Tag Archives: Kubrick

The New Yorker: Whit Stillman’s ‘The Cosmopolitans’ + Kubrick’s Love of Stillman’s Dialogue

Richard Brody at The New Yorker writes another excellent article regarding Whit Stillman.  This time focusing on his new pilot, The Cosmopolitans.

This suspense is at the heart of Stillman’s drama; it’s how he gives a theatrical kick to situations that are spare on action. He equips his characters with expository dialogue that’s so smart and sharp that it, too, seems like a sort of action—thought in action. But then he sets those characters in motion and puts them to the test. He also puts their identities to the test, with the comedy and the drama of self-definition and self-creation (this comes to the fore especially in “Damsels in Distress”). In effect, for Stillman, exposition is a matter of form; the deft interweaving, from the very start of “The Cosmopolitans,” of disparate situations arises from a sense that labelling, whether through self-identification or the identification of others, is itself an act of high drama.

Brody brings up something that Stanely Kubrkick noted in Whit Stillman’s Barcelona.  Excerpt taken from a previous article I published on the site:

Nicole Kidman had also told Stillman that Kubrick talked about the film all the time and that he said he liked the technique of dialogue advancing the story.

Kubrick was known to have loved Whit Stillman’s Barcelona.