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Director interview: Whit Stillman

DAMSELS IN DISTRESS written and directed by Whit Stillman, with Greta Gerwig, Carrie MacLemore, Megalyn Echikunwoke, Analeigh Tipton and Adam Brody. A Mongrel Media release. 99 minutes. Opens Friday (April 20). For venues and times, see Movies.


Whit Stillman has been missed.

After spending the 90s defining a certain type of tiny, perfect American indie with Metropolitan, Barcelona and The Last Days of Disco (and one atypical episode of Homicide: Life On The Street), the preppie auteur pretty much disappeared from sight.

Well, not entirely. There were reports that he was trying to get something going, and he was frequently spotted on the film festival circuit. I bumped into him at a Cannes party in 2008 (and, yes, that phrase is as casually bourgeois as any uttered in Stillman’s films) and asked how he was doing. “I’m working on a few things,” he said, offering no details about what those things might be.

“Yeah, I was just starting this,” Stillman says three and a half years later at the 2011 Toronto Film Festival, where his sprightly campus comedy Damsels In Distress had just made its North American premiere. “My writing process isn’t, like, straight ahead. It was, like, work on 30 pages, turn in 30 pages, wait, write something else.”

Damsels In Distress finds Stillman back in his wheelhouse, once again focusing on the travails of privileged characters. A trio of sorority sisters – Violet (Greta Gerwig), Heather (Carrie MacLemore) and Rose (Megalyn Echikunwoke) – have decided to improve their East Coast university by wearing retro dresses and dating lunkheads. It makes sense when Violet explains it to new sister Lily (Analeigh Tipton), anyway.

This somewhat ridiculous story, it turns out, is true. And that was the hook.

“I’ve had a hard time finding things that have a good structure,” Stillman says. “And in this case, there’s the story, the anecdote, of these girls who transformed this depressing, grungy university where I went to college.” (Stillman graduated from Harvard in 1973.)

“It was really depressing, very political and grim,” he says. “When I went back later, everyone was talking about these girls who wore perfume and dressed up and had this great social life and everything was quite fun now they were transformative. So that gave me something to work with as sort of a narrative line, and then I had insight into the whole heartbreak experience and the idea that something happens to Violet. There’s some big thing about to happen to her, and it’s nothing she can laugh off.”

That sounds grim. The movie isn’t – it’s a bubbly, brightly coloured comedy (and, briefly, a musical) that just happens to be about some incredibly shallow people.

“I don’t think I’ve ever been cynical,” Stillman says. “I always feel positive about unlikely people. I sort of defend people who are despised by society, or despised by those who write about society. I’d like to make a film sometime where there’s not a big sociological barrier to liking the characters.

“I mean, [even] these girls being very dressy and retro,” he laughs, “it’s kind of antagonizing.”

Interview Clips

Whit Stillman on a point of Violet’s style:

Download associated audio clip.

Stillman on the unexpected upside of waiting for Greta Gerwig to finish the Arthur remake:

Download associated audio clip.

normw@nowtoronto.com

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