“When I had an income, Paris was cheap.” - Whit Stillman, filmmaker
When we interviewed Whit Stillman for his latest movie, Damsels in Distress, it was his first movie in over 10 years. He told us about the lost decade in which he developed many other films but none of them came together. Fortunately, it only took a few years for Stillman to return, and this time we can help him.
The Cosmopolitans is one of Amazon’s latest pilots. You can watch it for free on Amazon.com or Amazon’s video service. I get it through my Vieiracast TV. After you watch The Cosmopolitans, take the survey at Amazon.com under the Pilot Season link and tell them you want them to make the whole series.
Even in a 25 minute TV pilot, Whit Stillman is very Whit Stillman. The Cosmopolitans centers on Aubrey (Carrie MacLemore) who is dumped by the boyfriend for whom she moved to Paris. She meets Jimmy (Adam Brody) and his friends in a cafe and is welcomed into their world of very mannered dancing parties. Jimmy is American but considers himself Parisian already, much to the chagrin of his ex Vicky (Chloe Sevigny).
We’re glad Whit Stillman gave us another interview to talk about his latest work. He’s still in France making the phone call for an interview, and he remembered us, sort of. He definitely won’t forget now, since he told me after this interview, “It’s really great to talk to you because you’re super well prepared.” Well, I did watch The Cosmopolitans twice and re-watched Metropolitan just to be safe.
Whit Stillman: So, Suicide Girls, that’s a cool site, right?
SuicideGirls: Yes, we spoke for Damsels in Distress. I don’t know if you remember that but thank you for giving us another interview.
WS: I knew I had some positive memory of Suicide Girls. How did they get that name?
SG: The idea is they may have committed social suicide by having an alternative look, with tattoos, piercings or hair color.
WS: Oh, I’ve got it now. She’s got blue hair [Mermaid] and she looks very attractive.
SG: I’m glad you think so. So had you always had an idea to do a television show?
WS: Yes, I would say since [The Last Days of] Disco I’ve been interested in doing a TV show. I had two prospective deals after Disco and then I had a couple of other things since. I think this is the fifth thing I’ve tried and it’s the first one that really went ahead.
SG: Was The Cosmopolitans something you were working on during what you called your lost decade?
WS: Yeah, the lost decade. Better a lost decade than lost generation. I mean, I was having these experiences in Paris and I was writing it down thinking that this would be independent film material at some point. So all kinds of potential material and stories. One of them, an agent in Los Angeles who was trying to get me a TV assignment - this is when I first came back to the states around 2008. She asked me, “What are you working on?” I told her a story based on some Paris characters. She said, “No American channel will do a show based abroad so you have to set your story in someplace like New York.” So I reset the story about these Paris characters in a New York nightclub, and I had a deal. It could have gone ahead very easily. It dragged on for so long that it seemed like it was going to get in the way of being free to do Amazon. So my agents were good about getting rid of that deal so I could go ahead to this one.
SG: Did it really take a model like Amazon to do The Cosmopolitans the way you wanted?
WS: Yeah. I mean, they came to me with the idea. I’d been in touch with Amazon for a long time because when they were just starting out, they actually optioned Metropolitan as a possible remake for TV shows and different film projects using it as a template. So they did the option but for one reason or another they couldn’t announce it, but we stayed in touch. Then last summer they called me with an idea of doing a series in Paris and I said, “Oh brother, do I have a lot of stories.” So I outlined some of the characters like Fritz and they said, “Yeah, go ahead.” It went really quickly, which is not my experience.
SG: When did you move to Paris?
WS: I lost my apartment in New York the weekend Last Days of Disco came out. I had a hard out on my loft lease and I really couldn’t afford to live in New York with a family on a writer’s pay. It was the exceptional moment when it was an incredibly favorable exchange rate in Paris, so I came over here with my two daughters. We were only going to stay for a year and I really had been thinking about moving to another city in the United States, but my spouse wanted to come to Paris so we came to Paris.
SG: And Paris ended up being cheaper than New York?
WS: It was briefly. It’s about three years. It’s odd. When I had an income, Paris was really cheap and when I lost my income, suddenly everything became very expensive.
SG: And now you’re back, just for work?
WS: For work and for life.
SG: If The Cosmopolitans goes, could you move back to Paris permanently?
WS: I never really know where I am going to be. I know where I am but I don’t know where I’m going to be, so I’d like to say I live wherever I have to be. If everything goes well, you kind of get a circus life where you go where the circus goes so I hope I’ll have this Jane Austen shoot in Dublin this year. And I hope we’ll be able to shoot The Cosmopolitans if we get the thumbs up.
