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"\n\n Whit Stillman, New York's king of comedy\u2014the comedy of principled, mighty fallen manners, that is\u2014is finally back with his fourth feature, Damsels in Distress. Set at the fictional Seven Oaks College, the film follows a trio of true-blue girls with an offbeat flare and Xanadu projections seeking to refurbish life on campus. The boys are either glib (like Adam Brody's Charlie) or Greek-lettered, loutish blockheads. The student body is either cynical or depressed.\n\n Lead by the persuasive Violet (Greta Gerwig), the damsels (think Grease's Pink Ladies in seersucker sans slang) indoctrinate new girl Lily (Analeigh Tipton). Their revolution involves running a tap dancing-enhanced Suicide Prevention Center frequented by heartbroken students like Priss (Caitlin Fitzgerald), or downers like Debbie (Parks Recreation's deadpan Aubrey Plaza). Later, spurred by Violet's olfactory encounter with a bar of soap, phase two is hatched. \n\n As with Stillman's three previous films\u2014Metropolitan, Barcelona, and The Last Days of Disco\u2014where urban gentry or budding yuppies muse delusively, often delectably, to a chosen outsider, Damsels is a similarly eloquent shuffle through the dynamics of a particular fishbowl. Romantic entanglements ensue. Sleuthing, false identities, and strange sex practices follow. The Sambola! (an international dance craze) is invented, on hand, as antidote. GQ chatted with Stillman about his first film in more than a decade.\n\n\u00B7\u00B7\u00B7\n\nGQ: It's been 13 years since your last film was released. What kind of anxiety, anticipation, and even fear of failing have you experienced in the years leading up to Damsels?\n\n Whit Stillman: Yeah, I had a lot of time to think about all of that. There's a line in Metropolitan where the Charlie character played by Taylor Nichols is in a conversation with a man at a bar and Charlie's trying to say they're all doomed to failure because of their background, and the guy contradicts him. He says, \"To the contrary, that no, they've just failed but they are not doomed to failure.\" And Charlie will not let go, and he keeps saying things like, \"Well maybe the failure will come later.\" And in that time, in those years, I was thinking, \"Okay, this is the failure that's coming later, the failure we talked about in Metropolitan. Here it is! Charlie was right!\" In the film, I sort of made fun of Charlie but actually he was right\u2014failure does come later.\n\nFacebookPinterest\n\nGQ: What did these in-between years look like?\n\n Whit Stillman: I have three hats, and one is kind of a bogus hat. And that is that of producer. So I actually am the writer of the film, although I might not feel authentic or cut out for it, that's become a reality. I'm the director of the films, and then I'm the producer of the films. But I'm the producer of the films when there's someone else who can say, \"Here's the money to make the film.\" Except with Metropolitan, I did raise the money myself. But with the other films, it was very much, \"We have money, go make the film.\" I get a line producer who really does the budgeting and the work, and the worrying, and then I get to choose, \"Well, let's not spend money on the professional dancers, let's do something else.\" But it's not really hard production work. And then what I found with this case, because I was not in the arena which my friends at Castle Rock operate, I was trying to make very different kinds of films, and I was trying to do them out of London. The equation or the formula or whatever it was that I had wasn't working at all. People thought it was a stretch and that it was too much. They said, \"What is preppy New Yorker, Whit Stillman, doing with black kids in 1962 Kingston, Jamaica?\"\n\nGQ: Which is the next project you are in fact working on, right?\n\n Whit Stillman: Yes, I still hope to make it at some point. And also I think, while there is an audience for our films and there are people who like them, like people in the business would respect that we had done something that was well regarded by other people, they actually didn't like the film. I mean the films were not their films, their cup of tea. I fell in with a group of funders in Britain for whom our films were not their thing. They tend to like bleak dramas, to be honest. But I didn't realize how bad things were because I was worrying mostly about the scripts, and the scripts were generally going pretty well. So I was I happy. I was living in this beautiful place, Paris, and had this sort of interesting personal life. And I didn't really realize that these films I thought were going to happen are not going to happen. And they don't tell you know right off that it's not going to happen.\n\nGQ: How does it feel when you do find out?\n\n Whit Stillman: Well generally, I was like, \"Okay. Good. I'll have more time on that script and now I can work on another one.\" I was like a grazing cow thinking, \"Oh there's grass in this pasture that I haven't eaten.\"\n\nGQ: You've got such a positive outlook!\n\n Whit Stillman: Yeah, I tend to be a little Pollyanna-ish. So you know the idea that this was really a crisis state, and even as years would pass, I still had this script to write or that script. There was always some positive thing happening amidst the horrible failure.\n\nGQ: The damsels in Damsels, especially Violet, like characters in your past films, adhere to odd certainties and are fond of giving advice no matter how convoluted or out-of-date. What draws you to these characters?\n\n Whit Stillman: Well, I like kind of heroic characters who aren't afraid to say stuff. I guess I am a little afraid to say stuff. I find them funny and larger than life, and appealing. It's escapism for me. And what I've noticed with these characters, the dynamic that is, if they're not very nice or constructive or positive, it's a little bit too bitter for the audience to take. The Kate Beckinsale character in Disco was hard for people to tolerate. Where the Nick character (Chris Eigeman) in Metropolitan, was catnip for people. What made him attractive was that he has this pose or reality of being this funny snob, and yet he's being really nice to the sad, timid, awkward, identification character. This is a person who could be really cruel and mean, but they're not. And that's Violet's trump too. She's just a nice person who had habits we associate with someone who's not nice. Also, you have to admit, some of that niceness has that trace of the condescension, and people hate condescension. You know they say that \"No good deed goes unpunished,\" and that's a little bit what happens to Violet. And I've noticed it too.