Stillman, Whit, 1952-

Whit Stillman is an American writer and film director, whose comic films wittily dramatize the predicaments of individuals navigating what one of his characters jokingly refers to as the “Urban Haute Bourgeoisie.” Hearkening back to Hollywood’s golden age of screwball comedies, and further back to novels of manners written by Jane Austen and Henry James, Stillman’s films have been celebrated by the critic Nick Pinkerton as “the infectiously enthusiastic works of a connoisseur of the sport of intellectual jousting.”

Stillman was born in 1952, in Washington, D.C., to socialite parents who moved in political circles. (His father, John Sterling Stillman, served in the Commerce Department of the John F. Kennedy presidential administration.) Raised primarily in Cornwell, New York, Stillman attended a series of preparatory schools before enrolling at Harvard, where he studied history and wrote for The Harvard Crimson. After graduating, Stillman worked as an editorial assistant at Doubleday in New York—an experience drawn upon in his film The Last Days of Disco (1998)—and published journalistic writing. His entrance to the film business came during his time in Madrid in the early 1980s, where he acted as an American sales agent—and sometimes actor—for films directed by Fernando Trueba (Sal Gorda) and Fernando Colomo (Skyline).

Stillman wrote the screenplay for his debut feature, Metropolitan (1990), while running an illustration company in New York in the mid 1980s. The film, with its keen sense of the social mores and tensions of an ensemble of Upper East Side college students on the debutante circuit, was a breakout hit at the Sundance Film Festival, with Stillman eventually nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay and winning New York Film Critics Circle Awards for Best New Director. The film was followed by Barcelona (1994) and The Last Days of Disco, forming a loose trilogy playfully dubbed by Stillman as the “Doomed Bourgeois in Love” films. The three titles are linked not only by shared cast (Chris Eigeman, Taylor Nichols) and crew (cinematographer John Thomas), but also by their close attention to details of location and musical soundtrack, and Stillman’s sharply ironic, yet unexpectedly heartfelt, writing and direction. The screenplays for Metropolitan and Barcelona were published by Faber and Faber, and Stillman’s novelization of the last film in his trilogy was published as The Last Days of Disco, With Cocktails at Petrossian Afterwards.

Stillman followed The Last Days of Disco with two comedies similarly concerned with female leads: Damsels in Distress (2011), a satire of coeducation, and Love and Friendship (2016), his exuberant adaptation of Jane Austen’s epistolary novel, Lady Susan. Stillman once again transformed the latter film into a novel, published in 2017 as Love and Friendship: In Which Jane Austen’s Lady Susan is Entirely Vindicated. He has also worked in television, directing an episode of Homicide: Life on the Street (1996) and a pilot for Amazon titled The Cosmopolitans (2014), while pressing ahead on any number of yet to be realized film projects.