Reaching a crossroads in his life after completing his trilogy of serious comedies dealing with the aspirations, fears and romantic entanglements of young Americans, the US writer-director, Whit Stillman, knew exactly which direction he wanted to take. Six weeks ago he moved to Paris with his Spanish wife and their two young children.
"It's a new page, a new chapter," he says. "I haven't been in New York for a long time and I always wanted to live in Paris. The time has come, and it's a good time to do it, during a lull and at the start of new projects. I went without any illusions. I didn't want to buy into the typical Paris mania of many Americans. What a civilised city it is!"
This week Whit Stillman was back in Ireland, visiting two of his other favourite cities, Dublin and Cork. Following the enthusiastic reception for his first film, Metropolitan, when he accompanied it to the Dublin Film Festival in 1991, he has made a point of returning to Ireland with each film he makes, travelling to the Cork Film Festival with his second movie, Barcelona, in 1994 and going back there last Tuesday night for the Irish premiere of his latest picture, The Last Days of Disco.
"The audience was wonderful last night," he said, still elated on Wednesday afternoon. "It was packed to capacity and they picked up on everything in the movie." He is bemused that, like Woody Allen, his movies are regularly better received in Europe than in certain parts of the US.
"There are huge pockets of support for my films in America - in New York, Boston, Chicago and Seattle - and in Canada, in Toronto and Vancouver. But southern California has always been a tough territory for us. Oddly enough, Texas has been very good for us - we've had great reactions in Houston. But they have a culture of humour there, like in Ireland."
The humour which pervades the cinema of Whit Stillman is smart, literate and idiosyncratic, as illustrated to sharply witty effect in his new film when characters get into a heated debate about the morality of The Lady and the Tramp.
"There are so many roots going into that sequence," he says. "I've had strong feelings about that film for a very long time - all that stuff about the lady and the tramp and how opposites attract, and that very Hollywood thing where they live happily ever after. Opposites do attract, but it doesn't always turn out too well over time. I've noticed it in some friends who, when they reached their 40s, broke up with the opposite they were attracted to."
The nature of attraction is a theme pivotal to The Last Days of Disco, which is set in Manhattan in the early 1980s as a disparate assortment of recent graduates find themselves uncomfortably cut adrift after the comparative cosiness of their college years. They include the impressionable Alice (Chloe Sevigny) and the sly Charlotte (Kate Beckinsale) who find work in the same publishing firm and share an apartment together, and the men they meet at their favourite nightclub: a good-natured advertising executive (Mackenzie Astin), an emotionally insecure assistant district attorney (Matt Keeslar), a two-timing lawyer (Robert Sean Leonard), and a nightclub staffer (Chris Eigeman) who fakes being gay whenever he feels like breaking up with a woman.
"I pine for nightlife," says Stillman, recalling his own disco nights. "I got a whiff of it at the end of the Sixties. I remember my first trip to Europe in June 1968, just after the Paris riots, and going to discos there and in Milan. It was a great group social period - before the wasteland of the druggy, solitary Seventies. Then disco came to America."
Whit Stillman was born in Washington DC, where his father was administrative aide to Democratic congressman Franklin D. Roosevelt, jnr, and grew up in Cornwall, New York, where his father worked as a lawyer. After graduating from Harvard, Whit worked as a trainee at the publishing house, Doubleday, from 1974 to 1978. When the disco boom hit Manhattan, he was working as managing editor of Access, a nightly news summary which he generally put to bed in the early hours of the morning. Some nights he went from work to clubbing.
One Harvard friend, who was in the retinue of Prince Egon von Furstenberg, helped get Stillman into one of the city's more exclusive night clubs. "I remember thinking, `This is fantastic, I've got to come here every night', but I didn't," he says.
Among the cameo players in The Last Days of Disco is the New York-based British journalist and New York nightlife historian, Anthony Haden-Guest, whose book, The Last Party, was favourably reviewed by Whit Stillman in Vogue. "It was very entertaining," says Stillman, "but by definition such racy accounts are collections of the most interesting, colourful, outre stories possible.
"To some stories there were about three witnesses. The other 5,000 people there the same night saw nothing. Similarly, the published photos tend to show gold and silver people, Nubian guards and exotics - as in the background in the movie - but most of the photographic coverage shows a lot of quite normal types dancing in a club."
The nightclub at the centre of Stillman's film is never mentioned by name and is based on aspects of different clubs. "Some prosaic licence was taken, but overall our club was, if anything, a little heightened from what I remember. Seeing cafe types dancing to Disco Duck at El Morocco in the late Seventies is not the sort of thing you easily forget.
"Anthony Haden-Guest says the film is exactly as it was back then. Those heterosexual girls who just went nuts for disco, and the married ones who would shed their husbands if they wouldn't come with them. As much fun as it was to talk about the period, the film is really about these young people coming into Manhattan after university and finding their identities, their lives."
Nevertheless, Stillman captures the period detail with admirable flair, and crucially for a film with a nightclub setting, he gets the music precisely right in a joyous soundtrack featuring more than two dozen well-selected disco tracks of the time. The hits just keep on coming: Let's All Chant, Love Train, I Love the Nightlife, Heart of Glass, Got To Be Real, Le Freak, Good Times, More, More, More . . .
"I got nearly every song I wanted for the film," he says. "We had used Diana Ross's Upside Down in Barcelona, but it was left out and then we couldn't get it for this film. Anyway, we decided we were sick of it. There was a lot of music we liked but felt it was best to avoid, like anything from the great but very overposed Saturday Night Fever, though Disco Inferno was a big temptation, and any music I had used in Barcelona, such as Silver Convention and the great Boogie Oogie Oogie."
To Stillman's surprise he has been commissioned by a publishing house to write a novel based on his screenplay for The Last Days of Disco - a real novel and not one of those "novelisations" of original screenplays rushed out to tie in with a movie's release. "This won't come out until long after the film is released," he says. "It's my one chance of doing a novel and putting everything in."
After completing Barcelona four years ago he planned to make something completely different, what he calls "my funny swashbuckler", a historical adventure film set in the 18th century, before becoming wholly distracted by completing his trilogy with The Last Days of Disco.
Coincidentally, given that he has now moved to Paris, he has been asked by one US studio to make a film about Americans in Paris and Venice in the 1950s. "You know, that Paris Review crowd," he says. "But I'm not sure that will happen.
"Whatever I do next, I want to make something very different from my first three films. Using Jamaican music over the taxi scene in Disco got me interested in listening to ska and reading all the liner notes, so I might do something based on the beginnings of Jamaican music. And I hope the funny swashbuckler will happen some day. Maybe I'll make it in Ireland."
The Last Days of Disco went on release at selected Irish cinemas yesterday