How to Adapt Jane Austen for 2016 with Love and Friendship's Whit Stillman

One wrote novels that explored the loves and lives of well-to-do Britons during the 18th century. The other makes films that provide sharp, humorous looks at specific, highly interconnected sections of society. And yet, while Whit Stillman took inspiration from Jane Austen's Mansfield Park for his 1990 debut feature Metropolitan — which the filmmaker himself notes is considered "a stealth adaptation" by some Austen fans — it has taken him 26 years and five features to craft an official screen version of one of the author's works.

Based on Austen's unfinished epistolary novella Lady Susan, the end result is Love & Friendship, a comedy of manners, match-making and possible marriages. Kate Beckinsale plays the recently widowed Lady Susan Vernon, who won't let rumours about her romantic entanglements get in the way of securing her next husband — or finding a suitable paramour for her teenage daughter, Frederica (Morfydd Clark). When she's not trying to win the affections of the young and handsome Reginald DeCourcy (Xavier Samuel) and setting up Frederica with the buffoonish Sir James Martin (Tom Bennett), she's confiding her schemes to her close friend Alicia (Chloë Sevigny).

A sparkling satire of societal expectations ensues — and from the witty banter between characters to the light yet insightful way the story unravels, Love & Friendship feels like the film Stillman was destined to make. In the lead up to the movie's Australian release, we spoke with the writer/director about taking the time to see the project come to fruition, balancing his own sensibilities with the source material, and reuniting with after Beckinsale and Sevigny after his 1998 effort The Last Days of Disco.

ON ADAPTING JANE AUSTEN

"I happened upon the material, the story of Lady Susan Vernon — which her nephew, when he published it a century after her death, gave it the title Lady Susan, which is not Jane Austen's title. I thought it was really funny and different. And I had sort of not entirely admired all the Jane Austen adaptations because a lot of them lost the humour and her true perspective, and so I thought this is a way of having something very funny and very entertaining — a sort of pre-Oscar Wilde sort of comedy by Jane Austen and in her world. It intrigued me.

"I wanted to take my time on it, and work on it when I didn't have paying jobs and could just do it at my own pace, just exactly as slow as it needed to be done. This kind of thing is like cooking — when you have a thing that is going to take a lot of time, it is going to take 12 hours of simmering something down. And so I knew that this was the 12 years of simmering something down. Well, maybe not that many years. But I knew it would take an amount of time."

ON TACKLING A LESSER-KNOWN AUSTEN STORY

"It was hugely liberating. Hugely liberating. A real benefit. But I also noticed that the film adaptations I liked best were often of non-masterpieces. So flawed novels sometimes make really, really good adaptations. And I was hopeful that this would fall into that category where there's enough things to be done to give the people working on the film a canvas to work on. What's really challenging and frustrating is to take a masterpiece and reduce it to a film, because it is an issue of reduction."

ON CHANGING THE TITLE FROM LADY SUSAN TO LOVE & FRIENDSHIP

"For me, it was a big thing. It was the first decision I made. I wouldn't have done the film as Lady Susan — it was the first thing I thought of. I hated the title Lady Susan, it wasn't Jane Austen's title. And I know that these character name titles don't work in most translation territories.

"I really think that Love & Friendship is a wonderful Jane Austen title that she thought of herself, and she wasted it on a story I don't take seriously at all. There was a good title on an unimportant story, so let's put the good title on the good novella."

ON BALANCING AUSTEN'S TRADEMARKS WITH STILLMAN'S OWN STYLE

"Everything is tricky. Everything is a balancing act to the very end. When we were putting in the sound, at the very end, the laughter in the dancing scene, it's like, 'Do we have too much of James Martin laughing? Are we making this too broad, too ridiculous?' And we actually dialled that back. And so, yeah there's always this balance. I had been so immersed in this novel for so long, so immersed in the period — it's a lifelong interest — that it sort of felt that we could handle that and do that balancing."

ON CASTING AUSTRALIAN ACTOR XAVIER SAMUEL

"Woody Allen and other directors have talked about this — it is almost impossible to find good romantic leading men and this sort of classic mould, and Xavier was a godsend when we found him.

"We almost lost him to a competing Australian film — his agent wanted him to take this higher-paying job in Australia. And, my gosh, I was so upset at the possibility of losing him that I told him that I didn't want to make the film if he wouldn't be in it. He is really important for the film."

ON REUNITING KATE BECKINSALE AND CHLOË SEVIGNY AFTER THE LAST DAYS OF DISCO

"That was really inadvertent. Chloë was actually in the film before Kate Beckinsale. I started so far back that I was actually in touch with Elizabeth Hurley, I think, about this when I first started thinking of it. Kate was far too young then, she was still in her twenties. But I always thought it was a lovely idea for Kate Beckinsale, but at the very start she was too young. And then, I think Sienna Miller was attached to the film as Lady Susan for a while. And then the clouds parted, the sun came out, and we were able to get Kate to play the part — and it is the part for which she was destined, and she was actually wonderful in it, and she was great to work with."

Love & Friendship opens in Australian cinemas on July 21.