SG: Does one of these characters represent you?
WS: Yes, the sad sack Hal character was essentially my story.
SG: Were all the other ones your friends, or are some made up out of whole cloth?
WS: Well, a lot of it’s true. I wouldn’t want to say exactly, but a lot of actual incidents.
SG: Have the ideas of culture in Paris changed a lot in the last 10-15 years since you first had this idea?
WS: I don’t know. I don’t know about that. I see a continuum of a lot of the dynamics being the same over the years.
SG: Metropolitan was about a character discovering this new world in New York. Nowadays would you have to go to a different country to find that level of separation?
WS: I don’t know. I don’t know what this scene is for young people now. I mean, that’s an interesting point. You do have the idea of breaking into a new circle definitely when you move to a new city or a new country.
SG: What is a milksop? I’ve never heard that word before.
WS: You hadn’t? The connotation is sort of suggested, isn’t it?
SG: Yes, in context I get it, so you taught me a new word.
WS: I think ti’s great that this Italian had such a rich vocabulary in English.
SG: You slipped in a comment about journalists being angry. Is that your opinion?
WS: It’s just some teasing. It’s all in fun. Some fun teasing with my friends.
SG: I certainly take it in good fun. Did the Joan Osborne cover of “What Becomes of the Broken Hearted” exist before this? Did she record that for you?
WS: She recorded for us. I’d thought there was a Joan Osborne single of that because she did the memorable performance for the Funk Brothers documentary, Standing in the Shadows of Motown, but we couldn’t find any track. I love that song and had the idea, the broken hearted is the theme for this episode and could be a theme maybe for the whole series. The idea of having an American female sing it and also sing it in her French seemed to go with Aubrey’s story, Aubrey being sad. So Joan came in and sang it in both English and French. For the pilot we mixed in one chorus in French but we hope to release three versions: One all English, one all French and one, the pilot version.
SG: It’s a beautiful cover so I’m glad you have plans to release the single, or would it be part of a Cosmopolitan soundtrack?
WS: I really want to try to get a soundtrack out but people just weren’t used to a soundtrack being issued with a pilot. So I was actually talking to my friends at Milan who did the soundtrack for Damsels in Distress and for Barcelona. They’ve been very interested in releasing the Joan Osborne but they would prefer to wait for a soundtrack album until we come out with the whole series, if that happens.
SG: Were people used to having movie style credits on a TV pilot?
WS: I didn’t know about that. It’s the only way I know how to do it. I had that pretty footage of the Seine and I wanted to use it. I love the credits that Teddy Blanks designed.
SG: I was happy to see the Sambola come back. Were you always planning to incorporate that into your future movies after Damsels?
WS: No, a lot of fun stuff happened right as we were shooting. I think that was modified, Jimmy and Kenny dancing to the Sambola. That was a revision right on set. Fortunately I had the Amazon executives in Paris. I thought there might be some questioning of that but they didn’t mind it.
SG: Has music always been a part of your work?
WS: One of the things is I always like listening to my favorite songs as I write on headphones. After a while sometimes I go to something else because I don’t want to burn out my favorite songs. I want to use them in the movie and not be so sick of them by then. I do think a lot about the songs I’m listening to and they affect me a lot. I was listening to that Gershwin song, “Things are Looking Up” a lot when I was writing in Paris in the old days and it got into Damsels in Distress. For this, we have two very expensive songs at the beginning and end of the movie that are pretty important. “To Be Loved” by Jackie Wilson, I just adore that song and it really helps conclude our episode. So in between I didn’t want to have any expensive music. Joe Rudge was music supervisor so we talked about stuff that we both liked. I really love ‘60s Jamaican, I love Motown and European pop. So we tried to get as much music as we could in a short period of time listening to it all, knowing what’s affordable music, what we can get deals on. I know that there are a lot of these music libraries where they really actually do have some great, great tracks that aren’t well exposed.
SG: Has dance always been a vehicle for your characters?
WS: Dance is really helpful because when you’re making a romantic story, a romantic comedy story, you kind of want something visual and cinematic where they can relate nonverbally. So a dance scene is really great for that.
SG: Do you consider it a gamble with this Amazon model where people get to vote on whether they want your pilot to continue?
WS: It is a gamble because although we have a lot supporters, there are a lot of people who seem to get their nerves out of joint with our films. I’ve been really amazed that Damsels hadn’t done better on IMDB. My daughter said, “Don’t look at IMDB. It’s terrible” but I was really surprised that Damsels didn’t get a higher rating, so I’m concerned about people voting against it. I think there are a lot of people who support it and I hope it’s more important to Amazon that a lot of people like it than that a lot of people think they don’t like it.
