Whit Stillman
Tags: Barcelona, filmmaker, sundance film festival, Whit Stillman, Metropolitan, The Last Days of Disco, Damsels in Distress, Greta Gerwig
The ‘90s were a vital decade for independent film. That’s when unique voices discovered at the Sundance Film Festival started finding their way into movie theaters nationwide. It was the decade of Quentin Tarantino, Kevin Smith and Ed Burns, filmmakers who emphasized the dialogue their characters would speak. One of the most respected artists of that era was Whit Stillman.
His debut film Metropolitan was a comedy about wealthy New Yorkers discussing their lifestyle with a stranger. His follow-up Barcelona took that sensibility to Spain. But 1998’s The Last Days of Disco was the last we’ve seen of Whit Stillman. He calls the 10 subsequent years his “lost decade,” a more highbrow way of saying “development hell.”
Stillman is back with a new movie. Damsels in Distress still has the unique dialogue found in ‘90s independent cinema, so it may seem even more special in today’s world. The film stars Greta Gerwig as Violet, a college student who leads a suicide prevention center. She and her fellow gals are so committed to helping the student body, she creates a new dance called the Sambola. She thinks if people dance they’ll be too happy to kill themselves.
The film is full of whimsical tangents and concepts. Some of the Seven Oaks college boys practice the Cathar religion, and some of the traffic lights are blue. Stillman took as mellow an approach to discussing the film as his characters seem to have living it. He had some deep thoughts but only in the spirit of having fun, not taking oneself seriously.
SuicideGirls: Are you saying these types of girls are your ideal women?
Whit Sillman: No. No, I wouldn’t want to say that. We’re writing fictional comedy here so whatever works for fictional comedy.
SG:
Are they admirable?
WS:
Oh, I love the Violet character and I like them all.
SG:
Is there something special about Violet’s acceptance of criticism when most of us have a knee jerk reaction ourselves?
WS:
Yeah, that is definitely a fantasy, people who appreciate and realize criticism.
SG:
Could it be something, maybe not that extreme, but we could all take a cue from her that there’s something worthwhile about criticism?
WS:
Yes, I think it’s great. I think we actually can really enjoy and appreciate criticism and make it useful but almost no one could do it right in the moment. It’s something one can appreciate really in retrospect later on.
SG:
Because emotions get in the way?
WS:
Well, right away you just don’t like being criticized. You like to be perfect.
SG:
How did you imagine the subject of suicide would be comedic?
WS:
Well, it is, isn’t it? Isn’t the whole thing too ridiculous for words? I think the whole problem is people overdramatizing the situation. If they could just be encouraged to take a step back, just a tiny bit of perspective… Let time pass, let wounds heal, let hormones get back into the right order or shape. For me this is a hugely autobiographical film because I was a very crazy sick little kid when I was 11 and 12. There were no medicines back then. There was nothing of that kind. It was really encouraging just that I got over it. I got over it. From 12 you become 13. From 13 you become 14 and then it was all gone. I think so many of these things that people get out of shape about are developmental in a sense that you go through a bad phase but you get out of it naturally.
SG:
Are you talking about the teen bullying suicides?
WS:
Well, that was a horrifying thing. The incident was happening right as we were shooting and I was thinking if only he could have been encouraged to wait, to let time go on, to put things in perspective. It reminds me a little bit of how I often feel when I wake up in the middle of the night, I think Fitzgerald wrote about the dark 3 a.m. of the soul or something like that but it’s true. If you wake up in the middle of the night, everything seems like just a terrible, terrible problem. Then the morning comes and you have your breakfast and your cup of coffee and suddenly the world isn’t so bad. Those problems aren’t so bad. I think that’s a bit adolescence.
SG:
I’m no psychiatrist but whenever I hear about teen suicides, I think isn’t someone telling them, “When you’re 20, this is all over?” It’s not even that much further away.
WS:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s a crazy period. It’s terrible.
SG:
You’ve done some period films and this is modern. How do you approach the era when you make a movie?
WS:
Well, we always sort of play around with period. I don’t really believe in a hermetically sealed kind of totally controlled period because I find usually there’s huge overreach and it turns into kind of wax museum period. So I like to say it’s a little bit open, a little bit informal. In this case it’s supposed to be sort of contemporary times. It’s not not contemporary. In the background there are scenes with a few cars and those are contemporary cars. On the other hand, the characters want to be living in the past so they try to create a retro old fashioned world. So what is the period of the film? It’s hard to say because yes, they’re more or less in the present but they’re trying to recreate this world of former times.
SG:
But it’s not as specific as the ‘70s.
WS:
Yeah, I mean, Disco we cheated that by saying the early ‘80s because I hated the way things looked in the ‘70s.
SG:
Your first three movies spoke very much to a generation. What’s your sense of how this generation of audiences will respond to Damsels?
WS:
Well, one thing I noticed is that if you make a film about an age group, that is not your target age group. So I think Damsels is probably for people older than college age or younger than college age. But the college journalists we’ve talked to have been pretty pro the film so I guess it’s playing well there. We’ve been to two college campuses already with the film and that’s gone well.
