Good news: Whit Stillman finished the script for his next film yesterday -- only eight years after The Last Days of Disco was released. The Jamaican setting represents a real change for the director of Metropolitan and Barcelona. And he's got other ambitions: to write and direct a movie about the Revolutionary War. The hyperliterate Stillman (who once said his five favorite books are Pope's Essay on Man, Tolstoy's Childhood, Boyhood, Youth, S N Behrman's book about Max Beerbohm and an edition of previously uncollected stories by F Scott Fitzgerald) isn't interested in a Hugh Hudson-Al Pacino schlockadrama:

"An inspiration was an interesting remark from one of our generals, Nathaniel Greene. As it was defined then, it was a civil war between Whigs and Tories. They [Greene's side, the revolutionaries] were the Whig army, and they were fighting the Tories. It was reflected by the politics of Britain: Edmund Burke and others were articulating the Whig cause. Greene said that by the end of the war it was an American army with British soldiers fighting a British army with American soldiers. There had been so much side-switching, and sociological internecine warfare. This could be really fascinating."

Oh, and if you haven't seen Metropolitan (1990), you should.