Whit Still­man: ​‘There would be a lot more Jane Austen movies if there were dol­lar signs’

Cin­e­mat­ic delights are rarely as absolute as Love & Friend­ship, the lat­est from Amer­i­can writer/​director Whit Still­man. Char­ac­ters in his pre­vi­ous come­dies, such as 1990’s Met­ro­pol­i­tan or 1994’s Barcelona, all seemed to exist out of their own time, but with this lat­est movie, an adap­ta­tion of one of Jane Austen’s juve­nile novel­las, peo­ple, place and time achieve a sub­lime connection.

LWLies: When you’re deal­ing with Jane Austen, do peo­ple imme­di­ate­ly see dol­lar signs?

Still­man: If there were dol­lar signs, there would’ve been a lot more Jane Austen movies. There was a bit of an Austen adap­ta­tion peri­od around ​’95, but not a lot since then. I’m par­tic­u­lar­ly fond of Sense and Sen­si­bil­i­ty as the oppo­site of what we do. It’s very roman­tic and we’re very com­ic. I think the films work together.

Could you do a pure­ly roman­tic movie, with­out the comic?

I wouldn’t have done that film in the same way. I real­ly admire what Ang Lee and Emma Thomp­son did with it. I was tan­gen­tial­ly involved in that film. I had con­ver­sa­tions with the pro­duc­ers, and I was incred­i­bly impressed with how it turned out. I can’t say exact­ly how I was going to be involved. One of the great things about that sto­ry is the predica­ment of the girls. The struc­ture of her nar­ra­tive real­ly works well.

How much inter­ac­tion did you have with the offi­cial Jane Austen society?

Bits and pieces through Twit­ter. They’ve always been good and sup­port­ive. The Dutch Jane Austen Soci­ety came to our screen­ing at the Rot­ter­dam Film Fes­ti­val and they loved it. It’s a dif­fer­ent kind of thing. A lot of Jane Austen peo­ple just like the world. They seem pret­ty accept­ing, though they do turn against adap­ta­tions they don’t like. They don’t mind when peo­ple do a Jane Austen film like a Brontë film, which is what a lot of peo­ple said about Joe Wright’s Pride & Prejudice.

So the idea for the film came about many years ago.

Yes. I was hav­ing cock­tails in Lon­don and I was chat­ting with a guy about this obscure, very fun­ny, very unusu­al Jane Austen novel­la, and he was ter­ri­bly encour­ag­ing. He was a neo­phyte who hadn’t done any­thing in film. He was a wannabe pro­duc­er type, but he end­ed up mar­ry­ing his Amer­i­can girl­friend, mov­ing to New York and get­ting into renew­able ener­gy. So I was off the hook. But it was fun hav­ing some­one who encour­aged it. It was the project I would always return to between script dead­lines and deliv­er­ies. There was no real pres­sure on this one. It was like a block of mar­ble that had to be chipped away. It was help­ful that you could come back to it and peel away some more text. It’s a gold­mine of fun­ny thoughts, sens­es and obser­va­tions. There was a point where the man­ag­er I was with thought it was all set to go and the cast­ing peo­ple thought it was a good idea. And then I was re-read­ing it and it just wasn’t ready.

We read that you inspect­ed the orig­i­nal man­u­script of ​‘Lady Susan’?

I did it online. Every­one can. It’s the Mor­gan Library web­site. There was an exhi­bi­tion of her man­u­scripts which I went to. That was years ago, but I loved it. I was actu­al­ly look­ing for whether she had put a title on it. I want­ed to change the title. I don’t believe it is on the man­u­script. Her nephew is sup­posed to have added it. I under­stand why, as ​‘Northang­er Abbey’ was orig­i­nal­ly titled ​‘Susan’, so it would’ve been strange if this was ​‘Lady Susan’. Also, anoth­er jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for using her juve­nile sto­ry title, ​‘Love & Friend­ship’, was that many of her projects she start­ed with a char­ac­ter title and then she switched to impres­sive nouns. ​‘Sense & Sen­si­bil­i­ty’ start­ed out as ​‘Eleanor and Mar­i­anne’, ​‘Pride & Prej­u­dice’ start­ed out as ​‘First Impressions’.

Was the process of drama­tis­ing the book tough?

It seemed like a real­ly tough task and it did take a lot of time. But basi­cal­ly there was an engine under the hood. When peo­ple work on mate­r­i­al that doesn’t have an engine, it doesn’t have that ten­sion to takes it to inter­est­ing places. And that’s what’s so frus­trat­ing about the film busi­ness: so many times you hear peo­ple say­ing that everyone’s done such good work, but in fact, it’s still dead.