His Growing Pains Are His Movie Now : Film: Whit Stillman’s ‘Metropolitan’ looks at the lives of young New York socialites. It’s his life, too.

For the first few days of filming his movie, “Metropolitan,” freshman writer-director Whit Stillman clutched his security blanket, a copy of a book called “How to Direct a Movie.”

Maybe Stillman was uncomfortable with the logistics of directing, but he was right at home with the scene he set: lush Manhattan apartments filled with elegantly dressed young debs and their dates gabbing intensely about love and life at “after-parties.” The independent romantic comedy, opening today, about the growing pains of a gang of young New York socialites was right out of Stillman’s own experience with that crowd in New York circa 1970.

The 38-year-old Stillman spent many a tuxedoed night with the billowy dresses and white gloves and velvety furniture talking about sociology, literature, sex and romance. “So the subject for the film just sort of fell into my lap,” said the Harvard graduate whose film career followed years of dabbling in book publishing, journalism and film distribution. “I tried writing about that world in college, trying to be F. Scott Fitzgerald. It never worked. I was too close to the material.”

With time and distance, he was ready to approach it. “For 10 years I was totally estranged and not involved in that scene, so I could go back to it with this distance and humorous take on it, and it really worked.”

“Metropolitan” first grabbed the attention of critics at the U.S. Film Festival in Park City, Utah, last winter, then at the New York New Films/New Directors series and the Directors Fortnight at the Cannes Film Festival.

Yet, Stillman is overwhelmed that it’s really happening to him.

“Can you believe this? I’m in the director’s suite,” he said, looking out French doors to the sun-splashed Hollywood Hills from his room at the Ma Maison Sofitel, where he was staying during a recent promotional stop. At Cannes, he stayed in a hotel he described dryly as “very normal, less than normal, sort of awful.” At the time, he was counting every penny for a film that he says came in for less than $1 million.

In his preppy blue blazer, white shirt and pants, and Kelly green tie, Stillman looks ready for the yacht club. He looks like a grown-up version of the characters in his movie, which he said became a breeze to direct. “After a while I felt like a duck in water directing--it was just what I wanted to do. It was a incredible sense of exhilaration.”

Despite the distance in years from his nights dancing by the fountain at the Plaza Hotel, his vision of the film was clear. “I felt really close to it,” he said. “I wanted to tell a story about the past. I wanted to sort of treat it ironically and make fun of the obsessions of those years.”

For Stillman, those obsessions included being lost in the world of Fitzgerald novels, the sociological theories of Charles Fourier and daydreams of one charming New York socialite girl.

“It’s amazing how you fool yourself when you have a crush,” he said. “I practically never saw her, but I convinced myself that she was my girlfriend.”

Stillman explained that this girl was his entree into the world of the young socialites. “Getting to know that world better was a way to get to know her better.”

Although his family took part in the socialite scene, “they were hostile to it at the same time.” His father was a lawyer with the Kennedy Administration.

In “Metropolitan,” the character Tom is smitten just as Stillman says he was. And like Stillman, he could play both sides when it came to the deb set. A socialist thinker with one tuxedo to his name, one thin raincoat and a divorced set of parents, he was at once an outsider and an insider.

Stillman spread himself around in the film, he said other characters in the so-called “Sally Fowler Rat Pack” were parts of him: Audrey, the naive Jane Austen-loving heroine; Nick, the aggressive fast talker, and Charlie, who is stuck on the doomed condition of his social class.

When you meet Stillman, it’s hard not to hear his characters when he talks. His speech is fast, ideas pop out suddenly and the satirical wit from his Harvard Hasty Pudding days is thrown in. “ ‘There’s a lot of Whit up there,’ my friends say when they see it.”

As Carolyn Farina, a first-time feature actress who plays Audrey, put it, “He knew those characters back and forth; he definitely knew what he wanted from us.”

The cast was made up of unknowns, because Stillman could not afford established stars. “I was looking for happy campers, because we were going to be camping out.”

Stillman was a well-groomed camper in the blazer and fedora he often wore to the filming. “We were in these very fancy places, and I thought it was a good idea not to look too filmic.”

Although for a long time, filmic was exactly what Stillman wanted to be: “But I didn’t have the guts.”

Instead, he went through a mini-identity crisis. He could not find his true vocational calling. He even took an aptitude test that said he should be an architect, but after devouring architecture books, he decided it was not for him.

His ideas about failure are woven through his film. Stillman invented a word in the film for the group plagued by the sense of doom he shares--UHB--which stands for Urban Haute Bourgeoisie.

What’s an UHBie? Not a preppy or a WASP but a member of a group that because of its social status has no where to go but down. The original tag line of “Metropolitan” was “Doomed. Bourgeois. In Love.” Because he thought it was too depressing for a comedy, Stillman changed it to “A story of the downwardly mobile.” He hopes the term UHB will start a craze. “It seems to me a perfect term to describe that condition.”

“There are a lot of illusions and attitude problems when talking about people in the UHB background.” He had firsthand experience: “Before I made a film I wasn’t a terrible failure, but I was succeeding OK at something I had no identification with at all.”

He eventually became involved in the film business as a sales agent for Spanish films. In that role, he went to Cannes annually for several years.

One Cannes night in 1985 at a cheap restaurant, the urge to write his own film finally became compelling. He started scribbling away.

Stillman went through a four-year process of writing the film late at night. While writing, it never seemed real. “You sort of feel you’re in a dreamland.”

He made it real by approaching some of his friends, “who had some spare change they could afford to lose on a friend’s film.”

Will people not from the background understand the New York-centric milieu and get the jokes? “I think people will enjoy the fact that the film has texture. They will sense that there is a joke there, even if they don’t get it.”

As he awaits the film’s opening, Stillman the doomsayer is wary that things are going too well. But he worries about the fate of his next script, the story of two American men who become involved in the youth culture in Spain.

“I am comfortable with everyday anxiety. I was happy in my failure,” he said.