Writer and director of two of the most relentlessly intelligent
movies of thedecade (Metropolitan and Barcelona), aptly-named Whit
Stillman is about to release his surprising take on 1 he Last Days of
Disco. PT Editorial-at-Large Hara Estroff Marano caught up with him on
his--and our--favorite topics: love life end conversation.
PT: Films are a great screen where we can look at human behavior
and see who we are. Through them, we can see ourselves more clearly. Is
this why you got into film?
Whit Stillman: My aspiration was to be a novelist. I tried doing
that in college, and I really didn't like the solitude. I didn't like the
prospect of an entire life spent writing a novel for four years, having
lunch with your editor, getting a telegram that it's published, and then
going back and writing another. I didn't feel cut out to be a novelist,
but I wanted to be in storytelling. I thought that maybe in film I could
do something where I wouldn't have to write all the time, where I could
be involved in stories in an industrial production line.
PT: Are you just telling stories? What are you showing us?
WS: To make a low-budget film, you have to have a script. So I
wrote the script for Metropolitan. It was a cheap way to get a script
that I could direct. But by coming back to writing later in life, I found
I had something I didn't have in college: subject matter. I could think
back ten years and have stuff I could write about. You can write a
romantic comedy and lie about the way people live together just to make
it entertaining, or, with the same amount of work, you can try to tell
absolutely the truth as you know it.
PT: When you have your characters acting, and you're deciding
whether something rings true, what is it about the human experience that
you want us to get?
WS: When you're dealing with fiction, it's important that it not be
explicit, that it somehow be intuitive. If it's conscious, it offends the
audience. So you come at it indirectly. I think often you're reprocessing
through your own experience the stuff you've read and loved in the past.
The writers I most love--Jane Austen, Tolstoy, Samuel Johnson--had their
desire to observe life and recommend, through their own means, certain
paths, certain types of people, certain types of conduct. At times, I
felt that The Last Days of Disco was a social guide for young women, or a
sex-education film. It is set in the waning days of that period we call
the sexual revolution, which was not about feminism or equality of the
sexes, but about sexual conduct. It was just before the change in
behavior in the eighties. Setting it there meant I could talk about much
more in a short amount of time, because people were having a lot of
experiences and learning lessons quickly, abruptly--lessons of
commitment, of premature commitment, and of biological problems that were
solved. We really touch on--I hope lightly--almost everything that can go
wrong. In times of more tranquil activity, those lessons come, if at all,
much more slowly.
PT: You've made three films. If I had to sum up in one word what
your films are about, I would say--and you may laugh--friendship. Discos
can come and go, foreign assignments can come and go, debutante balls can
come and go, but a circle of friends stays. Mating dances seem to take
place within the circle of friends. There are individuals, but there is a
group. There are alliances, but there is a group.
WS: This is something we hunger for in the United States. We're
living in times that are a bit atomized. When we find those groups, it
can really mean a lot to us. I think that's the really great thing about
certain schools and colleges. Whatever the academic program, whatever
their prestige, if they can put together productive, constructive groups
of people, then they've succeeded.
PT: This is something that you had, I presume. You're not writing
about friendship from the outside.
WS: And, to go back to the process, at the age at which I'm writing
this, in terms of looking for subjects, I'm looking back to those periods
where friendship was so important. Now I'm at the age where family is
more important, and children--in ten or fifteen years I expect to be
writing about something else. But for these films, I'm looking back to
that period of friendship when you are forming your identity and your
world. I think that is the way you evaluate certain professions and
certain schools: what kind of human network do they give you?
PT: That may be the best part of the appeal of a school like
Harvard.
WS: I think so. Harvard was quite underwhelming in a lot of ways,
despite its reputation. In actual experience, there were a lot of people
having nervous breakdowns, and a lot of people who were very depressed
and suicidal. But you did come out of it often with these wonderful
people the school had selected from all over and put with you in forced
habitation. Being abroad is another time for making friends because
you're again isolated, and foreigners abroad are pushed together as a
colony. These three films [Metropolitan, Barcelona, and The Last Days of
Disco] are trying to set up situations where people are together as
groups--at the debutante parties in New York; in Spain, where group-life
socializing is very normative; and at a very popular club. You've
graduated from college, you come to New York, you're together around the
city. It's a bit like freshman year in college all over.
Tags:
aspiration,
barcelona,
behavior,
budget film,
college subject,
film,
films,
hara,
human experience,
industrial production line,
last days of disco,
low budget,
lunch,
manic depression,
portrayal,
representation,
romantic comedy,
subject matter,
truth,
whit stillman,
writing a novel
