“I don’t want to get sued,” says Whit Stillman with a laugh, “but it’s pretty darn close to my life.” The director is talking about his latest work, The Cosmopolitans, an online TV venture made with Amazon that’s drawn from his days as an American abroad. “I lived in Paris for nine years,” adds Stillman, best known for The Last Days of Disco and Metropolitan.
The first episode of the fish-out-of-water dramedy sees a group of lovesick, largely American drifters make their way through the bars and nightlife of Paris. Like Stillman’s 1994 film Barcelona, it looks at how awkward expats can be abroad. “We’re Parisians,” Adam Brody, playing Jimmy, drawls at one point in his broadest west coast accent. But it’s also about how the loneliness of heartbreak can be amplified by being in a foreign land – something Stillman knows well. “Going to Paris was my spouse’s idea,” he says. “Our marriage was breaking up when we were there, and I got deeply involved with a French woman. I ended up being awed by the country.”
The pilot of The Cosmopolitans arrived on Amazon Prime late last month and continued the online-retailer-turned-content-maker’s remit of bold commissioning choices. Like the sci-fi thriller Extant with Halle Berry, and the Washington satire Alpha House starring John Goodman, The Cosmopolitans was never a safe bet, especially with Stillman at the helm, given his highly mannered work inspires love and hate in equal measures.
His fans, though, will be pleased with the appearance of Chloë Sevigny, who has reunited with the writer and director for the first time since The Last Days of Disco. She plays bitter fashion journalist Vicky. “It was terrific getting back in touch,” Stillman says. “She came in and did a bit part, but then I thought, ‘She’s here, we need to use her more!’ So I ended up writing her a bigger scene.” In it, we see Vicky offer Dorothy Parker-esque putdowns to guests at a party.
It’s his favourite scene in a show filled with “Stillman-esque” types: the posh, the naive and the navel-gazing. But it’s also desperately romantic and imbued with a genteel air, suggesting these characters ought to exist in another time. It was Metropolitan, his 1990 debut as a writer-director, that introduced the world to Stillman’s style. Drawing from his own experience of falling in with a group of UHBs (Urban Haute Bourgeoisie) navigating their way through New York high society, it remains his defining work. Its influence could be felt in Sex and the City (in particular, the character of Charlotte) and Gossip Girl. So perhaps the leap from film to telly wasn’t so great? “Well, when you’re doing the work, film and TV are exactly the same. TV is just film in reduced pieces.”
The Cosmopolitans does, however, mark the end of a 15-year struggle to get various telly projects off the ground. “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.” Working with Amazon, he says, cut through the red tape because they were their own TV channel. “Their attitude was, ‘We’re putting on a show, it’s happening.’ And it happened.”
Despite the long gap between films (13 years separate The Last Days of Disco and 2011’s collegiate comedy Damsels in Distress), Stillman says he wasn’t daunted by the workload of a whole series. “Amazon allowed me to make the show in pieces. I thought it was going to be 10 episodes, but it might be six half-hour shows now, which I feel happy about.”
It’s yet to be decided whether The Cosmopolitans will get picked up for a full series, but he’s hopeful, despite the mixed reviews. “I know there are a group of people who don’t know where the comedy is coming from, or don’t like the bourgeois characters, so it’s a challenge.” Stillman’s baffled by the Marmite reaction his work tends to get. “I have to embrace the fact people find me divisive, but I find it remarkable. I was very disturbed by the hatred Damsels in Distress received.” The San Francisco Chronicle compared it to “torture”.
Part of the criticism derives from the fact his films deal exclusively with the white and the privileged. “But my biggest false steps have actually been when I tried to do very different projects,” he says. “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. The industry doesn’t want me to do anything else.”
His next project is an adaptation of Lady Susan by Jane Austen with Sevigny in the lead. He describes it as “cynical, very Oscar Wildean in its humour and slightly inaccessible”. Sounds like a perfect fit.
• The Cosmopolitans pilot can be seen on Amazon.co.uk
