Movie director Tom Ford is a singular man

As his second movie hits the big screen, Tom Ford talks to Will Lawrence about the cult of masculinity and maintaining boundaries between his fashion and film work

When Tom Ford was growing up in Texas, men were encouraged to cross their legs in a specific manner. We are sitting across from one another in one of London’s Soho hotels and the fashion designer turned filmmaker demonstrates. “You could not cross your legs like this,” he says, perching the inside of his right knee on top of his left knee. “That was considered effeminate. Men crossed their legs like this.” He rests the outside of his right ankle on the left knee. “That was how real men did it.” His youth in the Lone Star state was frustrating at times. After all, he only realised he was gay when he reached his late teens and had relocated to New York to study art history at NYU (though he dropped out after a year to act in television commercials).

“When I was a kid in Texas, I didn’t necessarily fit in,” says the 55-year-old. “When I realised I was gay it was like, ‘Oh, that explains a lot.’ Living in Texas and in New Mexico, the first thing I wanted to do was to get out of there. There were lots of arbitrary rules about masculinity.”

Modern man’s interpretation of masculinity is one of the themes Ford explores in his second film as writer, producer and actor — Nocturnal Animals. He adapted the film from Austin Wright’s novel Tony And Susan, and it stands as a cautionary tale about coming to terms with the choices people make as they move through life, and of the consequences that these decisions might have.

He casts Amy Adams as Susan Morrow a successful, if unhappy, woman who receives a manuscript from her first husband (played by Jake Gyllenhaal), which tells a story of violence and vengeance in the Texas desert. This Texas tale is told as a story within a story and the fictional character (also played by Gyllenhaal) must confront his own masculinity when a gang of hoodlums kidnaps his wife and child.

“One of the themes of the film that hit home personally for me was the exploration of masculinity in our culture,” Ford explains. “Jake’s characters do not possess the stereotypical traits of masculinity that our culture often expects yet in the end they both triumph. As a boy growing up in Texas, I was anything but what was considered classically masculine, and I suffered for it.”

Like his first film, 2009’s A Single Man, Ford has created a thing of beauty; Nocturnal Animals won the Grand Jury Prize at this year’s Venice Film Festival. He is, however, keen to separate his work in fashion from his ambitions in film. Though the film is artfully composed, and Adams’ character lives a life awash with high-end art and design, Ford insists that there is no cross-fertilisation, or singular aesthetic vision.

“I want to be taken seriously as a filmmaker,” he insists. “It is not a hobby. It is something that I love and I am hyper-self-conscious about not linking the two worlds in film. Amy’s character is very fashionable but that is about her character. She is living in a manufactured world, a world that, for her, is cold and grey and unhappy. Everything about her is thought-about because she is trying to be this thing that she thinks she should be.

“The fashion part of this film is very much in support of her character. Because I have a life as a fashion designer I am very self conscious about not letting those two worlds overlap.”

Those worlds might not overlap on screen, but they certainly overlap in his life. As well as proving an accomplished screenwriter and director, Ford has run his fashion brand since 2006, launching the label on the back of his stint as creative director at Gucci and Yves Saint Laurent. He is famed for turning round Gucci’s fortunes, becoming its creative director in 1994 when it was said to be near bankruptcy. Five years later, it was valued at more than $4 billion.

Among his influences is the late, famed designer Halston, whose work fed into Ford’s early designs at Gucci. The two had met when Ford moved to New York and caught the final days of the famed nightclub at Studio 54. He looks back on this period fondly.

“You are 17, you don’t realize you are gay and you move to New York,” he remembers. “You are attractive. All of a sudden people start inviting you to Studio 54. You get in free. You are drinking. You are doing lots of drugs. You are having lots of sex and living a life of complete hedonism that you dreamt about when you were young. It was amazing.

“I was exposed to people that had a tremendous impact on me. I mean, Halston made me eggs in his kitchen!

“I was exposed to his incredibly beautiful house and to people who were my ideals of glamour. All of a sudden I saw this life. It impacted on my perception of beauty and glamour, which is part of my principal aesthetic and soul.”

His interest in film has been constant: “That goes back to my childhood. I lived vicariously through film, like a lot of us do.” He laughs.

“I couldn’t wait to get to New York where I could have a beautiful, glamorous apartment and live like all the people I saw in the movies. The actual thought of ‘well, I want to make films,’ probably happened in the mid-1990s. I’d already had a certain amount of success in fashion at that time.” He was attracted to the durability that comes with a finished film, something that stands in stark contrast to his creations in the realm of clothes design. “I love fashion, but you don’t have permanence in fashion,” he says. “If you are someone who wants to express something, there is nothing like film. Film is forever, more than any medium.

“Watch an old movie, you are drawn in. You are crying. The director is dead, the writer is dead, the actors are dead but you have been living with them and living it all fresh. There is nothing else like that. In that regard, film is incredibly appealing.”

The idea of permanence also figures prominently in Ford’s thinking about his family. He is married to Richard Buckley, a former editor-in-chief of Vogue Hommes International. They have been in a relationship since 1986 and have a son, Jack Buckley Ford, who was born in 2012.

“My son is my best creation,” Ford says with a smile. “And what’s interesting is that I hear myself saying things to him that my father said to me. That makes me realise that he was saying those things to me because his father had said them to him, and his father and his father and his father.

“I can now view myself as a link in a chain, whereas when I didn’t have a child the world started when I was born, and it ended when I died. That is different now. It’s a personal thing and everyone who has children maybe understands that. I don’t know.” Whatever the case, Ford’s son can continue the Buckley Ford name. And Ford has his films, which will remain forever. Everyone can appreciate that — even those masculine types from Texas.