In the 1990s, Whit
Stillman was one of the leading voices of independent cinema with his three
comedies “Metropolitan”, “Barcelona” and “The Last Days of Disco”. They were
films filled with wit and sophistication while covering the confusion of being
a twenty-something. Then Stillman had an unfortunate hiatus from the world of
cinema. He has now returned with a fantastic new film called “Damsels in
Distress” staring Greta Gerwig, which is a shift in style, while maintaining
his previous excellence.
We were thrilled to
have Whit Stillman chat with The Film Yap about the similarities and
differences between his characters, what an actor can bring to a role and how
Bloomington helped inspire his new film.
Austin: Now what
was it about The Last Days of Disco
that made you want to adapt it into a novel?
Whit: Well, I
always wanted to write a novel and the idea of turning a story of a film into a
novel came up with Metropolitan and
it used to a be a “phantom book” at Amazon just hanging around the internet. It
was announced in a catalog for Soho Press. They were people that really wanted
to do it, but they were pressing me to do it in a hurry and I was in Barcelona
trying to write that script on a limited time basis. So the clash between
trying to do the Metropolitan novel
in a hurry and have this other script responsibility meant I had to drop out of
the Metropolitan idea.
So I kept it in mind and felt that the Disco material was rich for a novel. A very good literary editor,
Jonathan Galassi from Farrar Straus and Giroux, like the idea of a novel that
would not be tied to the film’s release. So it could come out years afterward
and I would have time to work on it. I really liked the experience. It got a
pretty good reaction. I think there’s one part of it that I should have done
something different. About 3/5th the way through, it loses momentum.
I slavishly thought I had to include all the lines of dialog from the film in
the novel and that was a mistaken; I should have restructured some of it.
Austin: Do you
have any wish to return to prose?
Whit: I do, I
really want to. It’s very very tempting. You can achieve things with film that
you can’t at all in fiction; it’s more social and gregarious and has all sorts
of good things about it. But I think with writing fiction, you get the pure
creative play under your own control. I don’t want to use a strong word to
describe the world of cinema but….there are a lot of annoyances, tension, and
industrial processes with film. You don’t feel that you’re doing creative work,
but industrial work which has its good side, I guess, too.
It may be economical too. I’m not sure if you get paid more
for unprofitable films or unprofitable novels. (Laughs) No, our films are
profitable. The reason they’re profitable is because they’re profitable for the
investors and not profitable for me.
Austin: Then how
has the independent film market changed from when you started out to now?
Whit: It’s been a
radical change. We’re in a very tough period for independent film. I think
there are good things too, but you have to keep your cost level low. [Damsels in Distress] will be profitable,
but we made it very inexpensively.
Austin: And yet,
your new film has a lot of visual style that I haven’t seen previously in your
films. Including a musical number.
Whit: We were so
lucky that we got that off the ground. I was very happy with it.
Austin: What was
it like filming that?
Whit: It was
really fun. (Laughs). It all came together with this beautiful weather. The
cinematographer had a lot of really great ideas for how to do it. We got a
crane to shoot against the backlights; we waited for the “magic hour” moment
for Greta and Adam to dance in the fountain. We were lucky with our location
that we had things like the Staten Island Botanical Gardens on our set and we
had a young choreographer who knew how to adapt things to the spaces we had to
occupy.
Austin: Well, it
looked great.
Whit: I really
liked it.
Austin: Now I
wanted to ask you about your characters—
Whit: As well you
might!
Austin: (Laughs)
I know, shocking! In your first three films, it seems that your characters are
almost burdened by their education. They have this rich vocabulary and know so
much about literature, but they don’t know how to apply it well to their lives.
Whit: Well, I
think they’re all pretty superficial in the nice way that everyone is. I think
at that age and really at most ages you spend a lot of time talking about
things you don’t know that well.
Austin: But then
in Damsels, your characters don’t
seem as superficial.
Whit: Oh cool.
Austin: They’re
not as educated and they seem happier. Do you think that’s fair to say?
Whit: That’s
really interesting. You’re probably right about that, but I never thought about
it that way.
Austin: Do you
have fun writing one style more than the other?
Whit: You know, I
had a lot of fun writing Damsels in
Distress. I really had a gas writing this one; I like this kind of comedy.
Austin: It’s more
absurdist than your others.
Whit: It’s stylized,
absurdist, broad. It’s a more out-and-out comedy than the comedy of manners.
Austin: Do you
find there’s much of a difference between writing characters who are surreally
dumb to those who are trying to be witty all the time?
Whit: No. I think
the effect is witty sometimes from the characters in the other films, but I
don’t think they’re trying to be witty. I noticed in the first screening of Metropolitan, that people were laughing
more at the reaction shots. It’s not what’s being said, but the reactions to
it. So they are saying absurdities. There is a commonality between the supposed
“smart humor” and the supposed “dumb humor” of the two groups of films. I
consider Damsels in a group of stupid
films; now that I’ve gone stupid I don’t want to go back.
Austin: From that
first screening, did you shape your films while thinking about that kind of
reaction?
Whit: We had that
in mind. The editor kept thinking about that when we were editing Barcelona together. That’s one of the
great things about making a film, as opposed to writing a novel or another
endeavor: you have a lot of other people thinking about it at the same time. So
I like to think that every actor is like a research institute on their
character. Sometimes you change things for production reasons, but then the
actor comes up to you and says, “Don’t you know what you’ve done hurts the arc
of my character?” Then you do what they suggest because they are the people
keeping the integrity of that character going.
Austin: Do you
have any examples of how Greta Gerwig changed the character of Violet?
