‘Austen Is Film, Trollope Is Television’: A Conversation with Whit Stillman
by Daniel Marc Janes
Stillman’s work invites literary comparisons: an avowed Austenite, he cites a constellation of authors as influences. The literary lineage of his films was among a range of topics that we discussed as he carried out a tour of five British cinemas — exhibiting rare 35mm prints of two of his best-loved features. The Whit Stillman Tour, in association with Lost Reels, continues with screenings of Metropolitan at the Filmhouse, Edinburgh (25 July) and the Ultimate Picture Palace, Oxford (31 July).
This is the second leg of your collaboration with Lost Reels, the first being a sold-out screening of The Last Days of Disco at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts in January. How did this partnership come about?
I got an email from Geoff [Geoffrey M. Badger, founder of Lost Reels]. He was contemplating showing The Last Days of Disco at the ICA. They didn’t have any gaps in their calendar until later in the year, but I said I was just about to pass through London the first weekend in January and might they have anything then. As it turned out, they hadn’t programmed anything right after the holidays. So they programmed it for the Sunday, the first Sunday in January, and then — in a very cool move on their part — they added Barcelona and Metropolitan on the prior nights. So we had the trilogy playing over the weekend, and we capped it with the Disco screening on the Sunday evening. And it was really fun, a really good screening. When it sold out, they scheduled another screening later in the month. The Prince Charles Cinema has also been showing the film. So I'm very pleased that The Last Days of Disco is back on release in the UK.
It definitely feels as if there’s a revival of sorts going on. What has it been like seeing your films on 35mm prints?
It was a bit traumatic last night [Stillman had just screened Metropolitan at the Sheffield Showroom]. This was a first answer print struck when Sundance wanted us to reshow the film for its 20th anniversary in 2010 and they authorised us to do two answer prints. The second answer print was fully corrected and was shown at Sundance and put in an archive: the UCLA Film Archive. And this was a print — the first print which I think, as a director, I probably was whining about certain scenes and the colour correction. It was screened at the ICA back, I think, in 2010 when Metrodome put out the DVD in England. And that was a really great weekend. So we knew that the print was screenable. But last night, there was some problem with the sound and the projector — the optical sound reader. People are aesthetically enthralled by watching these prints and there are beauties in the image. But I think, as a filmmaker, sometimes you worry a lot about the ‘everything’ of it, and digital sound is much more reliable. It was a pretty weird experience last night, but I think I was the person quoting the most and the audience seemed to have been able to make out the dialogue. I think it’s probably just a projector problem that we fix, but we are going to test the print again before the FilmHouse screening in Edinburgh.
Could you talk a little more about what makes this Metropolitan print so exceptional?
These are the last prints struck of the film, and that printing negative — in the collapse of all these film laboratories — has kind of been lost. We haven’t been able to find it. And so these are the last of something that were created. I think we have some other printing negatives that were used for foreign release that we might be able to find. And now there’s sort of a push to go back to the original Super 16 and do digital transfers from that. It’s now possible technically, because these are negatives cut into A- and B-rolls for creating the master positive and now they can digitally do that. But these are probably the last prints of this kind to be available.
Metropolitan was shot on Super 16. Last Days of Disco was shot on 35mm. What was it like to shoot in these formats?
It's an odd situation, because we’re promoting these screenings as rare 35mm screenings, and there’s a vogue now for 35mm screenings, and people with higher aesthetic senses than mine really appreciate seeing films on 35mm, on film. I’m a huge skeptic about film. I remember suffering through all the problems of developing and color timing these films and how they were shown and how release prints were made. So I’m not really the best person to talk about the beauties of 35mm. I do know that when we were switching over Damsels in Distress from digital to film — it was shot digitally, we color timed that, then we did a [35mm] film version and color timed it for film — that that was particularly beautiful. That was really extraordinary. I thought we’d done a good job with the digital color timing, but this was really exceptional. And they made two premiere prints from that negative. A projectionist at the ArcLight in California, who had screened it digitally in its initial release, got to show one of these premiere prints later and she said she thought that the premiere prints were extraordinarily beautiful. Unfortunately almost no one saw those because the release prints that Technicolor made were absolutely horrible. Friends would call me up saying how horrible the film looked. That was the 35mm prints of Damsels: Technicolor was going out of business then and not doing a great job in their printing.
In the intervening time between your ‘Doomed Bourgeois in Love’ trilogy [1990-98] and Damsels in Distress [in 2011] , the digital revolution happened. Would you say that you preferred the process in comparison to film?
