Sharp Whit

Ask independent filmmaker Whit Stillman to discuss his influences and he brushes the question aside, saying, "I don't really think film precedents are accurate for me. I have stronger connections to literary precedents: authors I really liked as a teenager and young adult. My pantheon consists of writers like Austen, Tolstoy, Fitzgerald, and Salinger." It is not surprising then that Stillman's first film, Metropolitan, his 1990 critically acclaimed paean to the coming-out season of Park Avenue debs and their escorts, was praiseworthy for its perspicacious, Austen-like attention to drawing-room detail. Metropolitan's success allowed Stillman to take on a bit larger story, not to mention an international locale, for his second picture, Barcelona, out this month from Fine Line.

Stillman has written, directed, and produced the story of two cousins who find political intrigue and romance in Barcelona in the 80s, around the time of Spain's contentious vote on joining NATO. For Stillman, a Madison Avenue native, the settings of both films were very familiar. In 1979, he met his wife, Irene, a Barcelonan, at a party in New York. Less than a year later they were married in Spain, and while there Stillman talked his way into his first film job, as a foreign-sales agent for Spain's leading producers and directors. "Actually," he confesses, "I had just read Variety's first Spanish-film issue, and when I spoke to the producer, he thought I was an expert on Spanish film, and I was hired." Back in New York in 1984, he took over an uncle's illustrators' rep agency, and spent nights writing Metropolitan.

Now that Barcelona is in the can, Stillman's attachment to that city remains mostly personal. "Irene likes to go there to give birth to our children," says Stillman, the father of two young daughters. "The hospitals in Barcelona are beautiful. They're like little hotel rooms. And the doctors are beautiful thirtysomething women." Sounds like the perfect location for a movie.

JAMES E. REYNOLDS