Whit: First she
did something that I love, which was she embodied the character. She created
the character that was intended, which is the thing you really want. She did a
lot of little things, most of which I didn’t find out until afterwards when we
did interviews together. She did all of these physical things like she had a
way of walking rapidly with small steps that conveyed this determination and
specialness of her character. If someone spoke to her and she wanted to pay
attention to them, she wouldn’t turn her head, she would turn her whole body.
These were the little and big things she worked on to get
the character there. I think that’s the hardest part of the film so there had
to be a lot of modulation in the first four days of the shoot. “Is it this way or is it that way?” So she had to do a number of different versions and we
had quite a few takes to start with. Then once she voiced the right version we
stuck with that.
Austin: The
balance seems so difficult. How do you maintain respect for the character while
also focusing on the absurdity that she found an epiphany through a bar of
soap? How do you focus on the comedy while focused on the characters’ true
thoughts?
Whit: Well, I
believe a lot of this stuff. I think a lot of people can grab onto things to
have their epiphany on like a special rare scent. I don’t think neither Violet
nor I particularly like a lot of perfumes or a lot of scents. So you can have
the idea of something transcending. It’s something that sounds absurd or
laughable, but it can be something very helpful to people.
Austin: I
understand. I was in the audience when you spoke at Indiana University a few
months ago. I loved how someone asked you about Scrooge McDuck because I love
that dialog scene from Disco and then
you surprised me by reacting very enthusiastically about that character.
Whit: Uncle
Scrooge? Yeah I love that character.
Austin: So you
find that through the absurdity you can be really genuine?
Whit: I tend to have
to work with stuff I like. For instance, I was chastised by several reviewers
because they thought the film should have been about the conflict between
Violet and Rick DeWolfe from “The Complainer”. That was a missed opportunity,
blah blah blah. That was one of the big changes I made in the script because at
a certain point it was going to be conflict between those two or Depressed
Debby, Aubrey Plaza’s character. Then I thought that was such a boring prospect
and it depressed me so much for being so unoriginal that I couldn’t write the
script. I was stuck. My intention was to write it that way but then I had a
writer friend who said that when you get stuck, you’re stopping for a reason.
You have to think something through.
I didn’t want to make a boring formulaic film where there’s
a conflict between two people and that’s the whole film and then it’s resolved.
So I decided not to do the Rick DeWolfe story; he’s disappeared from the story.
His effect is still there, that influence becomes the killjoy for the whole
campus.
Austin: So what
inspired you to switch the conflict to what it is in the film now?
Whit: I think it
was that I was going in that direction, but it wasn’t the true direction of the
film. When I started the film I didn’t want to do any political dispute between
two people. I wanted to keep the zany Violet identity quest and romance story
going so it was avoiding the trap of the other plan and staying with the ethos
of the material.
Austin: I found
all of the characters in the film to be really funny, but I felt there were
more characters you wanted us to emotionally connect to and then there were
characters who were just there for humor, like the guy who doesn’t know what
colors are.
Whit: He was
kinda touching too.
Austin: Oh
absolutely. I was wondering, in a comedy, how much do you want us to respect
your characters? Is that a weird question?
Whit: I always
like it to leave it open to how the audience should feel about the characters.
Sometimes I fear I leave it too open. People really like the Lily character
because they think she’s the identification character but she really wasn’t.
It’s hard for them to get back on track and recognize it as Violet’s film. They
tend to be the ones more negative about the movie. That’s the problem with
people being too preprogrammed to a certain film formulas. Like the one where
the outsider character chastises the snobbish insiders, but Damsels ends up not being that.
Austin: I think
then the movie would work better on a second viewing because I started off
identifying with the Lily character until I realized how often she would change
her opinions with whoever she was around.
Whit: I think
improves a lot on a second viewing because they learn it’s not a film about
where the journey ends up but what’s happening on the journey. You stop
worrying about when it’s going to end and you get into more of the characters.
Austin: Now I
know you were at Indiana University for a year or so?
Whit: I was in
Bloomington for a foundation for a year but while I was there I had an Indiana
drivers license so I could use the IU library. So I was in the IU library
working at nights and on the weekends quite a bit.
Austin: Were you
affected by that type of college town for this film?
Whit: I really was.
My two college times were Harvard, my own experience, and the year I spent near
the IU campus. I was there when the movie Animal
House came out and I remember the toga parties at the time. And I had a tiny
tiny roll of the production of the lovely movie Breaking Away. The director and the screenwriter, Peter Yates and
Steve Tesich, were in Bloomington to location scout and they to be introduced
to Mayor McCloskey. We were at a party and I was picked to introduce them to
the mayor. I met Mayor McCloskey once so it was very incongruous me introducing
them. He was such a live wire about seeing what a good opportunity for the town
so he was like “Yes, we’ll do anything you need!”
Austin: Now I
have to ask, are you working on another project right now?
Whit: I do have
another project. I said in another interview that we’ll have to keep it under
wraps. Then they posted the article saying I’m working on a project called
“Under Wraps”, putting it in capitals. I loved that. So now people will say he
never made his film “Under Wraps”, another film he didn’t make.
Austin: I just
wanted to hear that you were working on something next because the gap was a
long time for fans.
Whit: There’s the
feeling that I will be able to make them faster now because I have the scripts
pretty well written. I have several I want to make, but I still want to work on
them. I want to make them even sillier.
“Damsels in Distress”
is still playing in theatres
across the country.
http://www.thefilmyap.com/2012/05/16/whit-stillman-writerdirector-damels-in-distress/
