After making a splash with his first film, A Single Man, Tom Ford, still better known as fashion designer, has made his second picture, the eagerly awaited Nocturnal Animals, which world premiered today at the Venice Film Fest.
Nocturnal Animals also plays at Telluride Film Fest this weekend and then travels to Toronto Film Fest.
Variety Reports:
“I’m sorry it was seven years,” the director told a packed Venice press conference after its first two screenings. “It kills me that it was seven years!”
Multi-Layered Narrative
“They’re really all the same story,” explained Ford. “The inner novel is explaining to the reader – Susan – the pain that this man felt, so the pain we feel in the inner novel is the pain that Edward felt when Susan left him. They’re all twisted together.”
Book Vs. Film
“A book is a book,” he noted, “but a film is a completely different thing. It’s a totally different medium, and sometimes the essence of a book, if you translated it literally, would be lost, because you’re telling a visual story. In the book, we’re experiencing an inner monologue, in the head of Susan, Amy’s character, and so I had to create scenes that explained visually what she was feeling and what she was going through. It had to change dramatically.”
New Setting: West Texas
Ford added that “the other major change was to shift the crime story from the northeast of America to West Texas. This was really because the book was written in 1993. In today’s world, you’d lock the doors of your car and call for help on your cellphone. So I had to move it to somewhere where, theoretically, there could be no cellphone service. And also, I believe in that old line, ‘Write what you know.’ And West Texas is a place I know very well.”
Jake Gyllenhaal
Star Jake Gyllenhaal revealed that Tom Ford identified very closely with the emotionally fragile Edward. “When I was sent the screenplay,” Gyllenhaal recalled, “I had just played a few characters that were all very physical and all about responding physically and emotionally – being able to protect and having the capability of protecting their people they loved. So I couldn’t have gotten this script at a better time. When I had sort of worn that other road out, here comes a guy who doesn’t know how to do that – he only has a bloody, beating heart.
Wonderfully frustrating
“It was not easy to film those scenes, to just let people take your family away from you. It was a difficult week of shooting, with constant questioning of Tom, who kept saying, ‘No, you’re just gonna stand there and take the hits.’ It was frustrating. But wonderfully frustrating.”
Lingering Memories
“Maybe I’m old fashioned,” Ford said, “but I think there needs to be–I don’t really like the word moral–a moral to the story. You need to think about it. Things can be entertaining, but if you leave the theater and it doesn’t stay with you, doesn’t haunt you, doesn’t challenge you, then it’s not successful, for me. So I hope to make films that make one think.”
