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"  Novice filmmakers don&amp;#039;t usually set off Oscar buzz their first time out, but Tom Ford is not your ordinary novice. A young supernova in the fashion world, he eventually found himself in crisis mode, but instead of the usual drug-fueled crash and burn, he struck out in a whole new creative direction, optioning the Christopher Isherwood novel A Single Man as well as a screenplay based on it. Then he realized the novel was too meditative to be a gripping story on film. But since Ford is unstoppable, he proceeded to write one around the novel&amp;#039;s main character, George Falconer (Colin Firth), a quietly elegant British lit professor in California who has lost the love of his life (Matthew Goode) in an automobile accident. It&amp;#039;s 1962, when homosexuality was still on the books as a psychiatric disorder, so Falconer hides his anguish behind a fa\u00E7ade of courteous British reserve. That fa\u00E7ade never cracks, but Falconer has, and you watch with a lump in your throat as he goes around meticulously tying up loose ends, making things as easy as possible for those who will have to clean up after what he&amp;#039;s decided will be the last day of his life. If the movie is wrenching at times, Ford makes it unexpectedly comical at others (turns out that trying to kill yourself can be just as ludicrous as any other human enterprise). A Single Man is a thing of artful beauty, like Falconer&amp;#039;s breathtaking glass-and-timber house, where he spends a potentially seismic evening with a favorite student (Nicholas Hoult). But Ford tweaks his own impeccable taste with loving bursts of over-the-top early &amp;#039;60s glam, most of it courtesy of Julianne Moore as Falconer&amp;#039;s expensively flamboyant former lover and oldest friend. ELLE: You said you modeled Julianne&amp;#039;s character on your grandmother. Was your grandmother very dashing? Tom Ford: She was really stylish. When we were doing the costumes, getting all sorts of dresses from the period, we narrowed it down to five, and incredibly, when we looked at the label of the one we picked, it was from a Santa Fe shop where my grandmother had a lot of her clothes made. She wasn&amp;#039;t stylish in the New York-London-Paris world I&amp;#039;ve grown used to. She was stylish in a provincial way\u2014she was the hottest thing in Dallas! And she was one reason I became a fashion designer. Women like that bring so much to life. ELLE: Had you ever made even a short film before making this feature? TF: Never. ELLE: You have the nerve of God! TF: I believe that when you really want to do something, you should go ahead and do it. I mean, I feel fear, but I never let that stop me. ELLE: How were you able to juggle making this movie and keeping up your design work? TF: That was tough, but you know, when I was at Gucci as creative director, I was responsible for 10 different lines, and I was doing Laurent. But I&amp;#039;m extremely organized. The more things I have to work on and can bounce back and forth between, the more energized I am. It was hard, but when you love what you&amp;#039;re doing, somehow you have the energy to do everything. ELLE: How old were you when you became successful in the fashion world? TF: In my early 30s. I was at one time the largest individual shareholder of Gucci, so I made an enormous amount of money when we first went public, and then there was another offering, and I made more then. And I had been with someone [fashion editor Richard Buckley] for 10 years then, 23 now, so I had everything you could want at an early age.  ELLE: I&amp;#039;ve read that you once had a spiritual crisis. When was that? TF: It was in my early 40s. I started to feel that I had neglected the spiritual side of my life. It had always been there, but I&amp;#039;d neglected it. In fashion, that&amp;#039;s really easy because we live in the future (we&amp;#039;re always a season ahead), and we can place too much importance on material things. I started reading the Tao Te Ching. Do you know it? ELLE: Actually, yes, I have the Stephen Mitchell translation in which &amp;quot;the master&amp;quot; is sometimes a woman. I read it every morning when I was the editor of The Village Voice. It kept me sane. That was a wonderful job, but hard, not herding cats so much as herding wildcats. TF: [laughs] I bet it was. I carry the Tao with me now all the time. ELLE: Wow, that&amp;#039;s wonderful. I think this part is a great boon for Colin Firth because it took him into a character unlike any he&amp;#039;s played before\u2014not simply gay, but so precise and contained and so decent. Was it easy to persuade him to do it? TF: He was very easy to convince. He was my first choice, but he was very busy with other things. So I cast someone else who dropped out later, and Colin was available, so I sent him the script. Not to get too zodiac, but Isherwood&amp;#039;s a Virgo, I&amp;#039;m a Virgo, and Colin&amp;#039;s a Virgo\u2014so it all worked out. ELLE: Yikes, I&amp;#039;m a Virgo! TF: [laughs] There, you see? [We talk about Isherwood and loving Goodbye to Berlin.] Read A Single Man; it&amp;#039;s very different from the movie but a wonderful book. ELLE: I will. Now, how did you find Nicholas Hoult? TF: I had cast another actor [Jamie Bell] who&amp;#039;d been attached to the project for six months, and as we were getting ready to shoot, he literally did not show up\u2014had his agent tell us he was dropping out of the film. Two weeks earlier, I had seen a taped audition Nicholas did, so I rushed someone to London to wake him up at 2 a.m. and rush him to Canada to get a quick visa. ELLE: I felt as if Nick&amp;#039;s performance brought extra layers to the role. You come away feeling you know him and wanting the best for him. TF: Nick in real life is so adorable and sweet you want the best for him too. And he&amp;#039;s a really serious actor. He&amp;#039;s got a very strong English accent, and his American one was perfect. ELLE: Was it your idea to make the girl he pals around with a pouty Brigitte Bardot lookalike? TF: Yes it was. ELLE: That was so clever\u2014exactly what a young Bohemian might have done in 1962. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.elle.com/culture/movies-tv/interviews/a10742/tom-fords-tender-first-film-a-single-man-388706/>