TIFF: Here's why there are no Tom Ford designs in 'Nocturnal Animals'
TORONTO — You won’t see one Tom Ford product in the designer-turned-director’s sophomore feature effort, Nocturnal Animals — not even in luxury-laden scenes featuring Amy Adams as an art dealer whose world is stocked with Chanel, Cartier, Prada and Balmain.
“I want to be taken seriously as a director,” Ford, who also wrote the film, told USA TODAY following Nocturnal Animals’ debut at the Toronto International Film Festival. “I didn’t want it to be a Tom Ford ad.”
The thriller, which recently won the Venice Film Festival's Grand Jury prize, begins when Susan (Adams) receives a manuscript in the mail with a note from her writer ex-husband. The book is dedicated to her. As she reads the novel, the film switches to the story inside, following a brutal carjacking of a man named Tony (Jake Gyllenhaal) and his family by a redneck serial killer (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) on a deserted road in Texas. Slowly, she realizes the narrative mirrors the devastation of her first marriage.
Ford thought about the story, adapted from August Wright’s 1993 novel Tony and Susan, for two years. Then “I wrote it in six weeks,” he told USA TODAY, incorporating a disciplined schedule of sitting down daily from 8 a.m. to 1 p.m.
“He’s the real deal,” says Michael Shannon, who plays a laconic cop nauseated by Tony’s weak constitution. “Everyone thinks of Tom in terms of the fashion thing, but he’s from this (movie’s) neck of the woods. (Ford is from Texas.) He knows the southwest. And he has such a clear idea of what what he wanted this to be.”
With long greasy hair, mutton chops and overgrown nails, Taylor-Johnson’s murderer is so dark that “I had nightmares and I didn’t sleep,” during the three months surrounding production, he says. Chatting on Monday at the Shangri-La Hotel, Taylor-Johnson called Ford “an old-school movie filmmaker. I feel like he’s Fellini-esque, he’s (like) Hitchcock. He knows how to shoot suspense and tension.”
The English actor, who is married to director Sam Taylor-Johnson, would often see Adams on the morning school run in Los Angeles. “The funny thing is Amy’s daughter is in (my daughter’s) same class at school,” he says. “So I’d catch Amy and see her in the mornings. And she’d look at me like – I must have creeped out the teachers sometimes coming in after night shoots looking very disheveled.”
In Toronto, everyone cleaned up nicely, with the A-list cast now definitively clad in Tom Ford.
“Any premiere, event or tuxedo I’d only ever wear Tom Ford anyway,” says Taylor-Johnson. “So to be then gifted a custom suit by Tom, I actually feel secure, I feel safe, I don’t have to worry about what everybody else is wearing. Tom has already visualized how we’re all going to stand next to one another." Under Ford's watch, he adds, "You just feel very looked after and nurtured."