Yes, I greatly prefer digital. The frame it gives you to fix mistakes and to make things better — it's really extraordinary. You have to do it with the full capabilities of digital so that later you can correct errors and make things better. The thing is I have to reconsider my point of view. This week we were watching the films at a film festival in Portugal and someone was saying he felt that the original three films had a warmth that digital wouldn’t bring to it. There was a closeness to the characters and to the image that came from film, factors that it’s hard for me to evaluate. So maybe I’ve been kind of wrong and just too much inside the box of seeing how the production is affected by these different formats. But certainly, for sound, digital is better.
There is certainly a widespread fetishisation of physical film. Do you feel that this is an undue veneration — that there’s a nostalgia at play?
I do, I do, but I think I’ve just been limited in my aesthetic sensory apparatus, and just worried about having it look good from the filmmaker’s point of view. Other people could be responding more richly to the aesthetic elements. I’m willing to be educated about why film is better. But there are so many traumas when you’re shooting on film when things really aren’t right at all, when there’s dirt on the negative and all this kind of stuff. When you find a good color timer at the lab, you just love the person and just adore that. But it’s kind of a struggle. You’re dealing often with a cinematographer and the color timer and all of you coming to agreement about what’s the best way to go.
Your tour concludes with a screening of Metropolitan in Oxford. Is it a place you know well?
I’ve had some of the happiest screenings of my life in Oxford. There was a screening of Barcelona that was just fabulous, and a fabulous screening of Love & Friendship with Jane Austen experts who came to it. It'll be fun to go back.
I can certainly see the appeal of Metropolitan to current or recent Oxford students: it evokes that post-university phase of life, that sense of idealism and self-questioning. I know that you’ve previously screened the film on campuses. Have you noticed any trends in the way new audiences, in particular younger audiences, engage with your work?
To go back to university environments, the two best screenings I had for Barcelona were at Oxford and Yale, which seem somehow appropriate. I’m really encouraged by the new generation. That’s one of the cool things about taking the film on tour — that, in addition to people who’ve seen them before and want to see it on the big screen, we get new people who get turned on to one film or another and that helps us build an audience. In the US, where we’ve done a lot of screenings of Metropolitan, often seasonally around Christmas, it’s really helped the profile of the film. Everything is helped by theatrical showing. So you start getting all these downloads, and when it's on a platform, people are watching it. It's been hard because, in prior regimes, the films were shown quite often on British TV, but the rights are with a home video company now and they don’t really have a TV sales operation. Metropolitan has been out of circulation in the UK for a long time, and I hope this will sort of help that.
I hope so too. I wanted to ask you a little about what exactly Britain means to you. Your sensibility owes a lot to the English novel in particular.
I think this sort of in-depth literary appreciation has been very helpful in the reception of the films. We’ve had wonderful experiences [in Britain]. Mainline Pictures took on Metropolitan and did a wonderful job. That was great. Members of the royal family came and spoke to the managers. They enjoyed the show. That was a thrill. And The Last Days of Disco was a wonderful thing. We kind of struggled in the United States because every important film of the year suddenly decided to open at the same time that we did. So it was really tough. And there was kind of a whiny attitude [in the US] towards the disco films that were coming out [Last Days’ production coincided with another disco movie, Miramax’s 54], because people thought that we were trying to foist a disco revival on them and they were having none of it. Anyway, when we came to England, it was really wonderful: the Warner Brothers office in London was really terrific. They did just a sensational job. Of 24 releases they had, The Last Days of Disco was one of only four that were profitable just in cinemas. Part of that is that they had a limited number of prints and very limited advertising, so each print was very profitable. But that was a cool experience, and you got a fun reaction. And it actually started in Edinburgh. Both of those films were shown at the Edinburgh Film Festival, and I think the Disco screening was also a Soho House presentation with Chloë Sevigny in attendance.
Which members of the royal family, out of curiosity?
It was Princess Margaret and her kids. It was very nice of them. They came for a Sunday show and stopped by and said to the managers that they enjoyed the movie.
Things took a surreal turn last week when you tweeted that AI had propagated misinformation in advance of your UK tour — specifically that Metropolitan had been listed as a Spanish co-production produced by an imagined ‘Jose Garcia’.
I’m finding that AI is spreading misinformation everywhere about our films. It’s just the strangest thing. I was with a fellow last night, and he says that AI is also destroying films. People are trying to clean up film files, using AI to clean up imperfections in old film material, and AI is generating entirely new things that have nothing to do with the film in question. I think this enthusiasm for AI is totally out of hand because it’s just spreading nonsense. It makes you wonder about the people who are big enthusiasts for it, because I think it shows their lack of concern for accuracy and quality.
