With Love & Friendship, Whit Stillman, the director of Metropolitan, The Last Days of Disco, and other contemporary (or near contemporary) tales of America’s so-called urban haute bourgeoisie, steps back 200 years, crosses the Atlantic, and takes on a formidable collaborator: Jane Austen. The movie is based on a posthumously published, little-read Austen work called Lady Susan, whose heroine, played by Kate Beckinsale, is a Georgian-era mantrap—intelligent, irresistible, and entirely unencumbered by scruples. (In a Last Days of Disco mini-reunion, Chloë Sevigny plays Lady Susan’s conniving American sidekick, Alicia Johnson.) On the eve of the film’s January 23 premiere at Sundance, Stillman—who also has a deal with Little, Brown for a tie-in novel, due out in August—chatted with V.F. about his undying ardor for all things Austen and how Love & Friendship, gearing up for a spring 2016 release, finds fresh comedy amid the corsets and carriages.

__Vanity Fair: In Metropolitan, there’s an exchange between Audrey and Tom in which she says, “What Jane Austen novels have you read?” And he answers, “None.” I’m guessing you’re with Audrey on that one. __

Whit Stillman: Well, I’m sort of with both of them, because I do have the habit of not reading things and of talking about things I haven’t read. I actually was wrong-footed with Jane Austen. In college, I made the mistake of reading her too early, with the wrong book. So I started, sophomore year, with Northanger Abbey. And I didn’t like it at all. I didn’t get it. And I would loudly tell people that she was overrated and bad for a long time. Until, after college, my sister said, “You better read Pride and Prejudice.” I did, and it changed me.

Did you become an Austen devotee?

Absolutely. I mean, I read tons of Jane Austen. I read a lot of the biographies and the later books. I find it fascinating. The first thing I fell for was 18th-century British literature, Dr. Johnson and Alexander Pope. And she’s very much a Johnsonian. So if you sort of want Samuel Johnson in fiction, it’s Jane Austen.

We’re all recovering English majors at heart, aren’t we?

I was actually a history major playing hooky in the English department.

Would you say that, in your career, you’ve been inspired as much by great novelists as by great filmmakers?

By Jemal Countess/Getty Images.

Well, yeah. There are three fiction writers who were really important for the films—Fitzgerald, Austen, and Salinger. And I think it was kind of a gift that Salinger wouldn’t let his books be adapted, because we sort of had to do our own Salinger films without using his stories.

With each of the pictures you’ve done, do you find yourself going back and looking at certain favorite books by these writers?

Well, it did help me a lot. I remember dipping into Austen while I was writing the Metropolitan script. I was reading her sort of as a palate cleanser while I was trying to write. I tend to like authors where you read a paragraph and you like it so much you sort of think about it—so I don’t progress too far in terms of page-turning plot.

That brings up a question. You’re a master of dialogue and don’t need any help in that area. But with Love & Friendship, because there was source material, you must have ended up leaning on Austen for dialogue. How did that work out?