In New York, around Christmas, it is the season of debutante balls for the youth of high society. Tom, from a different social class, gets caught up in the game. A debut film that reinvents sophisticated American comedy.
Rather than an intellectual idea, Metropolitan was born from a certain hindsight on a period of my life. I’d been to university, Harvard, like my father and grandfather, my brother, and so on.
After the admissions interview, while packing to go to Harvard, I was listening to a Bee Gees album – from their sad, melancholy period, before the disco Bee Gees – and I remember the depression that came over me at that point. It wasn’t sadness, it was real depression. Anyway, I get to Harvard, I’m struggling with this depression, and I find my brother. He was an extreme leftist, very radical – it drove him crazy, he ended up institutionalised. He and his far-left friends spent their time in the rooms of newcomers like me, trying to recruit us. All this radical talk, this hyper-politicised environment of 1969 America, it was super depressing. Then I went to New York for Thanksgiving and Christmas, and had this wonderful experience with the people who would become the characters in Metropolitan. My best friend’s mother from high school called me and said, ‘Can you and Tony take Suzy to this dance?’ That was the formula for these dances: two boys for one girl, so she wouldn’t be trapped with a single date. And they were a whole group, those people were really funny. The real girl that Sally Fowler is based on was called Molly Ferrer. Her father was an important doctor at Columbia and her brother was Mel Ferrer, who was married to Audrey Hepburn. It was always, ‘Aunt Audrey, Aunt Audrey!’ That’s why in the script I called the main character Audrey, because while I couldn’t know the actors in advance, I knew that this character of Audrey Rouget would be Audrey Hepburn, just as I thought Nick Smith would be Cary Grant, and Charlie would kind of be Jimmy Stewart. The Chris Eigeman and Taylor Nichols of Metropolitan are kind of the Cary Grant and James Stewart of The Philadelphia Story (1940).
From Whit Stillman : Not so long ago, Fireflies Press / FIDMarseille, coll. “One, Two, Many”, 2023.