Review 31 is a literary magazine. You are in fact the second filmmaker that we’ve published an interview with, the first being Wim Wenders. But this feels apt given the literary qualities of your films.
I wrote two novels!
I was going to get to that!
And I intend to do a real one too.
Tell me more about this.
It's something I massively researched during the pandemic. My father was in the Kennedy administration and I was going to do a novel against the background of the Kennedy administration.
At what stage is it at the moment?
Just fantasy. That’s the best stage.
You have to start somewhere.
That’s before things start going wrong.
I think Adam Thirlwell in his essay on Love & Friendship described you as a practitioner of ‘literary cinema’. Do you think that’s a fair characterisation of your films?
I don't know. I mean, I guess so. Why not? There was one review when Metropolitan came out. I was sort of spoiled — I wasn’t sort of spoiled, I was definitely spoiled — by how everything broke critically in our favor with Metropolitan. But there was one semi-sour review. I met the critic at a dinner when Barcelona was coming out and it was interesting because he said that he had a real problem reading books. He had a real aversion to books when he was adolescent and movies became his lifeline. He became obsessed with movies. And so suddenly this kind of sour review, or not very appreciative review, seemed fine in context, because Metropolitan is catnip for literary people. If he’s not literary, if he doesn’t read books, it’s fine. You just don’t respond to the movie. Okay, makes sense. I think that’s the proper way to think of these things, that people are bringing their aversions and their likes to the cinema and try as much as possible to keep the film so that people can approach it with their different points of view and get something out of it. But some people actually think that Metropolitan is harsh satire and negative and I think it’s pretty friendly to the characters.
There are two anniversaries this year that have special significance for your work. One is the 35th anniversary of Metropolitan’s release. The other is the 250th anniversary of Jane Austen’s birth. How often have you revisited the Austen canon, and how have your views on it changed in recent years?
I read my first Jane Austen in the first semester of my second year in university. For some reason I picked up Northanger Abbey. I hated it. I thought it was terrible. And I’d tell anyone who would listen how overrated Jane Austen was. But fortunately I have a literary sister and brother-in-law who clued me in and I think they had Sense and Sensibility. After university, I was working in publishing. I read Sense and Sensibility and loved it and read everything and loved it all. I delved more into Jane Austen and found the unfinished work that was then titled Lady Susan (not her title). I don’t know how many times I read her but, for a palate cleanser, when I was trying to write Metropolitan, I would read a few pages of Jane Austen just to get my bad writing out of my head.
Metropolitan contains a famous discussion of the likeability of Fanny Price, namely Lionel Trilling’s contention that nobody could like the heroine of Mansfield Park. Like Audrey, I’m a Fanny Price defender. There are not many of us around.
Do you think so?
She gets a lot of flak.
I sort of advance the prig point of view. No character can be too British for me. Except maybe someone from Trollope.
I understand you’ve been having something of a Trollope phase.
Totally. Again, a pandemic passion.
How did this come about?
My literary brother-in-law had read all of Trollope and so I had a guide. Back in the day, we loved Susan Hampshire playing Glencora Palliser in the Pallisers TV series. We enjoyed that. And so I started reading Trollope and listening to Trollope — I often listen to books — and just got absolutely mesmerised by him during the pandemic. The great thing is that there’s so much of it and a lot of it is so good. I had one declaration that it’s a vain exercise comparing Jane Austen and Trollope — both are enormously admired — but there seems to be this tendency to deprecate Trollope and to use Jane Austen to deprecate Trollope, which I think is a mistake. They’re really different and they’re both great and they’re doing different things, but I think lately I’ve had a way of categorising them which is that Jane Austen is film and Trollope is television. It’s the volume, it’s the sweep, it’s the length of the long, winding river of narrative and characters, while Jane Austen’s much more the perfected narrative that a film must have — where it’s much tighter and characters come into focus in a different way.
In discussions of the literary lineage of your films, Jane Austen naturally comes up the most. F. Scott Fitzgerald comes up a lot. One figure who is perhaps more surprising is Balzac — who has a lot in common with Trollope in terms of the panorama and scope.
I love Balzac. I adore Balzac. The other writers that have been influential and helpful have been J.D. Salinger and Evelyn Waugh. I’m not sure if some of my enthusiasm for Waugh holds up. Some of the novels I’ve gone back to and had real problems with. I think J.D. Salinger has been very influential in American indie comedy.
Which Waughs didn’t you get on with?
I’m thinking of Scoop. I think it didn’t hold up.
In what way?
It was kind of offensive.
Fair.
Some things can be offensive but still be doing something good. But this was stupidly offensive and kind of a mess. Put Out More Flags holds up better.
