In the liner notes to the Criterion edition of writer/director Whit Stillman’s debut film, Metropolitan, cultural critic/historian Luc Sante notes that the picture, “which looked like a perverse bit of daring in 1990, today seems like an artifact from an earlier century.” Sante is likely referring to the debutante culture in which the film is set, but the story of how the movie itself not only found an audience but rose to classic teen movie status among a certain class seems equally antiquated in this age of indie film Chicken Littles.

Made for a reported $250,000, starring a full cast of young unknowns, and consisting primarily of one long scene after another of rich kids sitting in a palatial Upper East Side apartment discussing Jane Austen, Charles Fourier, their mostly unfashionable morals and fears of failure, all the while dressed in evening clothes, Metropolitan played in theaters for seven months, eventually grossing $3 million and earning Stilman an Oscar nomination (he lost to the screenwriter of Ghost).

But if Metropolitan traveled a commercial road that seems nearly unnavigable today, the film itself has perhaps never been as in tune with popular culture. From Best Week Ever pundits to big-traffic bloggers, it’s become the standard mode of digesting the world around us to stand outside of it, employing caustic, self-deprecating humor as a defensive mechanism. It’s like we’re all Chris Eigeman characters from a Whit Stillman film––except, in some cases, stripped of the anxieties of old-money entitlement.

With Metropolitan premiering tonight on Hulu, I chatted with Whit about his films, the state of the indie film industry, his alleged political agenda, the state of the Last Days of Disco DVD, the project he’s getting ready to shoot, and why it’s taken ten years for him to make a fourth film.

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Karina: I want to get the inevitable elephant out of the room, which is of course the “What have you been doing for 10 years?” question. The most recent stories that I can find about projects that you have in the works were the Jamaica project, and then Little Green Men [based on the novel by Christopher Buckley]. Are either of those still happening?

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