The first thing Tom Ford asked me when I walked in for our interview was where I was from. He couldn’t place my accent (or lack of one, perhaps). He then asked what cologne I was wearing (full disclosure: Chanel Allure Homme Sport). Needless to say, I can’t remember a filmmaker ever asking me what cologne I was wearing.
I discovered about 45 minutes later that upon first meeting Jake Gyllenhaal, he’d also asked him what cologne he was wearing. Possible trend?
A few days later, after a conversation about her roles in both “Arrival” and Ford’s “Nocturnal Animals,” I jokingly asked Amy Adams if he’d asked her if Ford had asked her the same thing upon meeting. She smiled and deadpanned as only Adams can, “No, I think he just asks the fellas that.”
Well played, Mr. Ford.
In any case, meeting Ford, you immediately understand how he was so easily able to transition from legendary fashion designer to acclaimed prestige filmmaker. Ford has an intense charisma that is both flattering and disarming at the same time. And whether it’s genuine or not, he’s able to appear more humble and self-deprecating than many of his peers in either the fashion or the film world. If you haven’t figured it out already, those qualities combined with genuine talent will get you far.
It took Ford seven years to follow up his impressive debut, “A Single Man,” but “Nocturnal Animals” is worth the wait. Based on Austin Wright’s novel “Tony and Susan,” the film finds Adams as Susan Morrow, a rich LA-based art-gallery owner whose marriage to Hutton (Armie Hammer) is proving untenable. She receives a manuscript from her ex, Edward Sheffield (Gyllenhaal), who she married at a young age and then likely divorced for the wrong reasons.
She begins to play out Edward’s novel in her head, realizing the story’s protagonist Tony Hastings (Gyllenhaal) and his wife Laura (Isla Fisher) are alternate versions of herself and Edward. The story in the novel features characters played by potential Best Supporting Actor nominee Michael Shannon and Aaron Taylor-Johnson and provides Susan with a perspective on her life she wasn’t prepared for.
My conversation with the charming Mr. Ford covered his difficulty in finding a follow-up to “A Single Man,” casting Adams, Gyllenhaal, Shannon and more.
I can’t believe it’s been seven years since “A Single Man.”
I know. I don’t know where the seven years went. I don’t know what happened.
Was it just because you couldn’t find the right material?
No. I built 100 stores. I had a child. He’s four and I couldn’t find material that I could control because I was offered a lot of things, but I’ve learned at this point about myself that I don’t perform well unless I am ultimately in control of the project, so it has to be something that I can own the underlying material for and ensure that I don’t lose control of it, and it took a while also to find even that aside, to find something that had a message that I wanted to, you know, felt I wanted to say. And that takes three years, by the way, to make a film, so it only took four years for me to find the right thing and start working on it.
This is a novel, though, from way back in 1993. How did it come your way?
I read it in 2011. A friend of mine in London where I was living at the time, and still live mostly, said, “you need to read this book.” It would make a great movie. I read it. I loved it. I couldn’t put it down. It had been re-released in England ahead of being released here and the author had died, so I went to his estate, was able to get the rights before anyone here read it, before anyone else was bidding on it.
I wasn’t sure how I was going to turn it into a film. It’s a different book. It’s a great book. If you haven’t read it, read it, but it is very different than the movie. However, the central core theme, I think, is very, very much intact, which is really about finding people in your life that mean something to you and not letting go of them, and what can happen to you when you do, when you throw those people away like we throw away everything in our culture now and so often throw away people.
I’m a very loyal person. I’ve been with the same person for 30 years. Lisa, who just brought you in, has worked with me for 25, and when I find people that are great, I don’t let go of them, so that was a theme that felt like one I wanted to spend three years working on.
I don’t want to spoil it, but that fantastic last scene in the movie is not in the book. Where was the inspiration or that?
They don’t set up [a] meeting, and by the way, [the book is much different]. She has three kids. After the divorce, he goes on and gets married. I believe he’s an insurance salesman. It’s set in Maine. It’s different story. Susan’s not an art dealer. She’s a housewife. [Her] kids are playing Monopoly the whole time she is reading the book. She’s critiquing his work at the end. She says, “Well, he’s coming to town on business, but I’m not going to meet him.” She puts it aside. She makes their dinner and that’s it. But, we do know that she really loved him. This was the guy that she loved. She left him for someone which she thought was a step up at the time, was a medical student, but she left him for materialistic reasons. That’s not going to really play very dramatically on screen, so let’s exaggerate that so that our audience understands materialism. You know, so a film is a film is a film.
O.K., so what made you decide to place her in Los Angeles, living in this beautiful home in the hills?
Make it personal. Connect it to something that I can relate to, something that I’ve been through. Take that materialism which is present in the book, blow it up to something that I’ve struggled with. I’m lucky, I’m a lucky person. I’ve been able to have all of these things that our culture tells you you should have, and I went through a period where they overtook my life and I let my relationships with people go, not in the way that she does. I had no sense of spirituality or connection with the universe or any sort of balance at all.
Now I’ve been through that, so I’ve come to terms with that and I think that materialism is fine, it can add a certain pleasure to your life. All the lines I wrote, so you’re going to hear me [in them] saying Michael Sheen’s line, ‘Our world is a lot less painful than the real world,’ but Susan hasn’t learned to keep it in perspective yet.
Even though the ending of this seems brutal, it’s transformative. She’s taken those rings off, she’s wiped that lipstick off and she’s not going back to that world that made her so unhappy, so yes, and what she’s been reading is fiction, by the way. Nobody’s really been killed. We’re reading a work of fiction that has caused her to feel the pain. The centerpiece of the whole movie is that he’s trying to make her feel the visceral pain that he felt when she left him, and that’s what he is telling her in the story. “This is what you did to me. You killed me, destroyed our family. You stole our family from us. This is what you did” And through that, through her reexamining of all that, she falls in love with him again and she realizes that she needs to go back to pursuing who she really is.
In terms of the film itself, and since Susan’s world is inspired by your own experiences, are there friends of yours who are going to go see this movie and be like, “Oh my gosh. Michael Sheen’s character is like me” or Jena Malone’s character…
Someone who knows me well will see bits and pieces of me in all those characters.
I meant friends or people you know. Will they see themselves?
Well, Lisa Eisner, who is a friend of mine here in Los Angeles, was the model for Alessia, who is played by Andrea Riseborough. She’s wearing all of Lisa’s jewelry.
That’s fantastic.
I said, “Look, I put you in a film and Andrea Riseborough is playing you and can I have your jewelry and your caftan?”