 Welcome, Devani. Welcome to Arizona State University. Welcome, Whit. Here we are. Hey, to be welcomed by you is the greatest treat. But we should be the ones welcoming you, of course. So Metropolitan, your first film. Yes. The Academy Award nomination for the screenplay. I know lots of people who continue to talk regularly about the Lionel Trilling, Mansfield Park essay, the way that Mansfield Park seems to inspire that film. I even, I read one review recently that says Jane Austen is almost a character in Metropolitan. How would you, how did your character respond to that? Well, it was a big help. This is the first screenplay. I had no idea whether I'd get to the end of it when I was writing it. I had no idea if it would work at all. I was very scared of the whole process and whether I'd have enough, you know, useful material. And one thing that's very important in dialogue comedy is you have things to talk about that there are other people who know what you're talking about. And in the film Last Days of Disco, we took Disney films. So they debate about Lady and the Tramp, Bambi, Uncle Scrooge. All over the world, people recognize these things. In Love and Friendship, they talk a lot about the Bible, Bible characters, the commandments, things like that. And in Metropolitan, there's a debate about a Lionel Trilling essay about Jane Austen's Mansfield Park. So there's a focus on Mansfield Park in Jane Austen. And it is not an adaptation of Mansfield Park. I don't think you can say it's inspired by Mansfield Park, but I think there's sort of three props from Mansfield Park helping the story. So there is this debate about the point of view of this very sort of non-fiction sensibility of the guy, the sort of socialist Tom Townsend who doesn't read fiction. He only reads the criticism. And then Audrey Rouget who loves the books and really appreciates the books and reads them and knows them. And, you know, the debate between their sensibilities. And then the sort of comedy of his misinterpretation of the novel from the essay. And then her defending Jane Austen, how she defends Jane Austen, how he deprecates Jane Austen. And then inspired by that, there's the idea of the virtuous heroine. One of the things Lionel Trilling points to the beginning of his essay is that in modern circumstances we can't have a virtuous heroine, which she really rejects and I reject. And then the other thing is the sort of plot, the plot moment in Mansfield Park is her defending something that seems indefensible. It's her uncle's prohibition of them, the young people putting on amateur private theatricals in his great house. Her point is that he is their host. She is the impoverished niece who is being allowed to stay with this family and often made to feel her poverty and social inferiority. But still she's being housed and fed and clothed by this family. And she's grateful to them. And he has a rule against this and even though he's not there, she feels the rule stands and they have to respect his rule even though he's not there. His children and the visiting young people say no, no we should, it's nonsense, we'll just do this. And then in this story of Metropolitan they want to do the game Truth or Dare where you have to answer questions completely honestly. And she says no, we shouldn't play this game, it's really dangerous. They are a modern character. So it's again an indefensible, defending an indefensible prohibition that actually has a lot of sense behind it because there's a reason why people don't reply to questions with absolute honesty and candor because they can hurt a lot of people and cause a lot of trouble. A lot of things should not be told. It's a beautiful scene. And then it isolates her in the group and then there's a loyal fellow who likes her, who comes to her aid and the other guy who's kind of obtuse about it. And so there are these three or four things that helped me in the screenplay of Metropolitan but it doesn't make it an adaptation.