I’ve gotten to really, really like being back in the States. It’s so easy being in your own country, and I really like Americans – typical American towns and provincial college towns are my ideal place to be. – Whit Stillman
I’m not sure what my material would have been if I’d have started earlier. I probably would have started with ‘Damsels in Distress’ kinds of films because that’s the kind of comedy I was writing in college. So I didn’t really have any life experience to work off of. – Whit Stillman
My friends in Paris are writers, or something like that, whereas my friends in New York are doing cool stuff in finance and living very different lives. In writing, it’s pretty solitary, so it doesn’t really matter who’s around. – Whit Stillman
I’ve learned that I really want to shoot short films on a short schedule. There can be very good films that run 110 minutes, but 90 minutes is beautiful. – Whit Stillman
I can fake decent penmanship, but generally, it’s really just terrible. And, unfortunately for me, maybe fortunately for the reader, it’s very often illegible. If I get an idea, and if I do remember to write it down, which is rare, I write in such a way that I can’t read a letter. – Whit Stillman
There’s so much of this thing now, where you’re supposed to do all the work before you get the commission. I think it’s really good to try to resist that. If you just have a week to come up with a pitch for something, your ideas aren’t going to be very good. Get your income from somewhere else, and keep your writing not tied into these contracts. – Whit Stillman
I think one of the saving illusions of the film business is everything seems like it’s about to happen. It’s always about to happen. It’s only looking back that you see the wasteland. – Whit Stillman
It’s really important to have subjects that people all over the world are familiar with, and the Disney films are really great that way. – Whit Stillman
There’s the right person, or right people, for each other. There is that order that’s searching to be found but, I think, it’s not as if everything is going to be automatic. So, people could really be meant for each other and its goes awry; or they could have to learn or develop and grow up together. Grow to be right together. – Whit Stillman
I remember trying to write at 1, 1:30 A.M., and just sort of falling asleep. And I think that was actually a good creative state for weird ideas. I shifted to a morning schedule once I had two kids, and I still found that if I slept badly, I actually had better ideas. – Whit Stillman
What I find remarkable is that so much of the 18th century literature that I read is more accessible than reading your alternative weekly from ten years ago. People really aspired to write clearly. – Whit Stillman
I like to allow a story to arise as I’m writing scripts. I find it horrible when I try to think of something for the plot without really being on the ground and seeing where it goes. – Whit Stillman
I thought I was going to make bigger films for mass audiences. And I wanted that. I actually had in mind a James-Bondian thriller. – Whit Stillman
Paris is the destination for brokenhearted American women. I think men go there and have their hearts broken, but women come there with their hearts broken. – Whit Stillman
I think my favorite two words are ‘true blue.’ I think those words are really important, and the spirit of them has been lost. – Whit Stillman
I’m very troubled when editors oblige their film critics to read the novel before they see the film. Reading the book right before you see the film will almost certainly ruin the film for you. – Whit Stillman
I had, in college, a professor called Walter Jackson Bate, and he taught a course called The Age of Johnson. It’s about Samuel Johnson and his period, 18th-century British writing. So we all got to endure Samuel Johnson, and Boswell’s ‘Life of Johnson’ is now my favorite book. I read it all the time I can; it’s great for going to sleep. – Whit Stillman
What frustrates me a lot about some aspects of filmmaking is people thinking everyone is really dumb and that we have to make everything really obvious. – Whit Stillman
I’m very concerned about the countries bordering Russia. But let’s stay off that stuff. – Whit Stillman
Oscar Wilde was sort of my first love as a young reader. And then I went on to love Jane Austen’s wonderful – this sort of comedy coming from her. I mean, all of her books are comic. – Whit Stillman
I have to embrace the fact people find me divisive, but I find it remarkable. I was very disturbed by the hatred ‘Damsels in Distress’ received. – Whit Stillman
Happy is the small business that can hire additional employees besides the proprietor; rare is the indie-film enterprise that can be happy in this way. The norm is an unpaid principal with no employees between productions. – Whit Stillman
There’s something really admirable about French culture and an attraction in how independent it is from our own. So, it’s odd that in other countries that are very American-influenced – who seem to care more about the Oscars than anyone here does – there’s both anti-Americanism and also too much America. – Whit Stillman
When you’re trying to force things in a script, it seems like it’s getting somewhere, but it isn’t real or interesting. All the bad material you’ve written becomes an albatross around your neck. So I really don’t like writing a lot of bad stuff, I prefer to just keep narrowing it down to stuff I think is solid. – Whit Stillman
Coming out of university, one of my obsessions was that in the novels I was reading, they seemed to be portraying a world that had a social fabric. People knew each other in ‘War and Peace.’ They went to all the same balls. These were societies with tightly wound, woven, social textures. – Whit Stillman
Coming out of college, back to New York, where I didn’t really know that many people, I thought our world was very atomized. – Whit Stillman
You can be an American or an Englishman or Canadian and be a Parisian. It’s a very admirable culture, and people want to identify with it. – Whit Stillman
