14 DAY TRIAL // On January 12, famed fashion designer Tom Ford will be making his debut on the silver screen with his first directorial job, the drama “A Single Man,” starring Colin Firth and Julianne Moore. Speaking to V Magazine about how it felt to crossover from high fashion to filmmaking, Ford says it was a frightening, yet wonderful experience.
“A Single Man,” described as a quieter, more luscious “Brokeback Mountain,” tells the story of an excessively mannered English professor played by Firth, whose entire life is reduced to simply running through the motions after the death of his longtime partner. Julianne Moore is his boozy but equally sophisticated lady friend, Charley and, while these two stars can surely carry a movie on their own, Ford admits to being extremely nervous about the reception it would get at first.
Opening up to audiences was one of the first things that the designer found very hard to do, especially since there’s a lot of his own life in “A Single Man.” “There is a lot of my own life in the film. People say that when you start to write something you should always write what you know, so I had to ask myself, I know what I am as a fashion designer, but what am I about as a filmmaker? What do I believe in? Why should anyone see a Tom Ford film?” the designer / director explains for V.
Because of this, the stress was huge. “When you put that much of yourself out there, of course you’re terrified. Terrified! But I’ve never let potential terror or fear stop me. In my adult life I’ve understood that if I put an enormous amount of love and honesty into something, usually that shows in the end. […] I was very conscious of making it look like I knew exactly what the [expletive] I was doing. But, sure, I didn’t sleep the night before because I was terrified of having to say ‘Cut!’ in front of a bunch of people,” the director goes on to say.
Although the film has not yet opened in theaters, it has already made the festival circuit and has gotten nothing but the warmest praise in the process. Critics are pleased with it but, what’s more important, fans too are happy about how it came out. One might easily say that Tom Ford got so stressed out for a good reason.