Tom Ford knows the power of quick decisions. When the designer's friend, the fashion journalist Tim Blanks, suggested that Ford read Tony and Susan, Austin Wright's multilayered 1993 novel, a light went off – an urgent one. "An absolute page-turner, I loved it," Ford says, "and I've learned in my short time in the film industry that when you love something, option it."
Such decisiveness is also essential when a shooting schedule has to fit into the short autumn window of an already busy day-job schedule (a few days before our interview, he'd shown his fall collection in New York). Which is how Ford found himself helming Nocturnal Animals, only his second feature film and the first in six years, after 2009's acclaimed A Single Man, starring Colin Firth. But if A Single Man was a meditative study of bereavement, Nocturnal Animals is a sophisticated and at times visceral tale of betrayal and revenge.
Amy Adams stars as Susan Morrow in Nocturnal Animals.
The film's main story concerns Susan (Amy Adams), a wealthy gallerist who feels alienated from her art-directed life. This plot is wrapped around an entirely different meta-narrative, which arrives in the form of a manuscript from Susan's ex-husband, Edward (Jake Gyllenhaal), a mild-mannered writer. Or is he? Edward's novel turns out to be a Southern Gothic revenge allegory that echoes the brutal way he feels she left him. The film alternates between these parallel storylines with flashbacks to the pair's courtship in 1990s Manhattan, N.Y.
What struck Ford most as he adapted Wright's work was the book's theme of loyalty: "The fact that you shouldn't throw people away in your life that you care about. That it was a cautionary tale of what can happen to you.
"I grafted a lot of my own personality onto it," Ford continues. It's not only that he famously shares the insomnia that gives Edward's manuscript (and the film) its name, but the way that he values loyalty itself. Case in point: Prior to our interview during September's Toronto International Film Festival, I chatted in the hotel hallway with Lisa Schiek, the communications director of Tom Ford, the company, who has worked alongside Tom Ford, the fashion designer, for nearly 25 years. (A Single Man's editor Joan Sobel, costume designer Arianne Phillips and composer Abel Korzeniowski also reunite with Ford on his second feature.)
Immaculately dressed (as usual) in a black suit, white shirt and Chelsea boots polished to a spotless sheen, Ford, 55, admits not being entirely loyal, though, to the original novel. "There were some other very key things from the book that I expanded on in my own personal way," he says. For instance, he put a finer point on the novel's story-within-a-story and its critiques; what Wright's Susan observes in passing as junk culture Ford amps up by transposing her to the upper echelons of the stylish L.A. art world, where she lives in an aestheticized ennui that sees the Champagne flute half-full. As Flaubert once remarked, "Madame Bovary, c'est moi."
Jake Gyllenhaal plays Susan’s ex-husband Edward, a mild-manner writer who writes a revenge-allegory novel about his marriage.
Ford was previously the creative director of Gucci and Yves Saint Laurent, and oversees as well as embodies his eponymous luxury fashion brand. These days, he moves between homes in L.A., Santa Fe, N.M., and London, and when I inquire about the particulars of a shooting location, he casually says, "I have a Neutra house" – as in the internationally renowned modernist architect Richard Neutra – the way someone might mention owning a designer handbag.
What is it they say about those who live in glass houses?
But like photographer William Klein, whose 1966 feature Who Are You, Polly Maggoo? satirized the hollow fame of the very fashion industry that he made his name in, Ford is an open book about his own artistic ambivalence. He knows he's on the inside, looking in. "I live in consumer culture. I create consumer culture. And I've been fortunate enough in my life to have enough material things to understand that it does not make you happy," he says, a reference to his history of alcoholism and depression. "And our consumer culture right now, I'm not so happy with the direction that it's going, yet I am someone who contributes."
Ford says he used to be a lot like Susan, a wealthy gallerist who feels alienated from her art-directed life.
Merrick Morton/Focus Features
At one point, Susan alludes to her sensitive ex as "Edward the poet, Edward the capitalist." If Ford is both, filmmaking at least fulfills the former. "I'm a commercial fashion designer. The line where Susan says, 'I'm too cynical to be an artist' is true for me; however, making films is my artistic expression – it's something that I feel I have to do," he says.
Ford hopes the self-financed Nocturnal Animals will do well, "but I don't make films to make money. I make money selling lipstick, cosmetics and perfumes." (Tom Ford Beauty alone is on track to be a billion-dollar concern within a few years, selling such items as $68 lipsticks.)
While movie stills often fill the mood boards of fashion designers, visual art mostly inspired this movie's grammar. The composition of one climactic scene, for instance, came from the Richard Misrach piece Desert Fire #153, which found two men standing in a desiccated field. The photograph hangs onscreen in Susan's office, as it does in Ford's own.
To add to that, the director also supplied Susan's furniture. "It was all mine and came right out of my house," Ford says. "Because I was Susan in a lot of ways."
So while there are shared totems to unify Nocturnal Animals's inner and outer narratives (a red-velvet sofa, a 1970s muscle car), other elements inevitably tie back to Ford's own life and the paradox on his mind. Her sleek house was a place in Malibu but transposed with skylines of Bel Air, where Ford himself lives in the aforementioned Neutra villa with his husband, Richard Buckley, and their four-year-old son, Jack.
"Happy ever after, that's not life," he says when I ask what he thinks Susan might do after the film's ambiguous ending. "Life is happy, sad, wistful, content, happy again, tragic, sad." He then answers from Susan's assuming point of view. "Am I going to move out of the house, be a Scarlett O'Hara and get up the next morning and get on a plane and go, and maybe I'm gonna become that artist? I don't know. She doesn't know."
Nocturnal Animals opens Nov. 18 in Toronto, before expanding to Montreal and Vancouver Nov. 25, and the rest of the country Dec. 9.