SG: In a way is it less stressful if the actual audience decides than if it’s some executive?
WS: Well, I think it is the executives who decide. I think ultimately they have to use their own judgement but I guess they look pretty closely at how the public’s reacting, but they might be looking at an audience who likes it. The people who don’t want to watch, it’s not that serious. What we do want are people who really do want to watch.
SG: If we vote for a full season of The Cosmopolitans, will each episode be another chapter?
WS: They will be chapters but I’d kind of like to release it out of order so people have to figure out where in the story does this go. So you just release an episode but you don’t really say this is X episode. Maybe the episode released after that would be sort of an in between one and you’d piece together what’s happening to the characters. That would interest me.
SG: Would you still say Chapter Five, Chapter Two, Chapter Seven?
WS: No, that’s it. This might be the only chapter that’ll be numbered.
SG: Will you write and direct each episode?
WS: I’m kind of encouraged that they’re thinking of an order of only six episode. So if it’s six 25 minute episodes, that’s probably doable. If there were more episodes, I think I’d prefer to share directing work than writing work.
SG: Would Chloe Sevigny be available if it goes to series?
WS: I hope so. I think so. I think her agents will enjoy the negotiations. [Laughs]
SG: It was interesting she was a special appearance.
WS: I don’t know how that happened because we actually had Chloe in the first card with Adam, and then we got this word that her contract said guest star and some agent or manager said she had to be listed as a guest star and not as a star. I think that might be negotiating position stuff. I don’t think Chloe knew about it.
SG: There’s actually a rule, since she’s on another show, that you can only do three episodes of another show as a guest star. So that’s normal for television.
WS: I think that’s how we got to use her but by the time we were editing, I think she was no longer doing that show so we theoretically could have changed all that. For some reason someone said it has to be listed this way, and I don’t think it was Chloe. We’re all keen on Chloe being big in the series and I think she’s keen on doing it, so I think it’ll work out.
SG: I think the credit is cute.
WS: Well, that’s one of the fun things that whenever people say you have to redo something, you actually get a second chance at it. You get more time and a few more dollars to do something else so it generally turns out for the best.
SG: Is producing a series in Paris feasible now?
WS: Yeah, we really had a good crew. It was a good experience.
SG: You talked about reading IMDB ratings, but was Damsels in Distress a success overall?
WS: Yeah, it was. I think that I would’ve liked it to have been a bigger success, but it’s going to get its money back and it’s been really well received in certain quarters. I’m not going to fret too much about the people who didn’t get it or whatever. One of the cool things after living in Paris anonymously for so many years, when it came here in October 2012, it went over really, really well and got incredibly nice reviews in Paris, really beautiful ones. So that was a great experience to come back to Paris with something that people really embraced.
SG: Did people seek you out and identify you?
WS: Yes, there’s very good attache press and got people in to see it and wrote about it. Since then, there’ve been two retrospectives of our films in Paris. One is going on now and they brought out my Last Days of Disco novel here and it won an award. It’s been a magical year in Paris, all this great stuff happening. I feel like Jerry Lewis.
SG: Is the Jane Austen film, Love and Friendship, what you intend to do next?
WS: Yes.
SG: It’s one I’m less familiar with. It says it’s one of her short stories?
WS: She actually wrote three epistolary novels when she was very young, still in the 18th century. Two of those epistolary novels she turned into the modern form. That became Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice. This is the one she never adapted and published as a modern novel. She left it in manuscript form in the old 18th century style, like Dangerous Liaison or Samuel Richardson style of letters exchanged between characters. I worked on it forever because it was so hard adapting letters into dialogue drama. But finally it seemed to come together and people like the script. I’ve got these great actors interested, so that looks good. It’s more like Oscar Wilde. It’s like her doing Oscar Wilde. It’s funny, not romantic.
SG: Does it deal with different themes than her big four novels that have all been made into popular movies?
WS: It is probably most like Emma, but it’s different. It’s like she and Oscar Wilde got together to do something together.
SG: What are you looking forward to about designing and portraying the 1700s?
WS: I have beautiful locations in Ireland just outside of Dublin, these beautiful great houses. These anglo rich people built these magnificent houses in the Irish countryside. It’s really beautiful.
SG: Is it set in Dublin or is Dublin doubling for England?
WS: No, it’s English houses built outside of Dublin by English aristocrats. It’ll be doubling for the south of England.
