A Single Man Tom Ford Hollywood Dailies | Movie Trailers

Last evening Tom Ford was in Tokyo at Shinjuku Isetan promoting his 2nd and newest store in Japan. The new store in Shinjuku Isetan is a shop-in-shop on the 8th floor among the tailored clothes section of the department store. Ford, who contends his brand is outperforming other men’s brands during the recession because of Tom Ford being a new and growing brand has intentions to open a 3rd, stand alone flagship in Tokyo when a suitable location is located as well as launch his women’s line when finance is secured. In the meantime fans of Tom Ford will have to make due wit his men’s RTW line, skin care, fragrances and sunglasses available throughout Japan.

Source: Tokyofashiondaily.blogspot.com

Hot on the success of his film “A Single Man,” Tom Ford is looking to broaden his label with womenswear.

UK fashion trade specialist Drapers reported the luxury label is seeking a $50m investment to expand its products, which currently sells menswear, eyewear and fragrances.

Two years after leaving Gucci Tom Ford launched his namesake men’s brand line in association with Zegna. His perfume and sunglasses series included women’s but to date no women’s clothing has been introduced. Last year Ford said in a Women’s Wear Daily interview: “Women must definitely be introduced… once the men’s sales reach my target, I will revert back to women’s.”

During the recent catwalk season, Carine Roitfeld was spotted wearing archive Tom Ford for YSL during London Fashion week and a few days later Anna Dello Russo was seen wearing three different pairs of Tom Ford within 24 hours at Milan Fashion week, as many blogs reported.

Online private equity site peHUB in September reported Tom Ford International was on the hunt for financial backers for significant investment.

Source: Fashionunited.com

Out: Your first movie turned out to be the toast of the Venice and Toronto film festivals. Is this the start of a second career?
Tom Ford: I certainly hope it’s the start of a parallel career. It was a lot of work when I was both shooting and designing, but if I were only making films, the lag time between different projects would drive me crazy. I’d like to make a movie every two or three years, which is about as quickly as you can get a project off the ground anyway.

How do you think those two sensibilities — fashion and film — come together in the way you approached this movie?
They are very separate things for me. Making this film is the first time in my life that I have been purely expressive or artistic. Fashion, for me, is certainly creative, but it’s ultimately a commercial endeavor.

On paper, certainly, A Single Man sounds like an unlikely project. It’s a story about a middle-aged gay man preparing to take his own life.
Even [my partner] Richard, when he first read what I wanted to do, said, “Are you sure?” I said, “Yes, I’m positive. I have a feeling.”

The focus on love between two men seems so apposite given the debate around gay marriage and the glaring need for better representations of gay relationships.
I didn’t even think about it, but I created the kind of relationship on screen that I have and that [the writer] Christopher Isherwood had with Don Bachardy for 43 years. So it just seemed very natural to me. It was funny to me when one of my agents said, “This is a gay story.” I said, “Really? It is?” I’m just blind to gay/straight at this point in my life. I am gay — I’ve always been completely open about that—but first and foremost I’m human and live the same human condition that every other human on our planet lives. Christopher Isherwood was one of the very first people to treat his gay characters in the same way that he treated the straight characters. They were always just people interacting.

It’s clear that this is a personal movie.
If you read the novel, you can see that I’ve had my character and personality grafted on to the central character of George. The book A Single Man is kind of The Power of Now before The Power of Now was written. And going through a certain midlife crisis of my own — having spent an enormous amount of my life concentrating on the material world — this book spoke to me in my mid-40s in a way that it didn’t speak to me when I read it in my 20s. At this point in time a great message for all of us is to appreciate the small things in our lives and to try to be very present for them, because they are the big things in life — that’s what we get, that’s it.

In contrast to your sexually provocative advertising and Gucci-era persona, A Single Man reveals a deeper, more romantic side that may have escaped people’s notice.
I agree. One thing that most people wouldn’t believe about me is that I’m incredibly shy, and I don’t think I’ve ever allowed people in that close. So the fashion side of me is the surface side, really. It’s also taken a bit of coming to terms with the fact that I do spend so much of my life working in the material world. But as long as you keep it in perspective and don’t take it too seriously, I think fashion is a great thing that adds quality to our lives. It doesn’t mean that a beautiful pair of shoes isn’t still beautiful. But if you lose them, big deal, because they don’t really mean anything other than to be able to say, “Wow, look at my feet. Aren’t they pretty?”

How did your partner react when he saw this movie?
Well, he saw it in many stages. He read every incarnation of the screenplay, he came on the set a few times, he saw the dailies, he saw the first cuts. And I think he loves it. He’s very rarely particularly demonstrative about things I’m working on. Many, many fashion shows where I got great reviews—he didn’t say a word about them. It was almost as if they didn’t exist, and that used to drive me crazy. But he’s been much more vocal about this.

