The Straight takes full responsibility for beginning with perhaps too frivolous a question. Is it daunting, we ask, to adapt Jane Austen for the screen in the wake of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies? Deploying the kind of wit you’d expect from a man whose film career began with 1990’s razor-sharp Metropolitan, Whit Stillman takes this as his cue to provide some frivolity of his own.

“Do you know the director of that film was in Last Days of Disco?” he begins, speaking from Toronto, and referring to his own 1998 release. “He was Van, the door Nazi at the disco. Burr Steers. He said he did it because he wanted to get into film, he wanted to see how it’s done, so he appeared in our film and then he ripped off our material with a film called Igby Goes Down.”

No shit!

“It could be your exclusive,” he says, adding that Disco actor Matt Ross also helmed Sundance favourite Captain Fantastic, while this year’s Cannes critics’ week ends with a short directed by Chloë Sevigny. Slender filmography aside (“I’d prefer to be personally slender and have a fat filmography, but unfortunately reality dictated the reverse”), it seems that a Whit Stillman set is an unusually fecund arena for young talent. How does he feel about that?

“Jealous and resentful. They should stick to acting and not horn in on my work.”

All this aside, the New York–based writer-director has returned, Sevigny in tow, with a rather delightful Jane Austen adaptation called Love & Friendship (opening Friday [May 27]). Adjusting for snark, how does it really feel to bring Austen to an audience more attuned these days to mutant superheroes than 18th-century literary irony?

“I can assume our audience is pretty copacetic,” answers the 64-year-old filmmaker. “Because I assume the audience has aged along with me. It’s baby-boomer imperialism. Wherever we are in the generational cycle is, like, the dominant place. So young audiences have disappeared from cinema except for a couple of tent poles a year, but for the average Friday release it’s better to have an older-skewing film than a younger-skewing film.”

Whoever you are and whatever your age, and despite the puzzling absence of any CG effects work, a good time is guaranteed with Love & Friendship. Stillman’s light touch with the material—actually taken from an unpublished novella—provides fertile space for a slew of great performances, particularly from another Disco alumna, Kate Beckinsale, who feasts on her lead role as the exquisitely bitchy and calculating Lady Susan Vernon. (“Oh, yes, top-drawer bitchiness in our film,” Stillman remarks with a chuckle.)

“I dunno how actors do what they do” is the filmmaker’s admiring appraisal of Ms. Beckinsale’s performance, which, to be fair, depends rather heavily on his pristine screenplay. While he notes that “I like very much what Emma Thompson and Ang Lee did with Sense and Sensibility,” Stillman is hard-pressed to come up with any antecedents or influences on his own work.

“I wasn’t really thinking about cinema much when I was growing up,” he says. “I was thinking about how I was not F. Scott Fitzgerald and I was not Tolstoy.” Fair enough. And is he satisfied, these days, with being Whit Stillman?

“Yeah, if I can keep on being Whit Stillman,” he answers. The odds seem good that he will.