In The Last Days of Disco, Alice (Chloë Sevigny) and Charlotte (Kate Beckinsale) work at a publishing house. The movie has generated a lot more attention in recent years in its portrayal of the conglomeration of American publishing. Could you talk more about this and how it was inspired by your time working at Doubleday?
I had a little controversy with a popular essayist in America. She did a piece in the New York Times on Hollywood getting publishing wrong and the films being inaccurate. She’s a quasi-friend of mine, and I know she likes some of the other films. I think she liked Disco but she was saying that it was inaccurate and later we had it out. The thing is that she was in a really exceptional publishing house which organised itself in a very different way from Doubleday. I was just reporting on how it was at Doubleday and she was saying it was inaccurate. It just didn’t match her experience at her publishing house, which was actually the more exceptional publishing house. It seems to me, very often, a lame critique of a work to say that it’s inaccurate. You can be ignorant of the full range of things and you’re just going by your own limited experience. If I had been saying anything averse about the people in that publishing house, I could have been sued. It was so closely related to the atmosphere and the characters at the house.
And people were similarly in thrall to bestseller formulae?
Totally. It’s just exact. That’s exactly what was going on. We had a manuscript room just like that with a woman with an Eastern European accent. We were always thinking about the Scott Meredith formula [a bestseller formula created by a leading literary agent] and all that kind of stuff. We wrote reports that way and editorial meetings — it’s exactly as it was. Josh [Neff, played by Matt Keeslar] is sort of the hero of Disco and he’s an ADA. His boss has the last name of my boss at Doubleday [Betty Prashker], who I revered and who just died last year at the age of ninety-nine.
That’s a good innings. One thing that you have in common with Jane Austen is that you like to think about what your characters did next. Austen was said to have updated her family on the fate of Mr Woodhouse, Emma and Knightley after the events of Emma. You catch us up on some of the Disco characters in Cocktails at Petrossian. What do you think that the Metropolitan characters are doing now?
I kind of know, because that film was based on these wonderful people I knew in that period. And they really keep on keeping on in their mode. Since I was basing it on experiences from around 1969 — 1969 was the centre of the period, but I first saw a deb party around ’67 or so and we’re still seeing them until about ‘72. The judgmental Jane character is still judgmental. She’s not talking to a lot of people. The Sally Fowler charming character is still just like Sally Fowler. Two of the women went into real estate and were quite successful, one fabulously successful. And the Nick Smith character sadly has died. He was a really brilliant guy, a really handsome, dynamic guy who did marry a rich wife and that allowed him to be a writer and to be the best columnist for the New York Times. He had the architectural history column at the New York Times.
He’d write about all these great old buildings in New York and their history and had a business on the history of the buildings. If someone wanted to have historic preservation for the building, he’d say why and which [buildings] should be historically preserved; if he had a client who was a developer who had to knock the building down, he might say it really wasn’t that interesting a building. I think he was very, very honest and very, very devoted to the aesthetics of architecture. And so people really just kept on being as they were then.
We’ve talked about literary likes and dislikes. One author who you’re less enamoured with is Henry James, even though your work frequently draws comparisons with his due to your shared preoccupation with the innocent American abroad.
He doesn’t appeal to me so much. I suppose I should be reading James but, since I have Trollope to read, I don’t feel the need. I’ve read very little Henry James. . . I think there’s a certain prissy snobbishness that rubs me the wrong way.
There are interesting connections there, because he was great friends with this group of American and other artists who were in a small community — I think in the Cotswolds — that he’d often visit [the Broadway Group, named after the Worcestershire village of Broadway]. And there was a drawing by one of the artists of a baby. I think it was Frank Millet. And at a key point, this baby became the best friend of my grandfather. When I was in crisis — I was very homesick in my boarding school and I wanted to leave it — my parents had me go talk to him for advice, and he gave me this sensational advice that really helped me. It wasn’t really sensational advice, but for me it was sensational because it worked. And it just fascinates me that he was the baby being drawn, the toddler who Henry James would have known, who John Singer Sargent would have known, that these things go back in time and they connect in a direct way. I guess, as far as Americans abroad, I would admire much more John Singer Sargent than Henry James in a certain way.
I wanted to return to the subject of Jane Austen as we’re in such a renaissance right now: new adaptations of Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice, the Ang Lee film reappearing in cinemas. You’ve previously said that the problem with most Austen adaptations is that they are done as romances.