How did you come to choose Nicholas Hoult for the movie?
Originally, I had cast someone else in that role, someone well known, who pulled out at the very last minute. He just didn’t show up at the costume fitting five days before we were due to start shooting. About two weeks earlier, I had received, via e-mail, an audition by Nicholas, who wanted to read for it even though the part was taken. I remember thinking Fuck, he’s so good, he’s so right for this, but the part had already been cast. And then oddly — and this happened a lot with this film — things just moved. Colin Firth wasn’t available originally — I had cast someone else in the role — and we had a shift in schedule, he had a shift in schedule, the other person dropped out, and all of a sudden things lined up. The same thing happened with Nicholas. Now I can’t imagine anybody but Nick in that role.

There’s something very serene about his presence in the movie.
And angelic. And in a way he is a bit of an angel who saves George (Colin Firth). What’s interesting is that Nicholas was 18 when we started filming; Colin was 48. They were exactly the ages of Chris and Don when they met.

A Single Man opens in December.

Source: Out.com  By Aaron Hicklin

Without question the best-dressed premiere of the festival so far. Fashion designer turned filmaker Tom Ford  attended the premiere of his forthcoming film A Single Man.

Based on the book by Christopher Isherwood, set in the mid-sixties, it sees Colin Firth play an English professor mourning the sudden death of his partner, played by Matthew Goode. Firth has already picked up the award for Best Actor in Venice earlier this year for his performance, and we’re pretty certain the film will continue to pick up awards before it’s released here in the UK on february 2010.

Source: Festival.blog.lovefilm.com By Helen Cowley

In some actually good fashion news, one designer seems to be optimistic about the current state (both artistic and financial) of the high-end clothes industry. Tom Ford International, the luxury line from the former creative head of Gucci, is seeking funding to expand into women’s apparel. He’s looking for an investment of $50 million or more. Credit Suisse was managing the process.

Ford launched his company in 2004 after a successful turnaround effort at Italian luxury brand Gucci, owned by French retailer PPR. He served as creative director at Gucci and also at Yves Saint-Laurent after the company’s acquisition of that brand. The Tom Ford brand currently sells men’s clothing and men’s and women’s eyewear and fragrances. [Reuters]

Source: Halogenlife.com

Tom Ford (swoon – such a gorgeous man!), just launched his White Musk Collection, a four fragrance uni-sex collection all inspired by musk.

* Jasmine Musk is formulated with ylang-ylang, jasmine, patchouli, orris, vanilla, sandalwood, vetiver, cistus, amber, and two musks.
* Urban Musk has notes of ambrette seed absolute extra, white pepper CO2, notes of cumin, white honey, jasmine sambac, black plum, Tonkin musk headspace, and benzoin Laos orpur.
* Musk Pure is comprised of bergamot, pepper, ylang-ylang orpur, jasmine, lily of the valley, orris butter, orris absolute, jasmine sambac, tonka, benzoin tears, and Laotian beeswax.
* White Suede has Bulgarian rose, saffron, thyme, mate tea, olibanum, lily of the valley, amber, suede, and sandalwood.

I spritzed myself with some White Suede ($180) and it’s super sexy. I’m not a big believer in uni-sex scents, but this is one that I can see working for both men and women. There’s something wonderfully alluring and enticing about it. I’m so tempted to spritz my blanket with it, wrap myself tight, and go to bed!

Source: My.buzzcritic.com

Tom Ford: “This is the thing I’ve done in my life that I’m the most proud of.”

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.”

“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.”

Ford optioned the novel from Don Bachardy, the deceased Isherwood’s longtime lover.  Barchardy was somewhat hesitant given that “A Single Man” was Isherwood’s favorite book, and something very personal to himself as well (the character of Jim is largely based on him).  And even though Ford chose to take significant (and necessary) creative liberties with the original work, Barchardy is quite pleased with the final product.

“The book is an inner-monologue that’s beautifully written prose but actually nothing happens,” Ford explained. “There is no plot. So I had to create a plot. I had to create the suicide. In order to give George a reason, and for us as viewers to understand that he was now looking at the world in a different way. So I had to give some external indications of what was going on inside George’s head. But Don was really was really happy with it, which meant a lot to me.”

Ford owes a portion of that happiness to Colin Firth, who as George is in essentially every scene of the film and gives arguably the performance of his career tapping deeply into the character’s quiet sorrow.

“Colin was my absolute first choice,” Ford said. “He was tied up doing another film and then we were delayed a little bit and all of a sudden he became available. The moment I heard he was available, I called him and Fed Exed him the script. I jumped on a plane to London the next day. I had dinner with him and I convinced him - we had a handshake deal. I came back, we went into pre-production two weeks later. And the whole thing, like a lot of things in life that are meant to be, just came together.

Financing was something that was slightly more problematic.  Ford was working with a couple of people on the financing, but the financial crisis happened and that evaporated. But Ford had a privleged alternative.

“I felt that everything had come together and that I had to make this movie, so I financed it myself. And not everybody has that luxury. I did. And I thought, you know what, I’m going to invest in myself. I’m going to do it. I think some people thought it was a vanity project. You know, ‘he’s paying for it himself.’ But we sold it last night, and I made back my money.”

