Writer and director of two of the most relentlessly intelligent movies of thedecade (Metropolitan and Barcelona), aptly-named Whit Stillman is about to release his surprising take on 1 he Last Days of Disco. PT Editorial-at-Large Hara Estroff Marano caught up with him on his--and our--favorite topics: love life end conversation.

PT: Films are a great screen where we can look at human behavior and see who we are. Through them, we can see ourselves more clearly. Is this why you got into film?

Whit Stillman: My aspiration was to be a novelist. I tried doing that in college, and I really didn't like the solitude. I didn't like the prospect of an entire life spent writing a novel for four years, having lunch with your editor, getting a telegram that it's published, and then going back and writing another. I didn't feel cut out to be a novelist, but I wanted to be in storytelling. I thought that maybe in film I could do something where I wouldn't have to write all the time, where I could be involved in stories in an industrial production line.

PT: Are you just telling stories? What are you showing us?

WS: To make a low-budget film, you have to have a script. So I wrote the script for Metropolitan. It was a cheap way to get a script that I could direct. But by coming back to writing later in life, I found I had something I didn't have in college: subject matter. I could think back ten years and have stuff I could write about. You can write a romantic comedy and lie about the way people live together just to make it entertaining, or, with the same amount of work, you can try to tell absolutely the truth as you know it.

PT: When you have your characters acting, and you're deciding whether something rings true, what is it about the human experience that you want us to get?

WS: When you're dealing with fiction, it's important that it not be explicit, that it somehow be intuitive. If it's conscious, it offends the audience. So you come at it indirectly. I think often you're reprocessing through your own experience the stuff you've read and loved in the past. The writers I most love--Jane Austen, Tolstoy, Samuel Johnson--had their desire to observe life and recommend, through their own means, certain paths, certain types of people, certain types of conduct. At times, I felt that The Last Days of Disco was a social guide for young women, or a sex-education film. It is set in the waning days of that period we call the sexual revolution, which was not about feminism or equality of the sexes, but about sexual conduct. It was just before the change in behavior in the eighties. Setting it there meant I could talk about much more in a short amount of time, because people were having a lot of experiences and learning lessons quickly, abruptly--lessons of commitment, of premature commitment, and of biological problems that were solved. We really touch on--I hope lightly--almost everything that can go wrong. In times of more tranquil activity, those lessons come, if at all, much more slowly.

PT: You've made three films. If I had to sum up in one word what your films are about, I would say--and you may laugh--friendship. Discos can come and go, foreign assignments can come and go, debutante balls can come and go, but a circle of friends stays. Mating dances seem to take place within the circle of friends. There are individuals, but there is a group. There are alliances, but there is a group.

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