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It's terrible to write what are essentially comedies for people with no sense of humor. Everyone thinks they have a sense of humor, but observably not.

Whit Stillman

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Whit Stillman
Age: 72
Born: 1952
Born: January 25
Film Actor
Film Director
Film Producer
Screenwriter
Writer
New York City
New York
John Whitney Stillman
Write
Sense
Comedies
Writing
Essentially
Thinking
Thinks
People
Humor
Terrible
Comedy
Everyone

More quotes by Whit Stillman

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I think a lot of [Cosmopolitans] is marked by [Jerome David] Salinger. Salinger wouldn't allow his works to be adapted for film after his experience with Uncle Wiggly in Connecticut, and I think that's great for us because then we have to do our own Salinger stories.
Whit Stillman
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[ Lady Susan novel by Jane Austen is] extremely difficult to adapt. I worked on it for years, for, like, ten years, before I started showing it to people. This was my back-burner project.
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Sometimes you don't realize how dependent you are on just a few people, and if they disappear, suddenly you can be thrown on your own resources, which may be limited, and you're really in a fix. So I think that's authentic to the experience that it might be very lonely.
Whit Stillman
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Decline and Fall was a very depressing Evelyn Waugh novel, I think it was his first. I didn't get it at all, and then I got to love Waugh. And I think that maybe Cosmopolitans has a bit of an Evelyn Waugh vibe to it at some point.
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I think it's helpful to aspire to make films if you feel that other people are not doing what you want to do.
Whit Stillman
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We learned some bad things, and the Vietnam War led to some bad conclusions. We're not the greatest generation, that's for sure.
Whit Stillman
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I think crazy people are helpful, crazy people who are the catalysts who make other things happen for everyone else. It's almost as if they're not really making things happen in their own life, but their hyperactivity is triggered for everyone else.
Whit Stillman
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I think Austin is read more now than Charles Dickens, and Dickens was much more popular in his day. She endures because of her classicism.
Whit Stillman
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I'm for people clinging. I'm pro-clinging.
Whit Stillman
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You can't go by what the governments say or do. It's not the governments. It's on the street where there's more hatred of Americans in Britain than in France.
Whit Stillman
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I think it's really good and helpful to have the people you most admire in some other discipline than what you work in. It's too intimidating and derivative to be just totally gobsmacked by someone doing exactly the same thing as you are.
Whit Stillman
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For me, the present is a golden era. That's the greatest golden era. Right now. I just like pining for lost times.
Whit Stillman
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One of the problems of a director on the set is that we become overwhelmed by all the factors and threads of production, that sometimes we can't focus on our main job, which is steering the performances to create the whole film.
Whit Stillman
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Find someone hypersocial and crazy and try not to follow them to their doom, but to make friends with their nicer friends.
Whit Stillman
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The Cha-Cha is no more ridiculous than life itself.
Whit Stillman
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I can talk about Jane Austen until the cows come home.
Whit Stillman
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I love watching the romantic comedies of the late '50s and early '60s. I used to have a rule that if Tony Randall's in it, it can't be bad.
Whit Stillman
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In my father's time - he was in college during many transitions in the late 1930s - they had great institutional loyalties... to his college, eventually the navy, the Democratic Party and certain ideals of our country. Those are the things that became broken with my generation.
Whit Stillman
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There's a big difference between having relatives who have money and actually having it yourself. Just because you have a cousin who has a lot of money doesn't mean he shares it with you. Or that you'd ask him for a loan.
Whit Stillman
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Our roots are clinging, we shouldn't knock down so many old 'buildings.'
Whit Stillman