I think we’re in terrible danger now — I mean, we have been for a long time — of Jane Austen overload and people getting sick of it, and her risking being put in Coventry for overpopularity, if that's not an incorrect metaphor. I think people are going to get sick to their stomachs of endless trashy derivations of Jane Austen. I was somewhat connected to Sense and Sensibility (1996), in a sense that I was offered the film between Barcelona and Disco, and I did make comments on the original script they had, and I was really, really pleased with what they did with it. I think it was really brilliant. I love Sense and Sensibility. I love the Jennifer Ehle/Colin Firth BBC series of Pride and Prejudice.
It does seem to be that there’s a divide between those who came to Jane Austen through the romantic movies and those who came to Jane Austen through the books. There’s this cliché that it’s a girls’ thing. It's a woman’s thing. And I really was very ambivalent about some of the choices distributors were making and the pictures they chose from Love & Friendship to promote it. Our job was to get men to come to the movie too. We had a really happy experience when Love & Friendship was the surprise film at the Glasgow Film Festival. We’ve had really unhappy experiences as the surprise film in festivals: the Damsels in Distress screening at the London Film Festival was very bad. I mean, pretty damn bad. But, in Glasgow, Love & Friendship did exactly what a surprise film should do: it converted people. People who’d never, of their own volition, come to see a Jane Austen film were stuck in a cinema and watched it and ended up liking it. That’s what you want with that kind of surprise. If you go back originally, Jane Austen was denigrated by quite a few prominent women and appreciated and praised by quite a few prominent men. The championing of Jane Austen originally was a male project: Sir Walter Scott, the Prince Regent, other people. Our Chief Justice, John Marshall, a great constitutional figure, adored Jane Austen very early before she became a mass publishing phenomenon later in the century.
I’ve been to the big conferences they have and one of the things that happens is that people like to dress up in period clothes. I mean, they’re lovely people and they’re cool conferences. There are a lot of people who are curious and academic along with the fans. But it risks killing the reputation of someone who is a profound figure in literature.
Did you see the Puffin ‘First Impressions’ covers that came out earlier this year?
What’s that?
They republished the six Austen novels with YA-like covers.
That does sound like a bad idea. I went through a problem with a cover, too, with the Love & Friendship novel adaptation that I did, which really had to swim against a lot of preconceptions about Jane Austen. The Love & Friendship novel adaptation is not really a Jane Austen project. It’s sort of a 19th-century humorous project — modern humour and 19th-century humour using the Jane Austen material in a certain way. But they’d already written, based on Jane Austen, the copy for the catalog and the jacket flaps and I kept trying to change it based on what the book really was. There was this huge inertia. Then Pierre Le-Tan, the late artist who did a lot of our posters, did a humorous cover for the hardcover of the novel, and then for the paperback editions everyone abandoned that and for the French edition they abandoned that. Sadly, because I think it gave a much truer representation of the book than these hyper-romantic pictures they wanted to put on the novel. It’s bad to market something dishonestly, because what it means is the wrong people are going to buy it, and then they’re not going to like it and they’re going to complain about it. It’s really good to market things correctly for what they are.
I wanted to ask about Clueless, which occupies a prominent place in the discourse surrounding Austen adaptations. You’ve previously said that it’s a good teen movie but you reject the received wisdom that it’s a particularly good Austen adaptation. Could you talk about this a little more?
I just think everyone who says that should be chastised. Really, give me a break. Yeah, it's a fine teen movie. It's clever, it's good, but come on. It’s just frustrating. And that was the same year that Sense and Sensibility came out. All these people thought they were being clever: ‘The really interesting Jane Austen adaptation is Clueless.’ And so they ignore Sense and Sensibility for that? Come on. The whole thing of having an interesting, clever take for your fellows — and it’s the interesting, clever, original take that everyone has! It was just so widespread.
It’s become the orthodoxy.
I'm not sure it's true, but there was an American political columnist, Mary McGrory, who was a Jane Austen fan, and she absolutely destroyed the Persuasion adaptation from 1995, which was on TV in Britain and a film in America. I think that was overrated too: it was an admirable project but just overrated for what Persuasion is. McGrory had such great insights about the difference between the novel and the movie. I think it’s terrible when someone who doesn’t really care about the material at all, or is antithetical to it, does an adaptation. I mean, okay, you got a job, then you’re going to just destroy this thing that’s precious and wonderful? I think the film version of Brideshead… You have this great TV version of Brideshead that Sir Michael Lindsay-Hogg and his co-director [Charles Sturridge] did — it was just brilliant — and then you had that awful feature film that completely trashed Waugh’s point of view. It’s interesting. Someone could write about inferior film versions of things that were done better on television.
The Whit Stillman UK Tour is arranged in association with Lost Reels.