"I started listening to Jamaican music, and I got completely obsessed with it as kind of a career-ending obsession because I've been trying to make an early '60s Jamaican church ... film which is a such a nonstarter commercially in the film world. So, that didn't happen, but at the same time I was also working on this Jane Austen thing," says writer-director Whit Stillman.
If the previous obsession might have dimmed the 64-year-old filmmaker's career, his new adaptation of Jane Austen's novella Lady Susan, Love & Friendship has received the warmest reception of any film the director has made. Audiences who never saw his previous films Metropolitan (1990), Barcelona (1994), Last Days of Disco (1998) or Damsels in Distress (2012) are discovering his small-scale verbal comedies for the first time.
"It was just an incredible confluence I felt working with her material, particularly in this form, in this novel," he said. "I was incredibly lucky, but I've never felt so sort of happy in the world and in the material."
A Match Made in Heaven
The new film features Last Days of Disco star Kate Beckinsale as Lady Susan Vernon, a widow with a teenage daughter named Frederica (Morfydd Clark), a title and little cash to show for it. To remedy the financial situation, she tries to marry Frederica off to the amiable but not terribly bright Sir James Martin (Tom Bennett) and flirts with the much younger heir Reginald DeCourcy (Xavier Samuel).
Lady Susan, written between 1793 and 1794, went unpublished until 1871, long after Austen's death. And there's a reason the story has been adapted less often than Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility or Emma (Beckinsale has played the title character in a television version of the story).
Like Samuel Richardson's Pamela and Pierre Choderlos de Laclos' Dangerous Liaisons, Lady Susan was written as a series of letters between the characters. As a result, the story, while featuring a solid plot line and examples of Austen's formidable wit, doesn't seem like a natural fit for a visual medium such as film.
"The dialogue is essentially a back-and-forth of letters, so it's just dramatizing them in a room or in a space where they're together rather than miles apart writing letters," he explains from his home in New York. "I think she was influenced by Dangerous Liaisons because this kind of character is kind of the comic version of those kind of characters."
He adds that Lady Susan is an intriguing character who deserves her own time on the big screen. "It's interesting because she's an amoral character, and she's certainly not a sweet, good person. And yet she does accomplish a lot. People wind up in a good place by the end of the movie," he says. Stillman apparently loves the story so much that he has also released a book, Love & Friendship: In Which Jane Austen's Lady Susan Vernon Is Entirely Vindicated.
"I think she's a defense of the hyperactive person. She's sort of hyperactive in trying to find fortunes for herself and for her daughter, and her daughter resists the plan that she has for her, and it seems like Lady Susan's a bad person for trying to force her daughter into this marriage.
"But her hyperactivity leads to good solutions. Everyone ends up with the right person in the right situation. Yes, her hyperactivity is pretty sizable, but she is a catalyst who makes things happen for people. In certain ways, her moral effect, her moral results are superior to [someone] who would just wring their hands and say, 'Woe is me. I'm so moral. I'm just going to be a moral, moral, moral person but not do anything ... .' I think that's her defense."
Embracing Cluelessness
Like Austen, Stillman has a knack for creating intricate soliloquies that are loaded with amusingly warmed logic and clever barbs. Her influence on his movies is obvious from the beginning of his career.
The upper-class young men and women in Metropolitan debate the merits of Austen's work even though one participant has never read her writing for himself. After all, Tom Townsend (Edward Clements) argues, why read the text when the review can give you both the story and the opinion at the same time? Similarly, Lady Susan in Stillman's new film justifies scolding a friend, stating that it would be rude to do the same to a stranger.
Stillman says that he can create these exchanges convincingly because his films are often set in insular environments where long word volleys don't seem as awkward as they would in the age of Twitter. The Last Days of Disco, Barcelona and Metropolitan are all set in eras shortly before their release dates, and Love & Friendship takes place in 18th-century England.
"The conversations aren't as long as they used to be. They're getting shorter," he says.
With Austen's texts, however, glancing removes much of the pleasure and the tone. Stillman says, "I think we have these reading habits where we skim over looking for information. We look for plot and story, and we're not sinking into the experience. And so saying it obliges you to sink into the tone, which is so important."
By putting his stories in narrow stretches like the Manhattan neighborhoods in Metropolitan or rural England in Love & Friendship, Stillman says he can tell relatable stories, even if viewers have never set foot where he has.
"That's the intention. Most things to be about something should be a narrow stretch because Everyman stories don't interest me that much. It has to be kind of specific. Every sort of context has to have its own dynamics and its own interests, so I think this subject matter is as valid as others," he says.
"It's also more valid because a lot of the characters have ideas, and they're trying to kind of match the ideas to their identities so they're dealing with some significant stuff despite the sort of humor that's surrounding it. You've got to be honest with the material. With so many romantic comedies, I just think it's the high school nerd having his revenge on the popular kids."
That said, creating a convincing replica of Austen's landscapes and 18th-century London, which looks nothing like its past self, was tricky, so he and the company filmed Love & Friendship in Ireland. "It doesn't exist anymore in London. Georgian [architecture] still exists in Ireland. It's the backlot now for all these films because it still looks 18th century," he says.
Better for the Effort
Stillman has released only five feature films, but over the phone, he comes across as open and forthright and even grateful for the some of the struggles he has had.
"The two films I really had to sort of scrape to put everything together were Metropolitan and this one. This one had a much higher budget level. On Metropolitan, we had enough money to make it look good, but just the minimum for that kind of production," Stillman says.
For Love & Friendship, "The money came from all these different places: The Arte [France] in Europe, foreign sales, some private investors, friends I know, and it took a while to piece it all together, and we did. I think it somehow makes a film better when it's not just a bunch of cash coming down from on high, and you go ahead with the film. We really had to kind of earn everything.
"We were trying to find locations where they looked beautiful for several different things because then you're not spending all your time in cars and trucks going from one place to another, wasting creative time. You use every second of creative time in the same spot because all of these locations can look very different depending on which rooms you're in, which exterior you're in."
MovieStyle on 05/27/2016