Interview (Written): Whit Stillman

The Playlist interviews writer-director Whit Stillman (Metropolitan, Barcelona). His newest movie is Love & Friendship.

As far back as 2006, you were talking about making a movie based on one or two unpublished Jane Austen novels. Exactly how long has this project been gestating?
Those were different projects, actually. This was my secret one. I have correspondence on it dating back to 2004; and I may have even started it earlier. I knew it was going to take a long period of time. It was always something I was working on when I wasn’t getting paid for something else. When I’d turn in a script for a paying job and had downtime, I’d come back to this. It was nice to do something just in the spirit of pleasure, rather than with blood, sweat, and tears.

How did it evolve over that decade?
It was mostly just taking tons of really good material and trying to put in the right dramatic shape for a modern story. Or not a modern story, but a dramatized story. There was a twofold nature to the creation. One was editorial: rearranging and structuring. And then there was a time when the characters started to take flight, and have their own problems and desires and aspirations. The Sir James Martin character has a rather small part in Austen’s story and in my initial script, but I had written a scene for him that was just an audition piece — the “church”/“hill” scene — and when Tom Bennett was cast, he made so much of it that I started writing more for him.

A trailer for the movie:

For the rest of the interview, go here.