Whit Stillman wrote, directed and produced three brilliant films in the ’90s—Metropolitan, Barcelona and The Last Days of Disco—films that enjoyed both critical success and respectable box office returns and proved to be significant touchstones for a generation of filmgoers and even filmmakers. Life inside a Whit Stillman movie is immediately identifiable; his vision of the world is unique.
So how is it that this week’s Damsels in Distress is his first film in nearly 13 years? First of all, as Stillman is quick to correct, the fallow period is really a bit shorter. “I reduce the amount of time,” he explains, “because I turned in the draft of Damsels on December 25 of 2009 and it got going in January. So I put the gap at 10 years.”
Still, a decade-long period where one of the most beloved auteurs of his generation is reduced to churning out scripts for hire and living in, to put it politely, greatly reduced conditions—how does that happen? Stillman is refreshingly candid on the subject. “It’s difficult for me to comprehend too, which is part of the problem,” he says. “I kept thinking things were about to happen, so I never really took radical action because things really did seem to be about to happen. Then there’s the whole story about putting a frog in water and heating it up slowly, and it doesn’t jump out because it doesn’t notice. So I just didn’t notice.
“My section of the business wasn’t in good shape,” he adds, referring to independent film. “It had a boom and it had a bubble, and then the air came out of it as I was trying to get set up. The money started disappearing. I feel embarrassed saying this, by the way, because I’m sitting in a car right now with Greta Gerwig, and while I was over here not making films, she was making one after the other. But after Disco I was thinking I had to do things the typical industry way, and I think I was cowed by other people telling me that. And the industry way is big stars and presales and equity financing and all that stuff. And that system is a lot of bunk.”
Frustrated by his inability to get a big movie made, Stillman decided to make Damsels a small movie. Just how small, he won’t say. The budget, he allows, is “lower than what’s published. We can’t say how low because it makes us have to cut our prices for foreign sales. If foreign territories buy the film, they have these formulas where they’ll only pay a portion of the budget. So that’s one reason indie producers are kind of cagey about what the actual budget was.”
But he was encouraged by the thoughts of two great directors of the past regarding money and film. “The two people I quoted in the past,” he says, “were John Huston and Roberto Rossellini. I read a great biography of Rossellini by Tag Gallagher, and he quotes him as saying, ‘In cinema, money is the root of all evil.” And then John Huston also said that he’d found that the less the money, the better the film.”
Stillman began to believe that perhaps more could be accomplished with less. His experience making Damsels for a (cough, cough) budget “definitely strengthened that belief,” he says. “There are always exceptions. Gone With the Wind had to cost what it cost. Bridge on the River Kwai had to cost what it cost. Those are great films that I love. And there are many others of that kind. But I think that for me and my writing, having some sort of restriction is best.”
One of the benefits of a smaller budget is greater attention to dialogue, and of course it’s in the dialogue that Stillman’s earlier films really shine. His characters are so articulate, in fact, as to seem unrealistic and idealized to many, but Stillman disagrees. “No, no, that’s not the case,” he maintains. “Those kind of conversations were absolutely happening [in the debutante world and the disco world]. You’re right that those films were idealized in other aspects, and the characters themselves do tend to create utopias out of those situations. But there is also a realism there; I have college friends who are very offended when journalists say that no one talks that way.”
It’s a criticism that’s also been leveled at Woody Allen, a filmmaker to whom Whit Stillman is often compared. The comparison is apt, if often overstated. “With this new film, the Woody Allen thing makes more sense, I think,” says Stillman. “Woody Allen has had the courage and the wit to use things that are not very realistic, that are very effective in his comedies. In our previous films we’ve kind of stayed within naturalism and reality. In general that would be a difference between his films and our films. Although those films were idealized, they were set in a known milieu and followed generally realistic rules. This new film transcends some of those rules; there are things that are expressly unrealistic. We break those bonds a little bit, and I think that is a little bit more like Woody Allen.”
Another characteristic of his earlier films is a look at the end of an era. In Metropolitan, Charlie muses that “this may well be the last real debutante season.” Barcelona’s opening title card identifies the film as set “near the end of the Cold War.” And, of course, the death of the disco movement constantly hangs like a cloud over The Last Days of Disco. But there’s an important distinction there. “All of those endings are really different by nature,” he says. “There’s no pining for the Cold War at the end of the Cold War era, whereas there is this nostalgia at the end of Metropolitan for this disappearing era. I think a lot of that is the romantic pose of the characters; it’s more poignant for them to think that it’s the ending of something. Although in the case of Disco, it did sort of end.”
Like the earlier trio of films, Damsels in Distress is semi-autobiographical, but it’s also a slight departure from the end-of-an-era tendencies of those films. It’s inspired by a group of girls that came to Harvard after Stillman’s era and injected a bit of fresh air into a social scene that had become “very political and grungy,” in his words. They were throwbacks, of a sort, wearing nice clothes and French perfume and throwing fancy parties. They also looked to make actual differences in others’ lives, Stillman suggests, creating a suicide hotline, for instance (it’s a major storyline in the film). What some would call a degree of artifice that the girls brought to the Harvard scene seems actually to be a positive force in Stillman’s eyes.
It’s far from the first time Whitman has tackled the question of transparency, which Chuck Klosterman has called “the obsession of modernity,” a neat parallel for Audrey Rouget’s reluctance to play the Truth game in Metropolitan, and her warning against excessive honesty. “I think truth-tellers are generally bores,” he says. “There is this idea of truth being virtuous, and I’m not sure if that’s entirely true. It can be just the opposite, I think. Anything can be virtuous or viceful; you have to judge it on an individual basis. So this blanket statement that you should always tell the truth is just wrong. It’s like the person that says, ‘Oh she should know that her boyfriend is cheating on her.’ All these sort of self-appointed scolds. Everything is sort of case-by-case. Sometimes you should tell the truth, and sometimes you should not.”
But if the measuring stick isn’t truth or falsehood, what is it? Intent? Effect? “It’s everything. There’s just unlimited measuring sticks. The great thing about life is that it can’t be boiled down to one measuring stick.”
His philosophizing sounds like it could have been lifted straight out of a Whit Stillman movie. But in a few days we won’t have to imagine or recreate those Stillmanesque dialogues any more. For the first time in 13 years, we’ll get to see them on screen.