Top 55 Whit Stillman Quotes

The dull externals of the screenwriter’s working life are well known: We are the people taking up too much table space at cafes.

My guilty pleasure is watching the Investigation Discovery channel.

Paris is a Roach Motel for top American journalists: They check in, having won the plum foreign posting, but never leave.

I find it preferable not to have public opinions about anything. It’s good for me to shut up.

I think sometimes it’s the things you don’t like that give you inspiration.

My biggest false steps have actually been when I tried to do very different projects. I found I was getting people saying, ‘Why does Whit Stillman think he can do a film about blacks in early ’60s Jamaica? Or the Chinese and the cultural revolution?’ Those were the two biggest failures I had getting off the ground.

Sometimes, people who are very fastidious about what they’re going to do in their work are not very fastidious in their private life. I’m like that. I love it when people do really nice things around me, but I don’t have time to do it for myself. It’s very hard for me to even buy a new pair of trousers.

I didn’t realize how limiting an R rating is. I made ‘Disco’ as a cautionary tale for 14- and 15-year-old girls, and those girls were not allowed to see the film by their parents.

The cinema I particularly love is the cinema of the golden age of the studios in the 1930s. One of the really nice things about it was the way teams of actors and directors and crew people worked together again and again.

I was in Paris for nine years, starting in ’98. One of the great things when I was first there were these wonderful CD collections, selling for almost nothing. For ten euros, you’d get three CDs of all the Gershwin songs.

I’m anti-verite. I think the verite style is a completely false thing. Most things are false to arrive at a truth; verite is falsity without acknowledging its falsity.

When people are telling stories on screen, you can show the reactions of people, play it off those reactions, and it can be fun. But when it’s someone just giving an opinion on things, even if the opinion is kind of interesting, that is potentially deadly. It has to be really quick.

So much of artistic creation is just exclusion. It’s not creating things; it’s just excluding things that really aren’t going to be helpful.

You have to constantly work on your script if it needs it. You don’t accept, ‘Oh, I did a draft and…’ No, it’s your responsibility to work on the script as much as possible and make it better and better.

I think my favorite two words are ‘true blue.’ I think those words are really important, and the spirit of them has been lost.

The worst thing is the blank page at the start. Then the horrible things written on the blank page. Then deciding whether or not to throw out those horrible things: lame scenes, lame characters, bad ideas.

My family was entirely political, all the time, on the left. The opposite of that is not to be political on the right. It’s trying not to be – politics is not everything. There’s life other than politics. Politics intrudes.

I feel that if you want to make films, you have to be willing to make it without a fee. You get a deferment, I guess.

I always wanted to direct and write a movie, but I thought that I didn’t really have it in me. I tried to write fiction and humorous short stories, and some were considered successful, but it was always a huge effort for a small reward. I was always intimidated by the process.

If you’re mostly a writer – if your point of departure is writing something – which for a writer/director is sort of where you start, you’re really influenced by the writers you love one way or another.

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.

There’s certain key dance crazes that are just so much fun – wouldn’t that be a great thing to do, to invent a dance?

At the New York Harvard Club, they’ve moved the memorial for those who died in World Wars I and II up to an obscure little hallway; they used to be in the main hall, in the most prominent location. The sacrifice of those young people I always found so stunning and so admirable.

My theory in the ’90s was that I didn’t want to take a Jane Austen book I loved and reduce it to a 90-minute movie. The Emma Thompson-Ang Lee ‘Sense and Sensibility’ was beautiful, but other ones, I didn’t think justice was being done. It’s not a slam dunk to adapt these books.

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.

I’m a late bloomer. Even in high school, everyone else was charging ahead, and I didn’t come into my own until very late. I feel that’s true in cinema, too. I didn’t even start ‘Metropolitan’ until I was 37.

When you’re doing the work, film and TV are exactly the same. TV is just film in reduced pieces.

There are bad preppies and bad priests and bad humanitarians. Any group can have its bad apple.

One of the reasons it’s important to make a new project is it always seems to improve the reputations of the previous one. Whatever you did before is better than what you’ve just done, apparently. But I’ve had to follow the first rule of journalism: Never read the comments.

A very sad moment for me was when my parents separated – a lot of crying, ‘It’s tragic, we’re now a broken family, blah blah blah blah blah’ – although my psychological problems stopped. I actually felt healthier.

I like things that are sort of comic and humorous rather than satirical.

I think when my parents were together, my family was too prosperous for our psychological health. Not that they were that rich, but I feel that usually inherited wealth causes psychological problems.

I think that, in terms of mainstream storytelling, the rebel gets off way too easy. We’re way too hard on the insiders and way too soft on the outsiders.

I read one Jane Austen in college and didn’t like it at all and told everyone how much I disliked it. I read ‘Northanger Abbey’ sophomore year in college and hated it. I didn’t read good Austen until after college, maybe a couple years out.

I love making cheap films. I really do. What I’ve found is that I work better when it’s both a fairly low budget and a short schedule. It focuses the mind, and it’s a better atmosphere.

When I’m writing fiction, I read nonfiction or biographies. Now I’m watching very old movies or old foreign films. I don’t immerse myself in whatever’s going on in whatever area I’m working in.

I remember going to one party of this preppy, bourgeois crowd, and there was some obnoxious character there, really bad news, and saying, ‘Oh my God, so the caricature you always see in films actually exists.’

It’s a challenge for any writer to write beyond what he knows. You get material, adapt it, and do the best you can with it.

Oddly, in a sense, I still have more confidence as a director than my ability as a writer. Somehow, directing is just really easy. It’s just about being really honest about how you feel about what you’re seeing.

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.

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.

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.

I remember when I was trying to do ‘Metropolitan,’ in breaks I would read a page of two of Jane Austen as a palate-cleanser.

The usual key to getting films made seems to be a producer’s terrier-like determination not to let it go. Unfortunately, such producers often seem prone to sinking their claws into mediocre projects.

That’s why I hate the outlines and treatments, because all you get are cliches. If you put things down on paper as your plan, it’s very hard to get those ideas out of your head and do something better.

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.

I don’t think there’s anything cliche feminine about Jane Austen. And, anyway, her earliest champions were Sir Walter Scott and the Prince Regent.

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.

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.

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.

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.

A lot of people in the film industry are fatalists who think a worthwhile film will always achieve its destiny, and the films that aren’t worthwhile won’t. It’s all sort of pre-determined, etc. And I don’t think that’s true at all.

A brief experience with a Radcliffe girl got very bad very quickly. I was so destroyed by it that I left and went to Mexico for a semester, where I have cousins. I learned how to speak Spanish, which was really important for my life. It was wonderful going to Mexico, learning another culture and a language.

Making a show is such a long process. You go through a TV production house that will commission scripts, and if they like what you’ve written, they take it to a network and sell it to them. It has always felt very far away from something that’s actually real.

I think one thing that makes me delay projects more than other people is, I see this silver lining in a turn-down. Maybe if I just wrote a script and then pounded my head against all the doors, I would be shooting more films.