A Quote by Whit Stillman

I'm not sure what my material would have been if I'd have started earlier. I probably would have started with 'Damsels in Distress' kinds of films because that's the kind of comedy I was writing in college. So I didn't really have any life experience to work off of.
I started young in my profession, in my second year of college. I had to make a career choice. College life is the best time when you can hang around and do all kinds of crazy stuff. Everything clicked so well that the films started coming in bunches.
There has to be some more regulation. But our kids have this incredible buffet of they can work in genomics, they can work in pre-omics, or they can work in robotics, or they can work in this, or they can work in that. And within the next five years there will be entirely new industries that come out of nowhere that kids are working in that would have been inconceivable when they started college. Not when we started college.
When I left university I was sure that I was going to be a painter. Then I had a crisis, a revelation. I saw Dolce Vita and my mind was blown by it, by the synthesis. I realised I wanted to be a filmmaker and started making films. I was writing screenplays and couldn't get money because my work was so uncommercial. I got married and started writing fiction. What was wonderful is that it gave me my freedom because no-one can tell me I can't work. Novels have become equally important to me as films. I consider myself a storyteller and passionately engaged in both of those disciplines.
I had promised myself when I first got started that if I got to the point my life where I started feeling 'Gee, I'd rather be at home than at work', and that started happening more often than not, that it would be time to leave. I'd wake up some days and go "Oh, I don't even know if I want to go face this anymore". I would, I would go do it, I'm a dutiful kind of person and not afraid of work.
I would have started writing a lot earlier if I hadn't been [Arthur Miller's daughter].
We have a show very early on called 'Slap Bang' on a Saturday night and it didn't work. It started off peak time and started getting earlier and earlier in the schedule. I think that that taught us you have to adapt.
For sure I think that at the end of the day if I got started a little sooner on stuff that was more written more permanent I would have just made a lot of mistakes earlier. I don't know if it would have led to earlier success but I think it would have led to thicker skin and it would have gotten the ball rolling.
I have to say that my background in comedy, of performing live, has been such a great foundation for what we do now on camera. I really value having that kind of experience. Because when you're doing comedy shows you're writing your own material and trying it out on people and you know people find funny and don't.
See you tomorrow,” he said, instead. “All right.” Then, impulsively, I asked, “Do you have a place to sleep tonight?” “Sure,” he said with a smile, and started off as if he had somewhere to be. I could have bitten off my tongue because I pushed him into a lie. Once he started lying to me, it would be harder to get him to trust me with the truth. I don’t know why it works that way, but it does—at least in my experience.
That's how it all started, when I met my wife. My music career, even though I started when I was 16, it never really started till I was like 30, when I started singing and writing my own songs, and that's when it really took off. But prior to that, I was just doing a bunch of covers.
I'm not really sure if I have anything that inspires me. I think what goes into my work is everything beforehand that I do with my dad. He teaches me acting, and I think maybe without him it would be pretty hard. I started acting for fun, really, because my dad's an actor and my sister's an actor, so I started doing it and it was normal. But it got places really fast, and I started doing feature film auditions and stuff.
I started off on stage because it was the only work I could get. I haven't been back for 11 years. I think any stage experience is good experience, as far as being an actor is concerned.
So far, yes, I have been doing only commercial films because those are the kind of films that came my way. Those are the kind of films that I liked, but definitely I'm open to doing other kinds of cinema as well, and if something comes along - if I like a character - then I would definitely do something off-beat or edgy.
And writing comedy and it really taught me how to kind of like craft jokes, it sounds like weird but really focus on crafting jokes and trying to make the writing really sharp. At the same time I did improv comedy in college, and that helped with understanding the performance aspect of comedy, you know, because it's different when you improv something vs. when you write it and they're both kind of part of my process now.
I started writing when I was around 6. I say 'writing,' but it was really just making up stuff! I started writing and doing my own thing. I didn't really know what a demo was or anything like that, so I started getting interested in studio gear and started learning about one instrument at a time. My first instrument was an accordion.
The short version is that I started an internet diary a long, long time ago (six years!) because I was bored with my job. I figured I would write a few funny things a few times a week until I had enough material to do stand-up. After two or three weeks, I emailed it to some friends. They emailed it to other friends, and more people started reading. Eventually, I realized that stand-up was scary and it would be much easier to just keep writing this stuff at work.
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