Coming Attractions

An Exclusive Look at Whit Stillman’s Amazon Pilot The Cosmopolitans

Even the most devoted fans of Whit Stillman may have been surprised to learn, earlier this week, that he’ll be back so soon. The director, who took 13 years between his previous two features, 1998’s The Last Days of Disco and 2011’s Damsels in Distress, has made his next project at relatively lightning speed; The Cosmopolitans, a half-hour pilot made for Amazon Studios, will be available online beginning August 28.

As you can see the exclusive teaser above, the title’s similarity to Stillman’s debut feature, Metropolitan, is no accident. “This has elements of all three of the first films,” he says, referring to his 1990 debut, 1994’s Barcelona and 1998’s The Last Days of Disco. “It’s very much like the fourth film, of those three.” Following a group of young expatriates living in Paris, and starring Last Days of Disco’s Chloë Sevigny and Damsels in Distress’s Adam Brody and Carrie MacLemore, The Cosmopolitans is populated by the same erudite, talkative young people who defined Stillman’s other movies. Even the title is a nod to the old-fashioned New York City club that his mother and Eleanor Roosevelt belonged to, the kind of place the kids of Metropolitan might have visited. But it’s also a TV pilot, and a potential series, presented by a company only beginning to dip its toe into original programming. How’d that happen?

“I had a lot of material set in Paris, and I would always think in terms of doing an independent film,” says Stillman, who lived in Paris for nine years after making The Last Days of Disco and was writing several projects during his 12-plus year break. “But you also have to make a living, and TV is what’s happening.”

Director Whit Stillman with Carrie MacLemore, Chloe Sevigny, Jordan Rountree and cast.

Courtesy of Amazon Studios

In fact, Stillman is no neophyte to either TV or Amazon Studios—he told us the latter optioned Metropolitan for a potential remake several years ago, and Stillman remains “hopeful” about two TV projects he pitched, one set at a magazine and the other following playboys and their lives in Manhattan. But Amazon Studios, like fellow digital TV upstart Netflix, operates quite differently from the traditional network model. “They really wanted this,” Stillman says. “They wanted me to do it and they wanted Paris. We were on the same wavelength.”

Perhaps unsurprisingly for a director who made the heroine of Damsels in Distress a young woman who wanted the world to be a gentler place, Stillman hasn’t paid much attention to the ongoing dark, violent Golden Age of television. “I try to watch shows that aren’t shocking. I don’t watch violence or sex, so it knocks out almost everything.” In the past, when he’s cited Everybody Loves Raymond and Desperate Housewives as shows he likes, he’s been correctly called out: “You only watch TV on airplanes.” But Stillman says that not watching much TV makes it that much easier to come up with his own world for The Cosmopolitans, or any other project: “We have to do our own show, and not think of other shows.” That even applies to his Cosmopolitans leading man, Adam Brody, whom he’d never seen on his breakout series, The O.C.

Stillman hasn’t abandoned filmmaking—he’s currently prepping for the Dublin shoot of an independent film based on a Jane Austen manuscript—but he sees his Amazon Studios experience as similar to the spirit that went into making Metropolitan, back in the earliest days of American independent films as we know them today. “To have things happen you really have to say, ‘We’re putting on a show. We’re doing this! It’s happening!’ That was sort of the Metropolitan spirit. That was the spirit of Castle Rock [the studio behind that backed Barcelona and The Last Days of Disco] in its heyday. It seems to be what Netflix does and seems to be what Amazon does.”

Beginning on August 28 Amazon Prime users will be able to watch The Cosmopolitans pilot and vote on whether it will be picked up for a full series. Should it be voted in, Stillman plans a short six-episode season for The Cosmopolitans, which he wrote “like putting two film scripts together.” And even if it doesn’t get picked up? “I’m very happy to have it as a pilot. I really feel that my IMDB page will look a little less pathetic.”