While the film has everything even his naysayers may have expected - it’s stunningly shot, the production and costume design are both meticulous and gorgeous - it’s also profoundly affecting.  Ford found a way to take his more obvious talents and use them to bring forth a depth in the film’s narrative and its characters.

“For me,” he said, “the set design, the production design… has to relate to the character. Now, of course, it’s beautiful. I’m someone who is never probably going to make a movie about the ugly world. Just like Hitchcock didn’t - and I’m not comparing myself to Hitchcock - but he’s a great director for me. Because cinema for me is also a bit of a dream. An enhanced reality, maybe. But not an enhanced reality for no reason. You know, there’s a reason to every decision.”

Ford also - like Isherwood’s novel (and his entire literary career, really) - decided to take on the film’s gay material without making it all about being gay.

“Isherwood’s books are not about struggling to deal with your homosexuality,” he said, “which a lot of us do, of course. We live in a time when other people have struggled a great deal so we don’t have to struggle. Things are more accepted. You know, I’ve always thought of myself as just a human. I forget that I’m gay and I don’t see this as a gay story. It’s just a story about love and isolation and trying to figure out what life’s all about. What’s on screen, is the life I live. Those are my dogs. That’s the relationship I have with my boyfriend. The suicide was a suicide that happened in my family. At certain points in my life I’ve had intense depressions. That’s my life. It’s completely integrated.”

As for Ford’s newfound life as a filmmaker, he’s confident there’s much more to come. In the meantime, though, he wants to savor his “Man.”

“I need to live through this first,” he said. “I just finished editing two weeks ago. George hasn’t left me. I don’t want to just make movies that mean nothing. I need to get a little bit of distance and figure out what I want to say next. And some of that will come from having said this, and I’d like to make a movie every two or three years. But for now… it’s funny. I’ve never at all been afraid of death. I don’t have children. I get on planes…  little planes. I just don’t care. I travel, travel, travel. When I was working on this film, it just killed me to think I might die before I finished it. This is the thing I’ve done in my life that I’m the most proud of.”

A scene from Tom Ford’s “A Single Man.” Imag courtesy of TIFF.

Source: Indiewire.com by Peter Knegt (September 17, 2009)

Tom Ford makes directorial debut with “A Single Man” at Venice film fest

VENICE, Italy — Tom Ford switched from the catwalk to the red carpet on Friday, presenting his directorial debut — an intimate movie about coping with loss and grief — at the Venice Film Festival.

“A Single Man” stars Colin Firth as a college professor coming to grips with solitude after his partner of 16 years dies. Also starring are Matthew Goode, playing the professor’s partner, and Julianne Moore as a longtime friend who harbors an unfulfilled love for Firth’s character.

The movie was the last of 25 films to screen in competition for the Golden Lion, Venice’s top prize. The winners are announced Saturday.

“A Single Man” is based on the book by the same name by Christopher Isherwood. Ford, a former Gucci and Yves Saint Laurent designer, said the film is “the most personal thing” he has ever done.

He said the film is not “about being gay” but rather touches on universal themes.

“It’s really a film about love and isolation that I think all of us feel, so it is very universal,” Ford said at a news conference. “When I see someone who sees the film and says, ‘ It’s a gay story,’ I don’t even know what they are thinking, it just seems to me a human story.”

Ford himself is gay.

“When I was coming to terms with being gay, it’s never anything that was particularly traumatic for me,” he said. “I have been in a relationship with the same person for 23 years.”

The story begins with George (Firth) discovering his partner Jim (Goode) lying dead from an automobile accident. George wakes from what is only a nightmare — only to face the truth that his partner is really gone.

He starts to plan his own suicide, carefully organizing his belongings and visiting his friend Charley (Moore).

“(George) thinks it is the last day of his life, so for the first time in a long time he is seeing, and he is pulled by the beauty of life,” Ford said. He “has a kind of epiphany where he understands what life was about.”

The movie is set in 1962 Los Angeles during the height of the Cuban Missile crisis and the looming nuclear threat. In an apparent nod to his past career, Ford recreates the era with meticulous attention to details and style.

Fashion “is a very fleeting and commercial art,” he said. “This is pure expression.”

Source: Blog.taragana.com

Tom Ford has branded as “disgusting” the ban on gay marriage in parts of the United States and elsewhere in the world.

The designer, who is openly gay, used a Venice press conference for his feature film debut “A Single Man” starring Colin Firth to criticize decisions like that in California in November banning same-sex marriage. He did, however, add that his movie, which is in competition at the Venice film festival was not about being gay at all, but about the human condition in general.

“It is, I have to say, quite disgusting that in America and in other countries you cannot have a civil union or something equivalent to marriage,” said the 48-year-old.

“I have someone I’ve lived together with for 23 years. Recently he was in hospital for something. I had to carry papers on me at all times that he had signed saying that I could visit him in his room and make medical decisions for him if anything happened. Our taxes, by the way: if I died tomorrow my estate would be completely taxed and then the remainder go to him whereas if we were a couple his life wouldn’t have to change and my entire estate would move to him. There are things that are wrong with our legal systems in a lot of countries.

Source: Blogs.reuters.com