“ very down-market, explicitly a female audience. Stillman expressed concern about one of the posters for the film-one prepared for the British release. And also compression, compression, compression, edit, edit, edit.” I learned that from writing the scenes for that show. They told me that I needed to make every scene go faster.
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“Love & Friendship” tells a story with plenty of narrative twists and many dialogue scenes, but Stillman observed, “I think it’s the fastest-paced movie I’ve had… I truly had gotten a taste for it from my Amazon pilot. Those guys sort of humanized it and gave it another dimension.” He added that other touch of British sketch comedy. “One of the last people cast,” Stillman added, was Justin Edwards, who plays Charles Vernon, the very obliging husband of Catherine Vernon. He’s a very good comedian, and was adding a lot, but with the lines. So I started writing whatever scene I could for him, and he really changed the project.”īennett didn’t engage in improvisation during shooting, Stillman said, but he added, “He came to the screening at the Rotterdam Film Festival, and after the screening he came out in costume as Sir James Martin, and he definitely improv’d very well there-according to him, he didn’t really know what a movie was…and he had a lot of fun with the name Rotter-dam. He made the rewritten audition scene, which was still kind of weak comically, work-the whole thing about church and hill, which is pretty lame. He came like a Dickens character-he’d been appearing in some play of the period, with side whiskers, and he looked like something out of Mr.
Then there was a guy who was atypical, more working-class but a super-funny comic. One…came from that kind of silly family and had all those mannerisms. “Then for Sir James Martin, I had three people who were possible. Then Xavier Samuel came in, and he was wonderful. He was just transcendent, and the other people were just normal. “Normally you look and look, and then you find the right person,” Stillman explained, “like James Fleet, who plays Sir Reginald. But the actors surrounding them-especially the men-weren’t so easy to find. Lady Susan is played by Kate Beckinsale and her equally duplicitous confidante by Chloe Sevigny they’d previously co-starred in Stillman’s “The Last Days of Disco” (1998), and were relatively easy to cast. The narrative focuses on an impecunious-and highly manipulative-widow who is searching for another husband, as well as one for her daughter, recently tossed out of a posh boarding school. I didn’t think had anything to do with the story to begin with, but once I finished the film, I thought, yes, it is kind of love and friendship.” “It was also more fun to work on it, because it made it kind of a secret project, kind of our own creation, not exactly what her novella was. A first draft would have a character name, and the final version that was published was ‘Sense and Sensibility,’ ‘Pride and Prejudice,’ ‘Persuasion,’ ‘Love & Friendship.’ So I thought we were making it more Austenian. She’d generally moved away from the name titles. She actually called ‘Northanger Abbey,’ ‘Susan.’ Later her nephew put it on her book. I’m very tiresome about how I dislike the title.
“And in the back of the edition of ‘Northanger Abbey,’ Penguin in its wisdom had put ‘Lady Susan,’ so I found ‘Lady Susan’ thanks to my aversion for ‘Northanger Abbey.’ And soon after I read it, I started thinking about the possibilities for adaptation.”īut, he added, “I didn’t like the title at all.
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She makes fun of Gothic novels the whole way through, and I knew Gothic novels and how to make fun of them. And many years later I went back to reread ‘Northanger Abbey’ and this time I liked it. And meanwhile I started reading Jane Austen and loved it. I edited Gothic novels, like Victoria Holt. “And then I went on with some book publishing. I told everyone that she was terrible, she’s overrated. “And part of my funk was picking up this Jane Austen-I’d heard a lot about Jane Austen-and I hated it.
“I read ‘Northanger Abbey’ when I was eighteen, a sophomore in college about to drop out and go on a funk and learn Spanish in Mexico,” Stillman recalled. Sitting down at a Dallas hotel to talk about his new film “Love & Friendship,” an adaptation of Jane Austen’s early epistolary novel “Lady Susan” that had screened the previous evening at the USA Film Festival, Whit Stillman admitted he was not always a fan of the English writer.
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