Last week, when I interviewed Whit Stillman on the occasion of Metropolitan’s premiere on Hulu, I asked him what movies he’d recently seen and enjoyed, and though he said that “seeing the trailers puts me off many more films than makes me want to see,” he noted that he did enjoy Sex and the City, which was lensed by his own frequent cinematographer John Thomas. Then, this weekend, Stillman sent me an email:

I spaced badly when you asked about films I’d liked recently. I loved Godfrey Cheshire’s Moving Midway which I saw at New Directors and which is coming out Sept. 12th. I’m going back to my film sales agent days in helping Godfrey trying to find it releases abroad.

Midway, film critic Cheshire’s personal documentary about his cousin’s plan to physically move the family plantation, will be at the IFC Center for two weeks. More info here.

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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.

——

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?

…Read more

• Are today’s bloggy cultural critics a thorn in Whit Stillman’s side, either because or in spite of the fact that “we’re all just stealing Nick’s lines from Metropolitan“? Maybe the next time Stillman emerges in search of his shadow, we’ll find out. In the meantime, Matt Dentler says Cinetic is working on distributing Metropolitan online “in the near future.” Although, of course, Last Days of Disco remains all but unavailable…
• Related, sort of: Peter DeBruge writes of the “bootleg director’s cut” of 54, which restores Ryan Phillippe’s character to his original conception as an “overtly bisexual bartender, one of those erotic beings (like Terrence Stamp in Pasolini’s Teorema)…he woos club owner Mike Myers, makes it with record exec Sela Ward, kisses out-of-reach soap star Neve Campbell, gets frisky with best friend Breckin Meyer and then bangs his friend’s wife Salma Hayek in a bathroom stall.” You’ll allegedly be able to sample the excitement for yourself next weekend at the Sunshine in NYC, where Mark Christopher’s recut will screen at midnight.
• “Zacharek’s first assumption is that Godard’s films went downhill after 1967. I’ll be blunt here: Zacharek musters absolutely no defense or evidence for this position.” Another review of a review of Everything is Cinema; this time it’s Only the Cinema on the first of the NYT reviews. Via The House Next Door.

About once a year, the “Whatever Happened to Whit Stillman?” train rolls into the station, unloads a few bits of rumor that never quite amount to much of anything, and then rolls right out again.  I actually saw Stillman at a Film Society of Lincoln Center party a couple of months ago; a colleague told me he was going from table to table, trying to woo investors. I don’t know if the fact that there was a listicle published with Stillman’s byline in Saturday’s Wall Street Journal should be considered evidence that his panhandling worked (and, thus, he’s now actually working on a film), or not. But as far as listicles go, it’s a pretty good story!

The filmmaker picks his top five favorite film books, of which I had only previously read two (Hitchcock/Truffaut and The Genius of the System). I didn’t even know the Preston Sturges book on the list, Between Flops, existed.

Via GreenCine Daily.