Tom Ford: “This is the thing I’ve done in my life that I’m the most proud of.”
by Peter Knegt (September 17, 2009)
A scene from Tom Ford's "A Single Man." Image courtesy of TIFF.
“No matter how much you love something, there are those moments where you think, ‘shit, maybe I’m just way out on a limb and other people aren’t going to feel this way’,” Tom Ford said yesterday regarding his film “A Single Man.” “But then after the screening in Venice, we had a standing ovation for ten minutes. And it was amazing. It was very emotional, and it was just like a great release of ‘yes, it spoke to other people.’”
Days after the that debut, fashion icon and first time filmmaker Ford can be considerably more certain of this. In the wake of significant praise in Venice - taking both its Queer Lion award and a best actor prize for Colin Firth - “A Single Man” made its North American debut Monday night at the Toronto International Film Festival. Expectations were suddenly high in the shadow of Venice, but the largely public audience seemed to embrace the film quite passionately, as did Harvey Weinstein - who had the U.S. rights signed and sealed by the next morning.
The Weinsteins are planning a release for the film by the end of the year, suggestively in an attempt to get “A Single Man” some love from awards season. It’ll be interesting to see how the Weinsteins handle the film in this regard, because “The Reader” this is not. Ford’s achievement, while an artful, crowning one, is far from commercial. And this is something Ford himself seemed to have no trouble admitting when indieWIRE sat down with him at Toronto’s Windsor Arms Hotel, moments after he had approved a press release announcing his deal with Harvey and Co.
“Fashion is something I love but it is a commercial creative endeavor for me,” he said. “This was the first thing I’ve ever done that was really just pure expression. Where I wasn’t necessarily thinking about how I was gonna sell it or who was gonna see it. And maybe that’s dumb. I do want people to see it because if they don’t see it you don’t communicate. But, for me it was something I just had to make. It was incredibly personal to me.”
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 “A Single Man” director Tom Ford (center) with Clive Owen and Julianne Moore. Photo by Brian Brooks/indieWIRE“A Single Man” was adapted by Ford and David Scearce from Christopher Isherwood’s 1964 novel of the same name, regarded as one of the first and finest novels of the early gay liberation movement. A meditation on love and death and isolation, it follows a single day in the life of George (Firth), a middle-aged gay Englishman working as a college professor in 1962 Los Angeles. His longtime lover, Jim (played by Matthew Goode in a series of flashbacks) has recently died in a car accident, and as a result George is the midst of self-destruction.
For Ford, the film is a long time coming. Known to the world as one of America’s most prominent fashion designers, he decided over a decade ago that he wanted to eventually take on cinema as a “parallel career.” When he left his post as Gucci’s creative director five years ago, he decided it was the perfect time. But finding the perfect project was a whole other issue.
“I know what I want to say in fashion,” Ford said, “and I have said it over the years but I had to really stop and think: Why does anybody want to see a Tom Ford movie? Who needs another movie? What do I have to say? So finding something that had a message that I felt was important was really the most imperative thing. I read a lot of scripts. I had optioned a couple books I was working on adapting. And still nothing felt quite right. Until one day I was driving to my office and I realized I was thinking about this character George in ‘A Single Man’ - which I had read in my early twenties when I was living in Los Angeles.”
Ford decided to re-discover the novel and found that from the perspective of a man in his mid-forties, it spoke to him in an entirely different way.
“For someone who has been fortunate enough to have all the material things that the world can offer,” he said, “and had really neglected the spiritual side of my life - this book spoke to me. In a very spirtual way. And I saw that it was actually a book written by the false self - from a kind of great distance - about the true self. It’s written in the third person. It’s really a book about learning to live in the present. Our culture is always living in the future… And that’s not really what it’s all about. As a fashion designer too, you also really live in the future. I mean, I design eighteen months in the future. Today doesn’t even exist. So before you know it, all your todays are gone and your life is over. And I’m constantly trying to live in the present and to drink things in and freeze them. And that’s what the movie is about. It’s about understanding the simple, small things in your life. And I think it’s the perfect time for us to all remember that, and to strive for that. So it seemed like the right story to tell.”
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