\n\nGQ: With yourself?\n\n Whit Stillman: Yeah, with myself. When you're in a really bad position, someone helps you out in a certain way and very often, you pick out the little problems in their generosity instead of the big thing of their generosity. It's hard not to react that way.\n\nGQ: Violet's career idea to invent a dance craze in order to boost people's quality of life is, of course, very unusual and funny, but somehow, in this sealed-off world, seems practical\u2014especially because she stands so firmly behind it. It's almost, innocently, somewhat Emma Goldman-y of her. And dancing is a key characteristic of your films. Do you dance?\n\n Whit Stillman: Well, there are a lot of things that I don't do that much, but I would love to. I would love to. I would love to know how to tango well. I keep going to the starter tango class at the local place, and I admire the tango enormously but I haven't really dedicated myself to learning it. Generally, most sort of informal dancing, I can do or fake. I remember recently, I was over in Madrid and I was with these people who really wanted to go out to dance to Sevillana\u2014that's the sort of flamenco dancing they do there\u2014and I just watched and tried to fake it. It's a very hard dance to fake but I felt like Jerry Lewis in those films where he throws himself into a situation and just has to pretend!\n\nGQ: He would just buckle down and go for it\u2026\n\n Whit Stillman: Yeah, it's quite fun even if it's a little annoying for the people on the dance floor.\n\nGQ: Is there a certain song or dance you cannot deny it?\n\n Whit Stillman: Yes, there is a lot of music like that for me. I just think some music you simply have to dance to. The Sambola! is quite infectious. Just to be in the safe side we titled it \"The Sambola! International Dance Craze.\" That's the whole name of the song.\n\nGQ: Sambola with an exclamation point!\n\n Whit Stillman: At one point there were two exclamation points, but now it's just The Sambola exclamation point International Dance Craze.\n\nGQ: Can you talk a bit about your cast?\n\n Whit Stillman: Well each one seems very different to me. They really have a different performing style, and come from a different place. Analeigh is very natural. She's just an extremely easy actress to work with. Adam has a lot of smarts and a lot of technique, and he has a really good guy quality.\n\nGQ: Guy quality? How so?\n\n Whit Stillman: I don't know, he's just an appealing guy. He's a likable guy. And I don't think I've had that many actors who can do the likeable guy thing and the Chris Eigeman funny thing. So that's an interesting combination. And Greta is the opposite from Analeigh. There's working thought and effort going on and what I like is that she's not prefab. She's not deciding what it is and locking that up. She's sort of trying to find the soul of it\u2014there are modulations and changes and thinking about things the first few days of shooting. I like the way she searched for it and found it. And I just learned during this press period that she likes rehearsal, and I tend not to like rehearsal much at all.\n\nGQ: If there wasn't much rehearsal, what was the set like? Especially since the dialogue is precise and manicured but the setting is contemporary\u2014are there any rules or tricks to maintain that particular sort of sphere?\n\n Whit Stillman: No swearing. No swearing. No swearing. It was a really pleasant shoot.\n\nGQ: Do you have a favorite part?\n\n Whit Stillman: One of my favorite things in the film is when the Violet Wister character goes to the diner. That's a really favorite scene of mine.\n\nGQ: I love that she's also dressed in this baggier button-down rather than one of the prettier, pleated dresses she wears on campus.\n\n Whit Stillman: I mean the men's shirt is something I wanted to do because I thought we had gone a bit too far in the dressing up thing. You have the idea they're going to be dressy, but I didn't mean that Sunday-school dressy.\n\nGQ: But it was great that all the damsels shared each other's clothes. That felt authentic.\n\n Whit Stillman: Yeah, that works, that works. But that diner scene, Carolyn Farina who was the lead in Metropolitan, sitting opposite her. And also the highway workers who were so great\u2014in fact I'm thinking if I do the Jamaican film, I'm going to find some way to have them because I really liked them.\n\nGQ: Can you tell me a bit more about that film?\n\n Whit Stillman: It's about the scene in Jamaica from '62 to '65. And it's set in Kingston and it's a very, very happy time in Jamaica. They had just gotten independence, it was very prosperous, and this fantastic music was being created. Then things sort of started to fall apart in '65 and '66, really badly. It was a crisis. I still hope to do it, and I hope [the highway workers] will be in it.\n\nGQ: The girls also believe in the curative powers of good hygiene. The trope of scent and smells play a role in their campus revolution\u2014it's their weapon so to speak. Is there a particular scent that woos you?\n\n Whit Stillman: Well, some of the original group that inspired the story were these groups of women who did these kinds of things in all-male colleges, and they often had perfumes as their trademarks. My favorite scent is Diorissimo, and I was going to call the film Diorissimo as one idea. So that is a reality that this fun and cool group of girls would mark themselves by all wearing the same perfume. Also, a lot of these things are\u2014I mean I love a nice scent\u2014but the idea was of a certain kind of sensual idealism, an excelsior, something higher or better, something finer..."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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