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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.

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
Point
Waugh
Fall
Evelyn
Didn
Vibe
Firsts
Depressing
First
Decline
Love
Novel
Think
Bits
Thinking
Maybe
Cosmopolitans

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I call the '70s the golden age of television in the early '70s there were sensationally good shows.
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It becomes a lot better for the actors when we're 'shooting, shooting, shooting,' instead of waiting around in a trailer for something to happen.
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I would say on the other side of the equation that there were really some massive sales and massive enthusiasm for some films that were given big releases. And I'm not really sure that happens in quite the same way, small films getting big releases. Maybe it still does, I don't know.
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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.
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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.
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I've had no money, absolutely, from my family. They paid for a good education - or schools that purported to be a good education - but, um, not a dime.
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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.
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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.
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There's some people who are just very dynamic about social life, and it can be some pretty crazy stuff, but you end up meeting people you like.
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I can talk about Jane Austen until the cows come home.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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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.
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That's one of the things I find really bad, is when people not only do injuries to others, but then lie about the others to justify it. It's not bad enough just being bad to someone, but then lying about it.
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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.
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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.
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I originally wanted to be F. Scott Fitzgerald, but failed.
Whit Stillman