Easily lambasted, always harshly represented (if not misrepresented), in 1990 the yuppies, intellectuals and rich kids of Manhattan found a gentler voice and sympathiser (though not an ally) in writer-director Whit Stillman...
Easily lambasted, always harshly represented (if not misrepresented), in 1990 the yuppies, intellectuals and rich kids of Manhattan found a gentler voice and sympathiser (though not an ally) in writer-director Whit Stillman. His first film Metropolitan was inspired by his experiences studying at Harvard, and follows a self-imposed outsider from a humbler background trying to tread water in the bizarre social politics of a clique of over intellectualising students experimenting with adulthood. Stillman’s latest film Damsels In Distress is an endlessly witty portrait of a group of college girls lead by Violet (Greta Gerwig) intent on raising the levels of sophistication in their historically macho environment and doing good to their fellow students, including starting dance classes to discourage depression and suicidal tendencies. Each of Stillman’s four films are strongly dialogue driven and manage what Woody Allen achieved at his peak; analytical characters manoeuvring seemingly uncomplicated scenarios without the film becoming muddy or irritating. Elitism is pulled apart, the ideal partner questioned, reality is pitted against idealism, but most importantly, it’s funny as hell.
The relationship between fantasy and reality in Damsels is wider than previous films, has it always been there?
The other films were trying to do a trick of seeming naturalistic but being kind of idealised visions of something or other. So we wanted to have naturalistic plausibility but there’s a silliness that is not declaring itself in the films, and in this, the silliness is more explicit and open.
It’s not a Buñuelian attack on the bourgeois?
No, I don’t feel I have any satirical bent. I fell very close to comedy and broad comedy, humour, but satire, I don’t think we do satire. Maybe there is satire that I’m not perceiving.
Since Metropolitan in 1990, your characters don’t seem to have aged much. Do you still draw from the same source of inspiration?
We got beaten up a little bit with Barcelona and Disco, people who claimed to have loved Metropolitan wanted to criticise those films. One of the things that was said was that these kind of characters are charming when they’re very young, but are too old to be going on this way. They said that about the Barcelona characters and the Disco people. They said it was tiresome that they’re so silly. So in a way I was thinking if that’s the case, I’ll make them the same age as Metropolitan so they can be as silly as I want and people won’t complain.
Did you come across these groups of girls wanting to change their college environment?
I wanted to do the college story, I heard about girls who did this at university, they were essentially a group like this, but not so ridiculous. They wanted to dress up and wear perfume and change the karma of their surroundings, and they did and everyone was really pleased with it, so it has true aspects. In other universities people said there were similar things going on there. And as these formally male bastions were humanised or feminised by the new co-educational students.
"For me cinema is finding things that I find interesting in the world and portraying them in an aesthetically pleasing and humorous way."
Was the frat boy Thor a counterweight to elitism?
The whole thing about elitism is which elitism are you talking about? Because in a way, socio-politically, Thor is the cliché reprehensive of the elite. He is the blonde fraternity member whose family is spending the big bucks to send him there, but in actuality, he’s the opposite of the elite. And that’s the whole debate about the fraternities. Xavier does score a point when he says "elitist morons."
Your films are very dialogue driven, had you always intended to use film to tell stories?
I wanted to be a novelist, I had childhood ambitions to follow my father’s career in law and politics, but to try to go further than he went, because he was very frustrated. Then I realised at some point that I really admired the writers I was reading and I wanted to write long form fiction. And I tried it in university and felt that I didn’t have the stamina and solitary nature to thrive as a fiction writer. UI had narrative problems to. I wanted to write comic material but I didn’t want to take responsibility for the narrative point of view. So I had these very cumbersome stories where I’d establish the narrator as not me but some other character, and he narrates the story. And it was very complicating and limiting that form. And I’d kind of given up writing fiction and I just wanted to tell stories in some way and I thought I’d write a script in order to direct a film and had no confidence at all on the writing side of that equation. and then I found that writing comedy scripts, it is first person narration, it is first person voices, it is not me. And so the comedy screenplay form is something that works where I’d failed working in other areas.
Do you use cinema as a platform to explore your own theories?
You’re right. I think it’s explaining and showing aspects of life that I like. Finding things that I find interesting in the world and portraying them in an aesthetically pleasing and humorous way.
Your path into directing doesn’t sound traditional, who were your contemporaries?
My inspiration was really from writers and there's a scene in this film where it’s explained who all these writers are, it’s Professor Ryan’s course on the Dandy tradition in literature. And so it’s the dandy tradition which I would extend back to Jane Austen, and even further to Joseph Addison and the spectator and even Dr Johnson. I think they are ancestors to the dandy movement, if it can be called that. In film what I found liberating was the form of small budget filmmaking that Jim Jarmusch showed in his early comedies. So Jim Jarmusch’s Stranger Than Paradise and Spike Lee’s She’s Got To Have It showed the way that, within an economy of means, you could have a big comic effect. And also portray a world that was not being portrayed. So I would say those films were the inspirations, and also the films of Bill Forsyth, he was a big inspiration.
Do you see yourself as part of the Dandy tradition then?
I do, more than the film tradition. Max Beerbohm is my idol, I idolize Max Beerbohm.
In terms of the art you produce or the way you live?
Well I’m too much of a slob. I like what the dandies do, but I’m too much of a slob myself to do it. I occasionally have one good suit, a couple of good suits and ties, I could on one occasion try to dandify myself, but generally I’m a slovenly writer.
Baudelaire talked about life as art.
Baudelaire, time and time again I find his insights great. When I was in Paris I had exactly the same reaction to the city that Baudelaire had. I love the old, old Paris and I do think that Hausmann destroyed Paris, and Baudelaire was very upset with the development in the Hausmannic period. He was a good architect and urbanist too.
Damsels in Distress is in cinemas from today.
Text by Simon Jablonski
