than you are... I mean, everyone I knew was cooler than I was, but that thing where they were always one-upping you, no matter what it was. I guess the priceless moment is when she actually one-ups Alice on soulfulness and religiosity.
O: Another director always gets credit for this, but you're really one of the first directors to bring in a lot of pop-culture references.
WS: I know who you're referring to. Yeah, and really some non-pop-culture references. The Lionel Trilling essay on Mansfield Park, I'm not sure that's pop culture. [Laughs.]
O: That's true, but just cultural references in general. Some films seem to take place in a world that's all their own, without much reference to everyone else's. How do you try to incorporate those? Because a lot of people won't get some of them.
WS: Well, I love having the characters fight each other through surrogates. They take sort of literary surrogates to debate about and battle, and they're really talking about themselves. But they're a little too correct to... It's what we all do, I think. People talk about a film, and you like a film or you hate a film, and you can often fight about it with someone by talking about this other object. In this film, I consciously tried to make references to things that most people would know about in most parts of the world, because the films have to travel, and why bore people in Brazil, the way my screening of Barcelona there did, when I can try to connect to something they know about? So they didn't know about Peter Drucker and all that Dale Carnegie stuff... But I hope someone has seen Lady And The Tramp, and through that you can kind of communicate. That is Josh non-aggressively fighting Des to court Alice.
O: It tends to take you four years to make a movie.
WS: Actually three years, 10 months this time. We're picking up the pace. We're racing with this film.
O: Why so long?
WS: I don't know. It just takes me forever to finish the scripts. I don't know why. I think it just takes a long time for the characters to find their way to the end.
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