Just Around The Corner

Hey Whit, where you been? Fourteen years after The Last Days Of Disco – the third of his fast-talkin' '90s portraits of urban haute bourgeoisie – Whit Stillman's fourth feature, Damsels In Distress, has finally brought him out of exile. “I spent all those years working on projects, I never stopped,” the 60-year-old filmmaker says. “The reason I didn't, like, blow my brains out, is that I was always confident one of the films was about to happen next month. You always have a film around the corner.”

Those projects included a “a very strange commercial” Wall Street drama; adaptations of Christopher Buckley's political satire Little Green Men and Anchee Min's Cultural Revolution memoir Red Azalea; and Dancing Moon, a Stillman-penned drama about Jamaican church-kids coming-of-age – replete with angels and demons – against the ska scene of the early-'60s. In 2008, he was even in Jamaica on location scouting; but, as things went for Stillman in the '00s, the project never materialised.

In those same 13 years, Stillman's influence grew: with confessed acolytes in film (Noah Baumbach, Wes Anderson) and television (Lena Dunham, Amy Sherman-Palladino) becoming the successes Stillman never has. Well, aside from that time 1990s Metropolitan, his debut picture, was nominated for a Best Original Screenplay Oscar. “We got nominated for a script, but we weren't going to win a prize,” Stillman says. “In some ways it's better not to win, because the films that win are usually godawful.”

Stillman was inspired to write Metropolitan in Barcelona in his mid-30s, when he was working as a foreign-sales agent for Spanish filmmaker Fernando Trueba. Upon learning the entire production cost for Coarse Salt – in which he had a small role as a “stupid American” – was only $50,000, Stillman moved back to New York, spent four years writing the screenplay, then sold his apartment and leaned on family and friends for the money to make it.

The filmed was inspired by Stillman's experiences as native New Yorker attending Harvard as the '60s turned into the '70s. But it's hardly nostalgic. “There's this idea that these will be the best years of your life, but that's a terrible thing to say to an 18-year-old! Better to says, 'These will be the unhappiest years of your life, but you've gotta do it',” Stillman recounts. A deep depression set in whilst he was packing to go to his dream school (“I was listening to the Bee Gees' Greatest Hits”), and following “an extreme Maoist” elder brother to Harvard, Stillman remembers his college years as “bleak and political and troubled”. “The reason the story of Metropolitan so appealed to me,” he offers, “is that the only two weeks of [my freshman] year I wasn't morbidly depressed, it was the champagne cure.”

When he returned to Harvard years later, he was shocked at how a school he viewed as “incredibly depressing and grim and grungy and horrible… now seemed more cheerful”, and learnt of a group of girls (“there was six of them, all named after perfumes”) had changed the spirit of the school through dress-ups, parties, and endless positivity. This proved the eventual inspiration for Damsels In Distress, a colourful college fantasy (“I'm not much of a fan of reality”) which finds Stillman chronicling college girls both naturally gabby (mumblecore pin-up Greta Gerwig) and not (“Analeigh Tipton is doing a very fine performance of a realistic modern woman, and she's just wandered into our film”).

The production went “swimmingly”, the press has been excellent, and even if Damsels In Distress hasn't been a commercial hit, Stillman's “optimistic” about shooting his next “secret” project in Ireland in 2013. “I'm insanely optimistic about projects from the very start,” he admits. “I think it's everything's going to be sensational, and my only problem will be keeping my ego in check amidst all that success. And, as it turns out, that's never the case.”