In the years when American independent film was still fighting for its place in theaters, usually only one or two Amerindies a year broke wide. In 1990, Whit Stillman's Metropolitan was one of them. A reserved, witty portrait of the New York City debutante-ball season, based on Stillman's own experiences as an upper-middle-class kid with super-rich friends, Metropolitan announced Stillman as a filmmaker with a uniquely positive perspective on class privilege. But he took four years to follow up his Oscar-nominated debut with the even-more-mannered Barcelona, and four years after that to complete his unofficial "yuppie trilogy" with The Last Days Of Disco—both also loosely based on his own experiences. And while Stillman has been rumored to be working on several new projects that depart from his first three films, fans are still waiting. In conjunction with the new Criterion edition of Metropolitan, Stillman spoke with The A.V. Club about his sensibility, his influences, and whether he's ever going to get back to work.
The A.V. Club: When are you going to make another movie?
Whit Stillman: [Laughs.] I just finished a script last week that's the first script I've wanted to shoot since Disco. I'm just beginning to show it to people, and I hope to get it off the ground soon.
AVC:You've been attached to two or three other projects since your last film, including a Revolutionary War drama and an adaptation of two unfinished Jane Austen novels.
WS: Yeah, my very slight alibi—though I don't really have an alibi—is that I've been working on a number of things that I hope at some point will come through at a faster pace. But it must look pretty pathetic.
AVC: Isn't there something to be said for just grinding it out, the way Woody Allen does, putting out a movie a year?
WS: I don't think so. I'm not that smart. Woody Allen is a genius. He's really funny, and it all just pours out of him in a really funny way. I feel kind of limited, in that I have to work on things a lot to get them to a level that I consider respectable. So that's one of the time factors. Also, I think that the first ideas I get, like a lot of other people's, are just total clichés.
AVC: Is this all a version of what Taylor Nichols' character in Barcelona describes as "Maneuver X," to play it coy and get your fans to come to you?
WS: Exactly. If I couldn't control demand, I could at least control scarcity.
AVC: You recorded a commentary track for Criterion's Metropolitan DVD, which must've made you nostalgic both for the time when you made the movie, and for the time represented in the movie.
WS: Yeah. The nice thing about it was the chance to
get together with some of the people on the crew, and the actors. I've been
living abroad, but I see the actors quite a bit because I go to the places
where they live, which is Los Angeles and New York. But John Thomas, the
cinematographer, came in to help with the color timing of the transfer, and the
editor, Chris Tellefsen, came in for the commentary. It also gave me a chance
to show them the script for the new film, so it was good that way. It's odd,
after so many years of not doing anything, to be working on the last production
phase of the first film, and also the first phase of what I hope will be the
fourth film.
So, to answer your question, yeah, the experience of making the movie is covered in the warm glow of nostalgia from 16 years ago, plus having that backward look on real people and events. I'm still in touch with the people I was writing about. I got in touch with them again through making Metropolitan. A lot of the women I went to those parties with, I had lost touch with them before the movie, and we actually showed them the movie in rough cut to see what they thought of it, and we've stayed in touch.
AVC: Do you feel like the characters in the movie would've stayed in touch like that?
WS: Yeah. In fact, I think we did that in Disco. Not necessarily the characters you'd entirely expect, but the idea was that the Metropolitan crowd would show up at the disco, because people from my real Metropolitan experience were at those discos in the period. So I think four of the Metropolitan characters are in The Last Days Of Disco, plus a couple of the actual people I knew in the period.
AVC: Those scenes in The Last Days Of Disco work a lot like the closing scenes in Metropolitan and the closing scenes in Barcelona, in that they all introduce a note of hope into movies that are about a golden era coming to an end.
WS: For me, the present is a golden era that's ending too. That's the greatest golden era. Right now. [Laughs.] I just like pining for lost times. I can pine for this morning.
AVC: You set Metropolitan "not so long ago," so viewers could project it onto any era they want to…
WS: It was also a production shortcut, so they don't say, "Oh, this car is from a different period!"
AVC: To you, what era is it?
WS: In a way, it's not really a true era to me. My own memories of that period are very specific, but they're bifurcated between the end of the '60s and the beginning of the '70s. Things are pretty straitlaced in the first part of the movie and then long-haired and druggy in the second part, which is what happened while I was involved in that whole debutante-ball scene. The film suggests that a little bit, with the difference between before Christmas and after Christmas. There's some drugs after Christmas, and some wild behavior within the context of the film, whereas before Christmas is supposed to be the end of the '60s, which came very late for us. I remember going to those parties in 1968, because I had an extra ticket from my sister, and from my perspective, it was a continuation of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Nothing much had changed. And then in the subsequent three years, things changed a lot.
AVC: In Metropolitan's opening credits, you share your credit screen with the editor and the cinematographer, similar to what Orson Welles did with Citizen Kane. Either you were being very humble, or very presumptuous.
WS: Oh, humble. Absolutely. I actually do that in all three films. I felt in Metropolitan that I couldn't have done it without John and Chris. And other people, too. So the credits are not in the usual way, where the producer credits are way down and the editing, cinematography, and music credits are way up.
I later had a tough time with the Director's Guild. I wasn't in the guilds for the first two films. I joined for Disco, and the DGA didn't want to let me do that with the credits. They protect the director's-credit solo-card quite firmly, and I think we had to say that our strobe effect in the credits would hit the director credit last, or something like that. I guess it's small beer. Not that important.
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