+ intro by Ruby McGuigan, BFI Programme Development Manager
Whit Stillman on ‘Barcelona’
Barcelona had its inception in 1983 – in Madrid. I was there playing the part of the obnoxious American director of a psychiatric clinic – Dr Mortimer Peabody – in Fernando (Belle Epoque) Trueba’s second film. As the least important person in the cast, my scenes were spread out through the schedule and I was left with a lot of time for script work.
For three years I had been working as the foreign sales agent for a group of Spanish producers and directors including Trueba and, while the sales agency was a bit of a disaster, its original agenda – getting me a job in the film business that might lead to making films – seemed to be panning out (a mere seven years later Metropolitan would be released).
Fernando Colomo, one of the directors I represented, had come to New York and, when his plans for a bigger film flopped, he recouped by making Skyline, an amusing low-budget comedy about his experiences as a Spaniard in New York (I played his agent; my wife, herself; and her sister, the Barcelona-girl love interest). As a frustrated filmmaker, I, of course, considered the film basically my idea.
In 1984 a new sales day job as a cartoonists’ agent tied me to New York. But I had already decided that only a story of Metropolitan’s narrow scope, filmable close to home, would be suited to my likely budget and total lack of experience.
When I took Barcelona up again it was June 1991 and we were living in the medieval old city of Barcelona across from the palace where Queen Isabel received Columbus on his return from the Americas and just above where, in the film, Ted and Montserrat stroll on the Night of San Juan, discussing trade unionism and the ‘AFL-CIA’.
I entered the world of Barcelona on Pearl Harbour Day, 1979, and have never left although I did not actually arrive in the geographical city for the first time until March, 1980. For me the key event was meeting my future wife – newly arrived from Barcelona – at a party in New York. Fortunately I had learned Spanish living with my Mexican cousins in the early 70s. For me it was love at first conversation. My first trip to Barcelona was to try to facilitate her return to New York, the second trip was to marry. Later there were stays for work, the births of our daughters, script writing and family unity. I have never had the experience of being in Barcelona as a traveller or detached observer.
In New York my wife and I had seen and enjoyed Taylor Hackford’s An Officer and a Gentleman. Although in Madrid there were long lines for it at a big Gran Via movie palace, we were surprised to learn that our Spanish film and journalism friends hated the film – not for the reason my video guide gives (‘a well-worn Hollywood formula script – with every plot point telegraphed ahead of time!’), but because it was facha, glorifying the military.
The first notion for the film was An Officer and a Gentleman – but two people: one an officer, the other a gentleman. These emissaries of American Imperialism – commercial and military – would get involved with two young Barcelona women who initially seem similar but are really heading in opposite directions.
Almost nothing in the final version of the script remains from the 1983 notes: just the idea of two couples, the Americans embarrassing themselves at a party and the sexual revolution time warp (the period was early Almodóvar: the sex and drugs wave of the ‘70s seemed still at its height in Spain, while in New York things had gone into reverse, at least among the people that I knew – Puritans from Mars for the young Spaniards.
It was while editing Metropolitan that I started re-considering Barcelona. I found myself losing interest in Metropolitan’s nominal protagonist, the male-ingenue ‘Tom’, and wanting to see more of the characters Taylor Nichols and Chris Eigeman played. I also liked the idea of a story with more ‘events’.
I had written Metropolitan under the conviction that life is essentially an eventless affair and to make a movie full of plot and incident would be a false and unauthentic repetition of genre movie cliches.
In the interval between the two scripts I changed my mind: life does have its melodramatic turns, and while melodramatic events might not seem especially interesting in themselves, they could provide another prism to examine the lives of the characters affected.
I ended up cutting back the plot, events, and melodrama to just those elements that I knew or felt through my own experience or the experience of others I know well. Aspects of the Barcelona and the Americans presented in the film might be untypical, selective, subjective – they inevitably are – but they are all, I believe, authentic.
Production notes
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Programme notes and credits compiled by Sight and Sound and the BFI Documentation Unit
Notes may be edited or abridged
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