I had a really great college experience with a wonderful teacher who wrote biographies of John Keats and Dr. Would you say that you’re as drawn to books as you are to films? Tushka Bergen, Taylor Nichols, Chris Eigeman, and Núria Badia in Barcelona (1994) Your new film is an adaptation of a Jane Austen novel, and literature has clearly been a huge source of inspiration throughout your work. She would do things like find a trove of suits that were from that period, and they’d look new, so she found new clothes from the period. The costume person, Sarah Edwards, has had a great career since then it was one of her first big jobs, and she’s done sensational work. We couldn’t close off Fifth Avenue, so two wrong-model cars passed through, but that’s the only dramatic time there’s something out of period that’s pretty visible. We were doing this beautiful shot of Chloë coming out of her walk of shame after the sexiness of Scrooge McDuck leads her into the bedroom of Robert Sean Leonard, and it’s the next morning at dawn, and she’s walking out of his town-house apartment building on a street in the East Nineties it’s a beautiful shot, and she’s crossing the street heading toward Fifth avenue. There was only one shot where we really got busted. For The Last Days of Disco, we had big trucks that were period and a lot of cars that were period in the foreground, and we tried to block whatever we didn’t want to see. I prefer that you see the city in the background and you have to trick it and not be too worried that some little element in the distant background that’s not quite right is going to get in. I don’t want to have that kind of fake, claustrophobic, hermetic period where they shut down a street or two streets, and then you just redo everything in the street. When doing a film in New York City in a period eighteen years before, it’s hard. You get a beautiful country house-the English aristocracy from the eighteenth century were building beautiful houses there-and you call the carriage company and you put the period costumes on those people, and they look just like coachmen from the 1790s-so you’re home safe. For, we were set up in Ireland, which is a great backlot for period films they have the whole expertise and support structure. It’s a lot easier, I think, doing the 1790s than doing the early 1980s. With The Last Days of Disco we went back to the fashion magazines of 1979 to 1982 and found the things we liked and the things that looked good to our eyes. For costumes and stuff like that we remind ourselves what was available and we stylize things-so we don’t make it look as bad as it could look. It’s not a big research deal to remember, in my own life, what 1981 was like. Carolyn Farina in Metropolitan (1990) What’s the difference between making a period piece set in the past few decades and making a film set two hundred years ago? Do particular challenges crop up when you’re trying to re-create a present that the audience can remember? I can deal with memory-and things get more dramatic and romantic-and you can reconstitute elements of the past with that helpful filter. It’s much more interesting to have things happening in the past. Do you feel a strong connection to the past, and does that play into your work as a writer and filmmaker?Īs a writer, talking about the past is a sort of creative necessity, I find, if you want to have certain material that you have perspective on. The majority of your films take place in bygone eras, whether that’s Metropolitan’s “not so long ago,” or the late eighteenth century as in this film. Recently, I had the chance to speak with Stillman about his trilogy, his new film Love & Friendship (based on the Jane Austen novella “Lady Susan”), and the filmmaker’s work of capturing the past. These three films, rich with witty dialogue and literary references and inspired by Stillman’s own coming of age, explore different facets of 1980s culture-from collegiate Manhattan debutante balls to the darker side of the waning disco era to the life of an expat in a time of tense anti-Americanism. This week, we released writer-director Whit Stillman’s early-career trio of films about the 1980s, including Metropolitan (his directorial debut), The Last Days of Disco, and Barcelona.
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