Stillman, Whit, 1952-

Whit Stillman is an American writer and film director, whose comic films wittily dramatize the predicaments of individuals navigating what one of his characters jokingly refers to as the “Urban Haute Bourgeoisie.” Hearkening back to Hollywood’s golden age of screwball comedies, and further back to novels of manners written by Jane Austen and Henry James, Stillman’s films have been celebrated by the critic Nick Pinkerton as “the infectiously enthusiastic works of a connoisseur of the sport of intellectual jousting.”

Stillman was born in 1952, in Washington, D.C., to socialite parents who moved in political circles. (His father, John Sterling Stillman, served in the Commerce Department of the John F. Kennedy presidential administration.) Raised primarily in Cornwell, New York, Stillman attended a series of preparatory schools before enrolling at Harvard, where he studied history and wrote for The Harvard Crimson. After graduating, Stillman worked as an editorial assistant at Doubleday in New York—an experience drawn upon in his film The Last Days of Disco (1998)—and published journalistic writing. His entrance to the film business came during his time in Madrid in the early 1980s, where he acted as an American sales agent—and sometimes actor—for films directed by Fernando Trueba (Sal Gorda) and Fernando Colomo (Skyline).

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