Tom Ford - interview

A Single Man has been praised and won Colin Firth Best Actor at the Venice Film Festival, so your decision to switch from fashion to film is vindicated. But it was brave. Were you worried?
Everyone expected I'd be ridiculed – but no one told me. They all said “Oh great! I can't wait." Now everyone asks how it felt to be snickered at. But no one snickered to me!

You rewrote a lot of Christopher Isherwood’s story about a bereaved gay man [Firth]. Why?
The book wouldn’t make a film. It’s an internal monologue with no plot. So I took it as a starting point. This is the last day this man thinks he is going to live, so he’s really looking at the world and learning to appreciate living. Not the beauty of things but of a man’s eyes, a girl's lips or an evening with his best friend [Julianne Moore]. Which is exactly what I was going through when I was writing it. I was mourning, not the death of a lover, but the loss of my voice in contemporary culture [when I left Gucci], and of my identity which was so wrapped up in that. I still love beautiful things. I just keep them more in perspective now.

The title is from a Tennyson poem about someone who gets eternal life but not eternal youth. Would that be worth having?
I wouldn't want eternal life. The death of a rose is what makes it beautiful. Sadness and beauty are linked.

It's a stylish film, which isn’t a surprise. The Hitchcock influence is, though: a huge backdrop of Janet Leigh’s eyes in Psycho, music that references Bernard Herrmann’s score for Vertigo…
Hitchcock is one of my favourite directors. Everything in his movies is absolutely stylised and I’m about exaggerated, enhanced reality. Even if I end up doing something unstylish, it will be stylishly unstylish. So it wasn’t that I set out to make a stylish film, it was more like: "Let’s move that clock slightly, that painting is horrible, he would never have had that." I had binders of visual references on each character: I knew George’s perfume, I had his stationery made at Smythson and put Savile Row labels inside his jackets.

Did you let costume designer Arianne Phillips do her thing?
I had as much influence as a director normally has, to say: "This is the kind of thing the character should wear." But Arianne did a terrific job on her own.

Except with Colin: he’s wearing your clothes.
No, she designed them. I made them – because I could make the right quality. I'm still making his clothes. I'm his tailor!

You've said that fashion is commerce while film is art. But fashion is creative too…
It doesn't endure, though. Whereas with a film, you're crying with these people, laughing with them – and it's a film from 1932, they're all dead! It's the most permanent thing we have.

What with Far from Heaven and now your film, Julianne Moore is becoming the thinking gay man's crumpet. She's very moving as George's lonely, ageing best friend…
I could make a whole movie about the plight of ageing women in our culture. There's the cliché of men buying a sports car and dating a young blonde, but we don't talk about what women go through. I work for women and love women, in a different way perhaps to straight men… I think I see them more objectively.

A lot of straight men don't love women anyway!
I think if I were a woman I might be a lesbian.

Then you'd have to fancy girls.
Well, if I were a woman I might. I don't not fancy girls anyway.

Colin Firth is amazing. He's such a good actor but often he doesn't deliver.
Every time I've seen him in anything I've wanted more. And that's a character trait of George's: he's one thing on the surface but underneath he's a romantic, full of sorrow and longing. And Colin is like that.

George holds a lot of himself back – he has to. But that's almost the definition of cool. And you've already said you do the same…
I think I am different on the surface, yes. But that's all I'm willing to put out there. Although actually I hate having cameras pointed at me. I'm good at it: I make them put the light there and use my best angle and so on. People make fun but I don't care, because I know how my face looks best. So that's all anyone’s ever going to see. It's a selling tool, it's part of my job and it allows me to do the creative part, which is the part I love. Nina Caplan

A Single Man opens in Australia on Thu 25 Feb

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