What led you to make this switch in titles? (I do want to register one official complaint. Yes, there was a contretemps with Northanger Abbey when I was a depressed college-sophomore entirely unfamiliar with the gothic novels she was mocking - but I was set straight not many years later.ĭL: What made you decide that “Lady Susan” wasn’t the right title to present this film to an audience? (Most of Austenprose’s readers will be wise to the fact that Austen herself didn’t choose that title for her novella, first published in 1871.) I like your new title Love & Friendship very much, but clever Janeites will know you lifted it from a raucous Austen short story, from her juvenilia, Love & Freindship. Whit Stillman: I prefer Austenite and I consider myself among the most fervent. Anything more you’d like to tell us about that? (Would you label yourself that? I see you’ve copped elsewhere to “Jane Austen nut.”) You’ve admitted you were once dismissive of Austen’s novels as a young man-telling everyone you hated them-but that after college you did a 180, thanks to your sister. Stillman to .ĭevoney Looser: We Janeites know that you go way back as a Janeite yourself.
for a screening of Metropolitan, followed by a question-and-answer session with the audience.Austen scholar Devoney Looser joins us today during the Love & Friendship Janeite Blog Tourto interview ‘Friend of Jane,’ writer/director/author Whit Stillman, whose new hit movie Love & Friendship, and its companion novel, are on the radar of every Janeite. He will be at the Valley Art on March 28 at 7 p.m. Whit Stillman will read from his book Love and Friendship at Changing Hands Phoenix on Monday, March 27, at 7 p.m. Or just sit there and enjoy the droll good humor of this talented author and filmmaker, who’s come all the way from France to share his work with us. Ask instead when we might see more episodes of The Cosmopolitans, based on his delicious pilot film, or maybe ask him about the difference between studio-financed films (his The Last Days of Disco was an expensive critical success) and independent films ( Metropolitan, released in 1990, was shot on a shoestring and earned Stillman an Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay).
He, an American living in Paris, prefers (according to a story in the New York Times last summer) to be thought of as a “forward-deployed American.” And when you go on March 28 to the free ASU-hosted screening and discussion of Stillman’s first film, Metropolitan, at Harkins Valley Art Theatre, remember not to ask him if Metropolitan (about a wealthy young boarding school student whose parents are divorced, whose father is married to a witch, and who is carrying on a romance mostly in correspondence with a shady woman named Serena - all things reportedly true about Stillman himself) is a Roman a clef, as he’s likely tired of that question.
Stillman read from Love and Friendship at Changing Hands Books on March 27, do not allow him to overhear you refer to him as an expatriate. Stillman’s voice is equal parts Patrick Dennis and P.G. The mannered prose is both pitch-perfect and deliberately self-conscious - Stillman is nudging us in the ribs even while forwarding his story about Susan, a woman on the hunt for a pair of husbands, one for herself, the other for her daughter.Ī retelling of sorts of an Austen novella titled Lady Susan, this version punches up Austen’s genteel humor with laughs and lowbrow comedy aimed at a scheming widow who’s gold-digging for two. The fact that its narrator is a child of 5, one who defends his re-creation of complete conversations by telling us that “The true explanation partakes of mystery,” elevates the shtick of revisiting Austen in this novel’s early pages. Stillman’s novelization of his film of the same name is a wee masterpiece. “And not a very good one,” he added, about the Stillman novel. Had my sort-of friend stopped there, we might still be exchanging the occasional social media bon mots and links to articles about Billy Haines. His book Love and Friendship: In Which Jane Austen’s Lady Susan Vernon is Entirely Vindicated, my erstwhile pal sniffed, was “just another” in the glut of novels resurrecting Jane Austen. Not long ago I ended a friendship, albeit an insignificant one, over an insult aimed at the author and filmmaker Whit Stillman.