Manhattan, early 80s. Alice and Charlotte, two young editors, work by day and dance by night. Comedy as an x-ray of a group of friends at the end of an era.
There’s a wide shot of the girls dancing, which I really like. The camera dollies in, there are lots of people dressed weirdly, the girls are together, Hap is with them, Tom arrives and starts dancing with Alice. Then there are some cutaways full of people. In one, we did something funny. Our lawyer, John Sloss, is really tall, so we put him in the background of the shot – he’s clearly visible, he towers over everybody else. In the edit, for the music we used [the Sister Sledge song] ‘He’s the Greatest Dancer’, as a tribute to our lawyer. We had a lot of fun doing such things with the disco music.
From Whit Stillman : Not so long ago, Fireflies Press / FIDMarseille, coll. “One, Two, Many”, 2023.