SG:
How did the Cathar religion end up in your story?
WS:
That comes from reality. A lot of things in the film are not invented. They really were referring to something.
SG:
Have you had an interest in alternative religions like Cathar before?
WS:
In a sense all religions are alternate religions to something else. I heard a story very similar to this one and two related stories very similar to this that did seem pretty absurd and kind of funny. Kind of funny after it stops being awful.
SG:
What about absurd touches like a blue traffic light?
WS:
Well, that actually was a longer scene explaining the whole thing about the blue lights which is okay, this is a character Thor who doesn’t know the colors too well. He sees a green traffic light and says it’s blue, but actually there’s a longer dialogue there that we cut out. Violet says, “You know, some traffic lights are blue.” And it’s true. If you really look at the color of some traffic lights, supposedly green lights are more blue. And Navy uniforms, another thing is Navy uniforms are not Navy blue. They’re black. What I heard was there was a mistake. The Navy ordered Navy blue fabric for their uniforms and a mistake was made and they were delivered black fabric. They were thinking of sending it back but there was much fabric it seemed like a waste. They found that with the gold braid on the black fabric, it looked like Navy blue because people’s eyes sort of adjust to the colors.
SG:
So that’s not meant to be absurd?
WS:
I like absurdity when it works. It’s interesting to me. If absurdity breaks the narrative tension then you’re in trouble but if it’s absurdity that’s just funny and entertaining but doesn’t break the thread of emotion, then it’s good.
SG:
If your first three movies were about class differences - -
WS:
Well, I don't think they were. I think there’s a lot of class stuff in Metropolitan just because of the nature of the locality. It’s set among debutante parties and there’s one character talking about it all the time. But I think that kind of wrong footed almost everyone about what our movies are about because I don't think it has anything to do with class.
SG:
Some say “comedy of manners.” Is that more accurate?
WS:
I don’t like comedy of manners either. I think these are comedies. If anything, a comedy of manners sounds like Henry James to me or Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest perhaps. It’s one of those phrases that’s used but I don’t quite see its relevance.
SG:
Is Damsels more about philosophical differences?
WS:
I think it is. I think it’s really about identity so I suppose there is a similarity to The Importance of Being Earnest because there’s a joke of identity there too. So it’s about youthful identities and how they’re formed and maintained.
SG:
When do you think your identity fully formed?
WS:
I would say sort of in this period, sort of from 16 to 22 there was a long march of identity.
SG:
What exactly were you doing during the 10 years between making films? When did you realize it wasn’t working?
WS:
Well, I was pretty much doing what I’m doing all the time which is writing screenplays, but the writing of screenplays was not interspersed with the 18 months of making a film. So essentially it was the in between parts. It was the same as the in between parts in the ‘90s. It’s just that none of the films I was working on got the go ahead.
SG:
After the first or second development problem, 10 years is a long time to not make a movie. Did you have a sense you had to stop pursuing some of these avenues?
WS:
You know, it’s a long time for a filmmaker not to make a movie. It’s not a long time for a screenwriter not to get an onscreen credit. A lot of my friends who are screenwriters, this is their life. Their life is getting paid to write scripts and ultimately not getting credits. They make a living, some of them make a good living. It’s really the screenwriter identity versus the filmmaker identity and that was the problem with me. If one project didn’t go ahead, I had other ideas I wanted to write so I’d just shift over and write the ideas. Finally I got something that had the right karma and the right people involved which was my friends at Castle Rock.
SG:
So were you able to still make a living as a screenwriter?
WS:
Barely but I survived on my writing. I survived on my writing and profits from Metropolitan and Barcelona.
SG:
Well, that’s a great victory for indie film if 20 years later you can still live off them.
WS:
No, it is. That’s the thing that really amazed me, that having made essentially profitable successful films, I couldn’t make a new film. In some ways I don’t think the business is a business. I think people’s decisions to make films don’t seem to have much to do with economics sometimes.
SG:
What are the projects you miss the most that didn’t get going during that time?
WS:
I can’t say that because I want them all to happen.
SG:
We do too. Are there any other genres you’re interested in exploring besides comedy?
WS:
No, that was really one of the problems I had that I was trying to work in dramatic areas that I don’t have a track record for. One of the things I wanted to make was very dramatic. It was set in a cultural revolution in China and was quite severe. Quite a severe drama. I don't think I would make that film in exactly that form because it’s based on a book and I don’t have the rights to the book. I’d have to make another story set in that period.
SG:
But you’re not setting out to write action or sci-fi?
WS:
Well, I did write a comedy sci-fi script because I wrote a script for Little Green Man that I kept under wraps because the producers wanted something closer to the book itself while I just mostly took the title. So I have written a comedy sci-fi script and I have written an adventure script but they all have a lot to do with comedy too.
SG:
So there’ll always be a light touch to Whit Stillman?
WS:
I think so, except for the Red Azalea project set in China, everything has a comic element.
Damsels in Distress is now playing in theaters.
Damsels in Distress is now playing in theaters.
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