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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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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
Rule
Watching
Early
Late
Comedy
Randall
Used
Tony
Love
Comedies
Romantic

More quotes by 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.
Whit Stillman
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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 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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We learned some bad things, and the Vietnam War led to some bad conclusions. We're not the greatest generation, that's for sure.
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I find it really disturbing to be watching a lot of the medium that I'm trying to work in. I prefer to be doing things that are farther away.
Whit Stillman
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I can talk about Jane Austen until the cows come home.
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.
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[Jerome David] Salinger was really taken to the cleaners by nasty critics in his day. I think Joan Didion was one of the people who attacked him in a very unfair way.
Whit Stillman
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I decided the moment I graduated from college that I would never wear blue jeans again. And I have never worn blue jeans again.
Whit Stillman
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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.
Whit Stillman
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I originally wanted to be F. Scott Fitzgerald, but failed.
Whit Stillman
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Our roots are clinging, we shouldn't knock down so many old 'buildings.'
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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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.
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.
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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.
Whit Stillman
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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.
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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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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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