THE LAST DAYS OF DISCO: INTERVIEW WITH WHIT STILLMAN

A Cineman Syndicate feature

THE LAST DAYS OF DISCO: INTERVIEW WITH WHIT STILLMAN

Whit Stillman may be a roving filmmaker in terms of the places and periods he chooses for his movies, but the director of Metropolitan and Barcelona can consistently be counted on for a story steeped in his classic 'whit.' The 46 year old writer, director and producer of The Last Days Of Disco had much to say on that subject, and he proved to be nearly as talkative as the very conversational and comical characters he is best known for.

PRAIRIE MILLER: Why do the disco days fascinate you?

WHIT STILLMAN: I'm really not interested in the disco period historically. I was interested in it personally, as a change in night life. I generally don't feel at one with whatever's happening in popular culture. When disco music came in, I thought now there would be night life where people would dance again.

There had been like six years when it seemed very solitary and very individualistic. So I liked the period for people going out, seeing other people you knew, and dancing.

PM: You're a very precise kind of director. I hear that you even kept count of the number of ice cubes in the Disco cocktails. Are you a hard guy to work with?

WS: Umm...I think it's really important to do the best possible job while we're all on set, and that we have really good stuff when we go into the editing room. Once you go into the editing room, you can't go back.

PM: Which of the characters is most you?

WS: My point of view is the Josh point of view. Everything Josh [Matthew Keeslar] says I believe, though maybe not in such an exaggerated, comical and ridiculous way.

PM: You have a special brand of onscreen humor, like no one else. Describe that unique comic sense.

WS: It's the kind of comedy that if it's approached directly, if you try to make it funny, then it becomes less appealing. The comedy is invisible, you're not begging for a laugh. You're just having the character operate, and people find something funny about that.

I guess what we want to do is make a film that the audience has to bring something to. There's kind of a relaxed attention that gets a wonderful response to the movie. Actually, we're planting small seeds in the film that will later pay off.

If something is said very dramatically to pull the heartstrings, it can sort of not be funny. There's a dryness that works better with this kind of comedy. PM: Let's talk about the great vintage music you got together for the movie.

WS: The music director schmoozed with everyone to get a most favored nations kind of blanket deal that everyone could plug into. Some of the songs we knew we liked going in. The discovery process goes back years, and the whole theme of the movie grows out of the process of making disco scenes for my film Barcelona. Then we got just every disco collection we could, and listened to everything.

PM: Now there's also Velvet Goldmine and 54. What's with all these disco movies coming out right now?

WS: Boogie Nights really isn't a disco film. It has a boogie in the title and it has a couple of disco songs. But it's really about the porn industry in California. It's true that there are things going back in time now to 1973. And there was The Ice Storm. I think that somehow it's loomed very large journalistically, but I don't really think there's much of a story there. Because these films don't have much to do with each other. And I don't think they should.

I haven't read the 54 script, but I understand it's really different. I think that film is covering just what I didn't want to cover, a sort of docudrama of Studio 54 and the gay subculture there. I thought, it would be great, because then people would say, that's what that film is about, and this is a different film.

PM: Throughout The Last Days Of Disco, you focus on this very insular white world, and then suddenly at the end you break out into the real multicultural New York. Could you talk about why you did that?

WS: It's goes absolutely with the territory. It's not really a change, it's really the background coming into the foreground. In the club there are many different types of people that my characters don't relate that much to. Then my characters step out of the frame for a moment, and the people on the subway start dancing.

But it's not about them. That's one moment when it's about the background. And I think it's actually a great experience for the background actors doing that. Because it's not often when what they do on their own is there. They weren't directed, that was their take on it. And I think they did a wonderful job in those scenes. The extras who turned out for the movie were enthusiastic dancers, but they weren't doing star turns.

PM: Talk about the dancing in the movie.

WS: This was the period in club life when it was no longer the Saturday Night Fever kind of choreographed dance steps and dance contests kind of stuff. It was called free style dancing, which these Manhattan clubs were famous for.

Our choreographer was kind of a censor. He'd go around and find people who were out of period, and he'd give the main characters a whole gamut of steps that they could do in line with the period. So we saved money on professional dancers, and we used the money for something else.

PM: Do your movies have any special connection to each other?

WH: I think all three of my films are essentially youth identity in crisis. The crisis might be muted, but it's that whole process of identity formation through young love and romance.

The essence of young romance is conversation. People talk to a tremendous extent with their first romantic partners. And it's both to find out who the other person is, and to find out about oneself. It's sort of holding a mirror up to oneself through conversation. I think my films are very much about that. And they're very much about those years in which people are forming not only their personal romantic identities, but their own inner identities.

PM: I hear your father worked for FDR, and was Democratic County Chairman in upstate New York. Did your father's involvement in politics have any influence on you as a filmmaker? I'm thinking especially about the importance of conversation and extended debates in your movies.

WS: Yes! Because I loved the campaigns and the gregariousness of it. I loved mixing with all kinds of people in a social setting, sort of ethnic enclaves. I would travel with my father when I was very young. He had a little campaign truck in Hudson Valley. I liked the process. And making a movie is very much like a political campaign, with its tensions.

I was completely obsessed with my father's political career. What I like about politics is the gregarious campaign nature of it. What I hated about politics was all the people you had to hate. My family had to sort of hate everyone who was bourgeois. We hated Republicans, people who played golf, people who were in the country club, people who went to deb parties...We had to hate all these people.

Then they sent me to schools where I met a lot of these people.And often I found that people who seemed empty headed and bourgeois were actually very funny and very kind people. Maybe their politics were retrograde and they didn't think about serious things, but in personal terms they were very nice.

PM: So you're in a sense a small town kid who likes to shoot movies in big cities like New York and Barcelona. What's that all about? WS: One of the marvelous things about shooting films at night in Manhattan or Barcelona is that these big, mean, loud tough cities become an absolute paradise of silence and peace.