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Tom Ford interview: 'Fashion is gone so quickly. But film lasts forever'
Two decades ago, Tom Ford had the fashion world at his feet. In 1990 the Texas-born designer had moved to Milan to take charge of womenswear at the struggling Italian leather goods brand, Gucci. When Ford joined, Gucci was almost bankrupt – both creatively and financially.
The company was struggling to pay its employees on time and even the then-creative director admitted that “no one would dream of wearing Gucci”. But Ford sexed up the brand, putting Madonna and Gwyneth Paltrow in his clothes, creating controversial nude ad campaigns and wowing the front row with his movie-star good looks.
He was made creative director of the whole company in 1994, and quickly became known as the king of the celebrity designers. But after clashing with his bosses over creative control, in 2004 he abruptly quit. Despite walking away with $100 million in stock, Ford began to struggle with alcohol, depression and generally “not knowing what I was going to do”. Then he had an idea: he’d become a filmmaker.
Two more tough years followed as Ford tried to find backers and scripts, so by his own admission he "panicked". He went back to fashion, starting his own Tom Ford fashion line in 2006 and – in typical Ford style – generated interest through provocative imagery, which included appearing on the cover of Vanity Fair fully clothed between actresses Keira Knightley and Scarlett Johansson, both nude.
Thanks to the line’s success, Ford was able to largely self-finance his first film A Single Man, an adaptation of a Christopher Isherwood novel starring Colin Firth as a gay college professor in 1962. Although Ford “lost a little money on it”, the film was a critical sensation, earning both Oscar and Bafta nominations. Seven years later, Ford is at the Toronto Film Festival to talk about his follow-up film, Nocturnal Animals.
Sitting in a hotel suite, the 55-year-old looks exactly like a Tom Ford model: immaculate dark suit, white shirt, turquoise cufflinks, tinted glasses and just the right degree of carefully tended stubble. He’s coolly confident, articulate, courteous and still leading man-handsome, although he has admitted to using Botox to help maintain his looks.
Ford has just flown in from New York, where he had launched his new “fall line” following a visit to the Venice Film Festival for the film’s premiere, and a brief stop at his house in Los Angeles.
Such a peripatetic schedule must surely dictate that he travels with a veritable wardrobe of suits? “In fact, I’m travelling with only carry-on luggage,” he smiles. “I wear this same suit over and over and over. I have probably quite a lot of them but they’re pretty much all the same. I have a uniform; it’s easy: I get up in the morning and I put on that uniform.”
Since making A Single Man, Ford and his longtime partner and husband of two years Richard Buckley, 68, have adopted a son, Jack, now aged four. “I’m a very hands-on father and I told myself, OK, for at least the first three years I’m not going to do anything except really concentrate on Jack,” he says. “Also my business expanded and I didn’t find a story that I wanted to do.”
He eventually discovered Austin Wright's psychological thriller novel Tony and Susan, optioned it and wrote a screenplay for it. The film, which he retitled Nocturnal Animals and which he produced and directed, stars Amy Adams as Susan, a successful art dealer who has a life-altering experience while reading a novel written by her ex-husband about a family man who gets brutally attacked while driving through rural Texas.
The two stories – Susan’s and the fictional family man’s (played by Jake Gyllenhaal) – intertwine throughout the film, which has received rave reviews comparing it to the thrillers of Alfred Hitchcock. (The Telegraph critic Robbie Collin declared it “intoxicating, provocative, delicious”.)
Through Susan, Nocturnal Animals explores the perils of materialism and consumerism, the very things that have made Ford a fortune. And the irony is not lost on him.
“Susan’s character in particular is autobiographical,” acknowledges Ford, who owns a Richard Neutra-designed home in Los Angeles, an 1827 John Nash house in London and a ranch in Santa Fe New Mexico which he has just put on the market for £60 million. “I have had the good fortune in life to experience that sort of materialism that our culture tells us is going to make us happy. I’m not saying that it’s not something that I enjoy; we live in a material world; we touch things that feel good and we get to see beautiful things.
“But you have to keep it in perspective and the most important things in life, certainly for me, are loyalty. I’ve been with the same person for 30 years and I’ve worked with the same people for many years.
“What drew me to the book was the story I took away from it which was really that when you find people in your life that you care about, that you love, you hang on to them. And this is a cautionary tale of what can happen to you if you don’t.”
His decision to write, direct and produce A Single Man was greeted at the time with skepticism by many, who pointed out that no one of Ford’s stature had crossed over from running a vast fashion empire into becoming a multi-hyphenate filmmaker.
But Ford, who had started his career as a teenage actor in New York, believes the two are not dissimilar. “You have to have a vision, you have to have something you want to say, you have to then hire great people around you and you have to inspire them,” he says. “I was not a great actor, in fact I hated acting, although I had a very successful career in television commercials. I took lots of acting classes so I think I understand what actors go through.
“Good actors want to give a great performance, so part of my job is to inspire them and to create an environment where they feel comfortable, where they can give their best performance. And I think I’m a good storyteller. If you were at a dinner party with me and I could sense that you were getting bored, I’d spice up the story with maybe something that wasn’t even true but to try to get you back.”
Ford points out that he’s spent 30 years working with the world’s best photographers, framing and telling stories: “I’m not saying this egotistically but even on A Single Man I felt very, very comfortable in the role as a director. But in fashion you get to do something new in two months, then it’s gone, it’s over and you move on. But film is something that lasts forever and I think because of that you give it a certain gravitas.”
Ford is, he says, at “a very good place” in his life and his past problems are well behind him. He hasn’t had a drink for several years, he has kept depression at bay, he exercises and plays tennis every day and, he says: “I have a wonderful family life. I think that the older you get the more comfortable you are with yourself. I am certainly more comfortable with myself now than I was 10,15 or 30 years ago.
“Somebody said to me, 'Are you going to wear a suit on the film set?’ And I said, 'Yeah, this is who I am and this is the way I dress. Why would I change my clothes? I’m most comfortable like this.’
Nocturnal Animals will be shown at the BFI London Film Festival on October 14 before its UK release on November 4