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Transitions: Chasing Whit Stillman

by Sean McManus
March/April 2008

Whit Stillman, photographed at the Strand bookstore in New York City by Andrew French.

Photograph by Andrew French. Whit Stillman, photographed at the Strand bookstore in New York City.

People have always viewed Jamaica through a violent 1970s lens. The early '60s were different."

When Whit Stillman debuted Metropolitan, his comedy of Upper East Side manners, in 1990, the writer-director earned an Academy Award nomination for best original screenplay. Stillman’s subsequent films, Barcelona, set in Europe at the end of the Cold War, and The Last Days of Disco, about Harvard grads in 1980s New York, established him as the WASP Woody Allen, a wry raconteur of upper-crust malaise.

But on the same weekend in 1998 that Disco opened, Stillman abruptly decided to move to Paris with his wife and two daughters. He would live for most of the next decade on the idyllic Île Saint-Louis, in the city’s 4th arrondisement. Stillman wrote screenplays, published a novel, directed commercials, and separated from his wife. But for nearly ten years, he didn’t make films. Stillman admits he’s a slow worker, but even by his standards, a decade was a lengthy gap. “I transitioned to the role of writer instead of film director,” he says, noting that a number of film and television projects he took on never came to fruition.

Now Stillman, 56, has finally reemerged with a new script, called Creation, that he’ll start directing this spring. A love story, Creation takes place in the “steaming Jamaica of the early 1960s,” as producer Jeremy Thomas puts it. To be filmed largely in gospel churches, it will have an almost entirely black cast and feature a soundtrack jammed with the ska and rocksteady music that preceded reggae. “People have always viewed Jamaica through a violent 1970s lens,” says Stillman. “The early ’60s were different.”

After Creation, Stillman plans to tackle the Chinese Cultural Revolution, a subject he’s pondered since the late 1970s. He’s also thinking of adapting Christopher Buckley’s 1999 satire, Little Green Men. “Things are picking up,” Stillman says.