With his films Metropolitan (1990), Barcelona (1994), The Last Days of Disco (1998), and Damsels in Distress (2012), writer/director Whit Stillman reigns as the auteur of elite urbanites. Now, he adds to his oeuvre with his first TV series, The Cosmopolitans. Despite a migration from the circles of Upper East Side socialites and preppy collegiates to those of fashionable expats in Paris, the comedy is classic Stillman: Commentary equally sharp and sardonic, and characters who wear their hearts less on their sleeves than in their substantial vocabularies. The director speaks to T&C about his new venture—or rather, by his own assessment, the next entry in his canon of the urban haute bourgeoisie.

What prompted your move to the small screen?
I'd been interested in trying to do something in television for more than a decade. The Last Days of Disco had a better reputation among TV people than film people. I think they saw it and thought, "this could be a series."  I actually had a TV deal back then, around 1999, 2000. But the landscape has changed so much. Now, the energy is more independent— more like how it was in film at Castle Rock Entertainment [which produced Barcelona and The Last Days of Disco] with Martin Shafer, Rob Reiner, and all the people I was working with in those days.

Why did you choose Paris?
Amazon Studios had actually optioned the remake rights to Metropolitan when they were starting up. We had kept in touch, and then last July they approached me about doing a Paris story. And I thought, great! I already had so much material set in Paris. I wrote an hour-long script for the pilot, but when I re-read it, I didn't think the second half was working. They said, "Great, we'll make it a half hour," which is what they preferred anyway. It's a six-episode series now, and there could potentially be six more half hours in the first season if it gets picked up.

How did you go about casting?
Adam Brody was the basis for the show, in a sense. He was considered for both Jimmy, the main character, and Hal [a supporting character]. Ultimately, he was a better fit for Jimmy, but we had a very difficult time finding a Hal. I'd heard great things about an actor, Jordan Rountree, in Paris, but we were only casting the European parts there and he was clearly very American. But when we found ourselves with no Hal, we said,  "Remember that guy everyone loved?" And Jordan—who looks and sounds very Yank but was born and bred in Paris—became our Hal. In an early scene Jordan thought he should make his French sound like someone new to the city—i.e. bad. But we figured it worked, because there would be one person in that crowd who spoke good French.

In addition to Adam, you had also worked with actresses Chloe Sevigny and Carrie MacLemore.
We knew we wanted Chloe to be a part of it, but we weren't sure if she'd be available because of her series [Those Who Kill, which was transferred from A&E to LMN earlier this year]. And we wanted Carrie for the role of Aubrey, but when we were discussing casting she was very pregnant. Luckily, the timing ended up working out in both cases.

In the pilot, there's almost no mention of jobs—it's almost as if the characters are professional expats. Was that deliberate?
More of that will come out as the series goes on, but it's also not something people focus on so much in Paris. It's a contrast from here in the U.S., where it's the first thing people ask about. In fact, in Paris it's almost considered bad form to talk too much about what you do for a living.

The pilot's soundtrack is full of Motown, from the opening song (Joan Osborne's cover of Jimmy Ruffin's "What Becomes of the Brokenhearted") to the end credits (Jackie Wilson's "To Be Loved"). How did that come about?
The character of Hal was envisioned as a music executive involved with licensing a music catalog like Motown's, so it was in the mix early. And I also just felt that it fit Paris so well, in its own way. There's a real love for that music there. Joan Osborne had done a wonderful live version of "What Becomes of the Brokenhearted" for the Funk Brothers documentary Standing in the Shadow of Motown. It was perfect for us, but it's not available except as a YouTube video of the live performance. While Joan was in New York on tour she recorded it for us in both in the original English and a new French version—the title version in the pilot has lines in both languages. Ideally, we'd love to make both English and French versions available for download.
 
What are your thoughts on the society scene in New York City today, versus when you first started making films?
My experience of the Metropolitan milieu was very different from what you saw in the film. My experience was in the '70s—a really crazy time. It was just after Woodstock and within a few months everyone in that world was long-haired and probably druggy. The idea of Metropolitan was to make something that was not specific to any period, but would cover whatever period you wanted to think it was happening in. In college, we assumed that F. Scott Fitzgerald's world of the '20s would be all gone by the time we had kids, and that if we wanted our kids to have a debutante party we'd have to pick it up again ourselves. But that world came back in the '80s, and now that I'm of the older generation, I get invited to friend's parties and I've seen that it's still going on.

Do you think that what it means to be preppy has changed?
I think that being preppy is more of a general thing, less specified; maybe there are less hard-core preppies running around in tassel loafers and Gucci shoes, or maybe there are more cheapskate preppies like me with Bass Weejuns. Preppy as some people describe it isn't really true; I don't think it's necessarily about wealth or rich people. It seems the whole scene has always been about assimilation. The people who were in my group in debutante parties weren't really deb party types. They were all kinds of crazy people who just liked going to parties and being in old-fashioned social contexts.

Where does The Cosmopolitans sit in relation to the rest of your work?
I felt we faced some heavy weather with Damsels in Distress in the United States. It went over better in Britain and especially France. I really like it—it's probably my favorite—but it's different than the other three, and people were critical of it because it veers rather sharply from realism. It was quite stylized and very silly, which I like; I hope to make more silly, stylized films in the future. But The Cosmopolitans is very much going back to the style of the first three films—it's kind of a continuation: MetropolitanBarcelonaThe Last Days of Disco, and now, The Cosmopolitans.

The Cosmopolitans premieres on amazon.com today. Stillman's next film, the Jane Austen adaptation Love and Friendship, is scheduled to begin production in Dublin this fall with stars Sienna Miller and Chloe Sevigny.