It would be an easy thing for the typical movie geek to snub his nose at Tom Ford for coming from the snobby world of high fashion design and transitioning into film with a slow-paced melodramatic movie about a suicidal, depressive homosexual man. Unfortunately for the insecure movie geeks who might want to dismiss the European fashionista, his film A Single Man was one of the single most gorgeous, heartbreaking, and wonderful movies of 2009, an auspicious debut for any director. It’s one thing to bust into the movie world with a small clever genre flick that gets a few traditional details correct, it’s quite another to start off with a mature prestige drama that deeply taps into the emotional core of a complex character. Tom For did just this with the help of a career-best performance from Colin Firth. How do you follow up that kind of freshman effort though? Ford ain’t saying.
“I’m not telling you anything about it.”
That’s Ford’s go-to response when asked about the project, with the only significant detail he’s let loose being the fact that he plans on shooting in London, and that it will be an original screenplay. This was a remark he made over a year ago during the promotion of A Single Man, when he was still recovering from the trial of managing his London fashion empire from LA during the shoot.
The director’s leading man has recently been more willing to field questions about the project during his promotion of The King’s Speech, but unfortunately for us he doesn’t know anything!
“I do know that he has plans to make another movie… I consider him a very good friend, but he won’t give anything away to me about what the film is. I know, whatever it is, it’s gonna be very different from A Single Man. I’m jealous of whoever’s going to be in it.”
“Very different.” That’s another phrase that keeps coming up. Ford used to be known more for his blatant sexual fashion ads than his delicately balanced approach to the pains of a human being, so perhaps we’ll see something even more influenced by his fashion-world aesthetics (though, A Single Man incorporated a “Vogue-ad” sense of production design and costuming sophistication already).
Ultimately Ford still has his feet planted firmly in the fashion world which has huge development cycles of its own, and probably doesn’t allow Ford to casually develop a film until he’s ready to completely dive in. When that will be, and what priority this next project will take is unclear, but if the resultant film is half as beautiful as his last, it will be worth it to keep track of it.
(Source | Moviefone & Fashinologie via Playlist)