Whit Stillman’s funny and evergreen comedy of manners Metropolitan is back in UK cinemas this week, with the US writer/director touring with it from July 22 with stop-offs in Sheffield, Manchester, Newcastle, Edinburgh and Oxford. The film follows a young man (Edward Clements) as he unexpectedly finds himself swept up by the party lifestyle of a group of debutantes and their escorts over the Christmas period. Sharply observational scripting saw Stillman’s debut nominated for a Best Screenplay Oscar (it lost out to Ghost). The filmmaker, now 73, has gone on to showcase his scripting dexterity in films including The Last Days Of Disco, Love & Friendship and Damsels In Distress. We caught up with him as he juggled paying for his lunch in Portugal with considering his career to date, the new lease of life for Metropolitan and what the future holds in terms of projects including the long-gestating The Splendid Affinities.
It’s been 35 years since you made Metropolitan. Do you find audiences respond to it differently now and do you think about it differently now that you’re coming back to it in a way?
Whit Stillman: I think it's set in the past and so I don't think the reaction to it has changed because it was in a kind of past then and it's in a bigger past now, but it's the same feeling. I've decided that there's a fifth protagonist. One of the sort of exceptional things of Metropolitan was that it had four protagonists. Now, I think, there's this older character [the “man at the bar”, played by Roger Kirby] talking about what failure is and what it's about and I think he's the fifth protagonist.
The labels that we use both for ourselves and for others get held up to the light in your films. You literally label the characters in a few words in Love & Friendship but it's also quite a big part of Metropolitan. That must be something that strikes a chord with audiences because there are a lot of acronyms flying about these days. Do you think that young people are always cycling through these same questions around identity and labelling?
WS: Yes, very much so. It’s searching for their identity and I think it's important not to anchor your identity too early, and to be sort of flexible about where you're going to end up. These people are forming groups and unforming groups. So, uh, we have our red-headed outsider character who is joining the group, but sort of the suggestion that some of the girls are going to be leaving the group.
And there’s this idea of the three-letter acronym, your characters in Metropolitan invent one – UHB (urban haute bourgeoisie) – and we use so many more of them now.
WS:There were quite a few of them back then and some of them weren't very nice. One I really disliked was PLU – People Like Us – I don’t like that at all. It’s very smug.
Have you been surprised by the new lease of life Metropolitan has had or did you think it was about time people started touring this again?
WS: Well it's been great but, you know, these things are really thanks to individuals. In America there's a tiny distribution company, Rialto Pictures, that re-releases a lot of films, generally European Classics. I got to know them and they took on Metropolitan kind of exceptionally. It's one of the only American films in their collection. I guess they also have The Conversation by Coppola. So these people at Rialto started going around with the film and, particularly, as a Christmas film – but then some people want to show it at other seasons. So you say it's a Deb season film or a Christmas film, depending on the time of year.
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| Metropolitan. Whit Stillman: 'I think it's important not to anchor your identity too early, and to be sort of flexible about where you're going to end up' |
So it's really thanks to Geoff that the films are in circulation again. There was a re-release, Metrodome put it out again and we were the second highest screen average after The Da Vinci Code during the weekend The Da Vinci Code opened. My Knights Templar film will be much better.
When I read that you didn’t like Jane Austen the first time you read her, I felt so “seen” because I remembered my entire Sixth Form class viewing Emma as sort of elaborate Mills & Boon when we were forced to read it but when you come back later you realise how good her books are.
WS: That’s a real mistake that they assigned Emma. That’s the one the professors and critics like but normal people find it hard going.
I was thinking as well about the conversation about Austen in Metropolitan, when a character talks about preferring to read the criticism rather than the original book, and I can’t help feeling that maybe you’ve got a soft spot for critics in general.
WS: I do. I was on the coast of Spain reading a book of criticism about Dickens and a British friend came by and said, “Oh, here you are reading the criticism not the fiction again”. And that’s certainly true, there are a lot of writers, who I'm more interested in the critical regard of than I am in ploughing through the monstrous tomes. Although, I’ve been converted to Trollope – but now I’ve decided that while Jane Austen is film, Trollope is television.
You’ve previously said that one of the hardest things to do in film is choosing not what not to do – what’s the one thing that you’re not going to do next time?
WS:Well there's so many things I'm not going to do next time. I'm going to eschew extreme violence.
You’ve always done that though.
Yes, I’m cheating. I’m not going to do “the outsider that arrives in a group” story. I did that with both Damsels In Distress and Metrolopolitan. That’s enough of that trick. My aspiration is to do a film with swords but I just can’t quite figure out how to do that.
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| Whit Stillman, right, chatting to Geoffrey M Badger on tour. Stillman: 'It's really thanks to Geoff that the films are in circulation again' Photo: Courtesy of Lost Reels |
Speaking of that, is there any news on The Splendid Affinities, I’d love to see swashbuckling Stillman.
WS: I really want that to happen but it might happen in a strange form. That’s a project that keeps changing form and never happens but I hope it will happen. It'll probably be project number two, there’s secret project number one, it would be a UK film, and then The Splendid Infinities would be project number two.
So as far as working environments go, I take it that you prefer to work in film over television?
Totally. Yes. I really hate television. I've wasted so much time in it. Or, it’s not that I hate it but that it hates me. It's very corporate it seems to me and I just haven't had good luck with it. So I found it a real waste of time. Yeah. Yeah. So it's about that. That always could change if you find the right person in the right context.
Do you find as you get older that you want to pick up the speed of your work?
WS: Yes, I’ve got to stop dawdling. I really have to get serious about it. One definitely gets the idea that there isn't unlimited tarmac on the runway and one has to start getting things done.
