- Title: UNITED KINGDOM: High praise for Tom Ford for his directorial debut 'A Single Man'
- Date: 19th October 2009
- Summary: LONDON, ENGLAND, UNITED KINGDOM (OCTOBER 16, 2009) (REUTERS) (SOUNDBITE) (English) COLIN FIRTH, SAYING "The film is already quite special for me I had a great attachment to the whole thing. It was a small intimate process and that's something especially satisfying about people liking it. The more personal it is the more it means that people get it." TOM FORD TALKING TO
- Embargoed: 3rd November 2009 12:00
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- Location: United Kingdom
- Country: United Kingdom
- Reuters ID: LVA3B2PANK4CNI668VAOY3VE1VV4
- Story Text: U.S. designer Tom Ford on Friday (October 16) brought his directorial debut 'A Single Man' to London before taking it to Los Angeles. The man credited with turning around Gucci before launching his own design line has traded fashion for film with his debut feature "A Single Man," starring Colin Firth as a middle aged gay professor mourning the loss of his younger lover.
The film had its world premiere at this year's Venice Film festival and scored a best actor award for Colin Firth and plenty of applause from the critics.
"You know the very first time I showed the film I was extremely nervous and of course going to venice I was really nervous because it was the first time a real audience had seen it. I've always had good intuition about things and I loved this project so much I put so much energy into it , as did everyone who worked on it , all my experience in the past is when you put that much energy and love into it then it does come out the other side" said Ford.
Ford based the movie on a novel of the same name by Christopher Isherwood. He said he shared some traits with the central character George, played by Firth, who contemplates suicide after his lover is killed in a car crash. Julianne Moore plays Charley, his former girlfriend, confidante and neighbor.
Living in the past, and unable to contemplate a future, his despair lifts when he befriends a student who reminds him of the beauty around him and the value of living in the present.
Ford switches from sepia tones to bright colors to reflect George's changing moods, and glorifies the male body with slow motion shots of men swimming naked and playing tennis without shirts in the burning sun.
But despite the storyline and style of the shooting, Ford did not want his to be labelled a gay film.
A first time director, Ford received high praise from the film's protagonist Colin Firth.
"He's not a man who tends to screw things up very often. He has an amazing track record of brilliant achievement. Achievement with quite a bit of substance, I mean he doesn't skate over things and so I was pretty convinced that he would do something pretty extraordinary with it and I was right he was one of the best directors I've ever worked with."
Before going into fashion, Ford attempted his luck with acting: "Well acting, growing up, like many kids I wanted to be an actor, I actually pursued that for a while and I worked a lot on television commercials, I was not a terrific actor, I was very self-conscious at that period of my life, you know I took up acting classes to understand the process."
He added that there were more films to come:
"I didn't do this as just a little lark, it's something I wanted to do for a long time. Fashion for me is a artistic but commercial endeavour. This was the first purely expressive thing I've ever done in my life, I hope to have a parallel career, I hope to be standing in front of you every three years or so with a new film." - Copyright Holder: REUTERS
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