On that afternoon, he was wearing a white button-down shirt, dark blue corduroy pants worn smooth at the knees, and a pair of new Blundstone boots, swag from this year's Sundance Film Festival. He was grateful for the largess, since he didn't receive a directing fee for "Love and Friendship."
As he explained it, he receives a fee only if a film is profitable. "No worries now," he said. "Love and Friendship" made the top 10 in its categ ory in the United States, the United Kingdom and the Netherlands over Memorial Day weekend, a first for him. With indie films, you get used to long periods without income, always hoping for pay dirt.
Mr. Stillman's contribution to Ms. Monnier's apartment was to suggest a multiplicity of doors when she renovated, he said, so that every passageway and room can be closed off, like those on a boat. "It's a new life, with doors," said Ms. Monnier of her roommate. Mr. Stillman added: "My flair factor is that I go to a cafe every morning to write. So I'm never here."
Ms. Monnier's contribution to his films has been editing the French subtitles of "Love and Friendship," an urgent role since an interpreter for "Damsels in Distress" rendered Adam Brody's character's name, Packenstacker, "as a really bad, kind of dirty joke instead of what is to American ears just a long and funny name," Mr. Stillman said.
His French is very correct, except for his accent, which makes him sound like Zorro, Ms. Monnier said. (He learned Spanish in Mexico during a semester off from Harvard and so he speaks French with a Mexican accent.)
Ms. Monnier and Mr. Stillman met 14 years ago at a party in a Parisian suburb, an event memorialized in "The Cosmopolitans," a pilot on Amazon in 2014 about a group of young American expats in Paris starring two Stillman regulars, Chloë Sevigny and Mr. Brody. (He's trying to write six more scripts now, he said, but has no idea if the series will continue.)
"I was taken there by my friend George, and we were lost, and we were late," Mr. Stillman said, recalling that evening. "Our driver was a ex-Mossad agent. George is one of those people who knows everyone. He's a Serbian preppy, which is very much like an American preppy. Anyway, when we arrived, there was this sort of bouquet of French femininity sitting in chairs on a terrace. Space is made for us, and we sit down between the lovely young women."
Ms. Monnier said: "I don't remember the other wome n. I thought I was alone."
Mr. Stillman smiled at her. "You could have been."
In "The Cosmopolitans," the young strivers confidently proclaim themselves "Parisian" to a deeply unimpressed American fashion journalist, played with exquisite disdain by Ms. Sevigny.
One young man is in an on-again-off-again relationship with a French divorcée named Clémence (a character inspired by Ms. Monnier). His friends gloat that he has "infiltrated French society at its most resistant."
To which Ms. Sevigny's character responds, incredulously, "You guys have girlfriends with names like Clémence?"
There's always a temptation to conflate Mr. Stillman's work with his biography. In "Metropolitan," the main character, Tom, is a child of divorce, with an absent father (thanks to a wicked stepmother), who pines for a young heartbreaker named Serena, who simultaneously wooed a number of boarding school boys with her prodigious letter writing, all of which Mr. Stillman experienced.
The other day, Ann Pyne, president of McMillen, Inc., the design firm, and the real-life model for Serena, said recently that while her character throws away all of Tom's letters, she saved Mr. Stillman's, and has them still, tied in ribbons in a cardboard box. They are romantic dispatches from another world, written in perfect cursive on letterpress stationa ry and filled with musings on agrarian socialism and Mr. Stillman's appreciation of Ms. Pyne's charms.
"Whit wasn't a very natural 15-year-old," she said. "He was playing a literary role and he had cast me into a literary role as well. As a grown up, I remember feeling flattered by my part in 'Metropolitan,' because, at 40, I wasn't worried about being a bitch. Whereas dreary? That was cause for worry.
"Mostly I remember weeping with excitement that Whit had gotten everything exactly right, which is not to say that he just took the biography and put it out there. As an artist, he liberated the material from its time and place."
On a recent Saturday night, Mr. Stillman and Ms. Monnier met Carol in Young, an American friend, gastronomic historian and culture writer, at Café Hugo on the Place des Vosges, after which they toured Victor Hugo's house. Noting the Parisian pretensions of the characters in "The Cosmopolitans," Ms. Young and Mr. Stillman said emphatically that Paris wasn't exactly home for them, but it was certainly home base.
"What confuses people about Whit is that his films are autobiographical, but they are also fiction," Ms. Young said later. "And that gets problematic sometimes. It's hard to separate the characters in the films from Whit himself. Part of what he loves about living here, I think, is that not many people know the films, so he doesn't have to play Whit Stillman. He can just be Whit Stillman."
Mr. Stillman, however, doesn't quite agree. "I'm not really sure I know what that means," he said. As an American in Paris, "I think I've enjoyed the isolation when I wasn't horribly lonely."
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