To celebrate the release of Whit Stillman’s Love & Friendship, we were joined by the American auteur for a post preview chat about Jane Austen, reuniting with star Kate Beckinsale and a few budget filmmaking tips…
JW: What were your thoughts on Jane Austen before starting Love & Friendship? There were rumours that you were planning to adapt one of her stories in the 90s…
WS: I love Jane Austen. I also have a very interesting friend who always gets things the wrong way around. He had read a Lionel Trilling essay about Mansfield Park and when he heard that I liked Mansfield Park he said, ‘Oh, that’s impossible…’ and that’s essentially the conversation in Metropolitan. He’s constantly giving me great material and he also invested in the film and lent his family’s beach house for the end of Metropolitan so he’s a very useful friend to have. When I was doing that about the two characters debating, I was also thinking about the virtuous heroine in the modern world. Audrey Rouget was a virtuous heroine and she was defending Fanny Price, another virtuous heroine and the big debate in Mansfield Park is that, her Uncle who’s not very nice to her – she upholds his rule that there not be private theatricals in the house and in Metropolitan the parallel to that is a game of truth or dare so there’s a little bit of connection with Jane Austen there.
JW: How did you get involved with an adaptation of Jane Austen’s work?
WS: When I was editing Barcelona and thinking of writing the script for Last Days of Disco I was pushed by a Producer who was doing a Jane Austen adaptation and in that case it kind of underwhelmed me. Then I read that same Jane Austen novel and found out that the adapter went directly into the dramatised scenes three chapters in and the first two chapters where the predicament of the characters was established, was not included. It was Sense and Sensibility and they did (ultimately) add in all that predicament which is really important for the movie. I’m sure they would have done that anyway but I was one of the first people to see the script. That’s the adaptation I really admire. I hugely admire it and there was discussions about other things, a lot of back and forth. I really felt like I was onto something commercial with this idea but the industry always feels differently,
JW: The basis for this film takes place in letter form – What challenges did this present when bringing it to the screen?
WS: Well Jane Austen started writing seriously when she was about 18, so there’s a lot of juvenalia which some people really admire. I actually don’t like a lot of the juvenalia except that it’s great that a 14/15 year old girl wrote that but I loved the title Love & Friendship. Austen was starting to write several novels in the 1790s when she was in her early 20s. One novel was called Elinor and Marianne and later that became Sense and Sensibility. Another was First Impressions which became Pride and Prejudice and then there was this which I don’t think she titled, that’s my excuse for changing the title. This, she didn’t change into a modern novel, she left it. The copy we have in the Morgan Library, which two weeks ago I got a chance to see, is a paper with a watermark of 1805. She copied it over I think she would have been working on it – I mean she’s not going to copy it without changing it, so I think she kept working on it until her 30s. So there’s this very unlikely material that Jane Austen left and didn’t publish and it’s considered imperfect by many people, it’s a little hard to read and she didn’t do the whole Jane Austen treatment for it. She got to a summary conclusion but it’s sort of abandoned but within it is just really excellent comic material and characters. It’s like a gold mine that no one had drilled and so it was exciting for me to do. Also, I originally started loving Oscar Wilde and in this there’s some feeling of Oscar Wilde repartee, dialogue and characters
JW: What was it like reuniting with Kate Beckinsale – was it easy picking up that relationship years after 1998’s Last Days of Disco?
WS: I always have to think ‘Is there a commercial story that I can tell producers and financiers?’ and I thought it could be the fact that Kate Beckinsale could play Lady Susan. When I started working on it she was actually too young to be considered but I knew my process and how long it would take, so I was hopeful. That intimidating wall around someone who’s become a big commercial star might have slowed the casting process but she had a really good agent who was very literary and keen to have her on the project. You need someone in the middle who wants it to happen because very often they don’t want it to happen, they don’t want their star performer taking a low fee to do a good film. Once all that was out of the way it was really good and she was incredibly serious and smart and went over the script really closely.
JW: How involved did she get with the script and the character?
WS: I was over in Paris and she was in Los Angeles so there was a big time difference but I’d wake up and there’d be a lot of emails from Kate about different things. It was really great because I’d been alone with the project and generally liked not having too much script development but in this case it was someone who was going to be carrying the film and so what she said and what she thought about the logic of the scenes was very interesting. She was going back and forth to the original source material which I wanted to do too before we finished it to make sure we had scoured the mine for all the gold and that was a very helpful thing. When she came on set it was really quite hard, all the costumes and hair and all that – but when she got to set she was just like a machine gun with dialogue, it was flawless
JW: Tom Bennett is brilliant as Sir James Martin. How much of that part was there and how much was made larger whilst filming?
WS: That’s extraordinary. I’ve never had this experience before where adapting a story or a novel, if they don’t write letters, they don’t fully exist. The characters that fully exist are the letter writers because you know what they’re saying. In his case, he’s sort of described – he laughs a lot, other characters describe him occasionally but he doesn’t really have a scene. So I came up with one that was the audition piece. One of the good and bad things about auditions is that you hear it so many times, even if it’s good you really get sick of it. In this case it wasn’t good so I got sick of it very quickly. I re-wrote the arrival scene but it’s still really thin comic material, frankly. It’s not hilarious but he made it hilarious. So when we did the read through, it was kind of tragic until he started his scenes and suddenly it was like a ray of sunshine and everyone was laughing. I realised this guy is just comic gold so we had two gold sources – Jane Austen and Tom Bennett so I started writing scenes.
JW: I also liked the scene with the peas…
WS: One thing about the peas – people say that my films are not cinematic at all but the peas thing started with the idea of these green balls on a fine piece of white china with this idiot running around and laughing. So it did start with an image,
JW: You shot in Europe on a tight budget, how inventive did you need to be?
WS: That’s one reason I like working with restricted budgets because it’s so much fun to be as inventive as possible and in this case we really had wonderful people doing costumes and Production Design. I think one of the secrets of indie filmmaking is trying to make every location five locations and not move. If you move from where you’re shooting it just takes up all this time for no purpose. So Newbridge House near Dublin is the facade, rooms and the garden of the Chloë residence. Stephen Fry, the room he comes out of, if you look at it from another angle is the breakfast room where Sir Reginald and Lady DeCoursy read the letter because the other side of that house is Parklands. The road to London is the road right by it and then the carriages that Chloë and Kate walk around, that’s the courtyard. You try to get these locations where you can shoot three in one and move on. There was a horsedrawn carriage coming back and forth and we tried to steal that shot by getting the camera really low, just getting the wheel and not having to pay but then there was a blue adidas sneaker dangling down wrecking it. Finally we broke down and hired him, his fee was 10 euros to go back and forth. So for 10 euros we got the carriage value. That’s what I love about indie filmmaking.
JW: Did the same rules apply for the cast?
WS: I had this idea for some more scenes for Sir James Martin and there was this one day where we were filming in Newbridge House and it looked like we were going to finish early and I saw that Tom Bennett was there for costume fittings and he said he was going back to the UK the next day so I said ‘What? He’s leaving? I want to shoot something with him’ and they said ‘No, you can’t shoot with him because you’ll have to pay him’ so I said ‘Okay, we’ll pay him’ and they said, ‘We don’t have a location’ and I said ‘We’ll put him up against this door and it’ll be our location’. And they said Kate doesn’t have time to change her costume and her hair before the end of the day so I thought okay, we’ll put Kate behind the door and so we did shoot that scene and it’s in the film. So there you go.
Love & Friendship is now showing at HOME. To find out more and book tickets, head here. To learn more about our Whit Weekender, head here.
