Movie Blog Post: NOCTURNAL ANIMALS

by Tinsel & Tine Editor, Le Anne Lindsay

Amy Adams is having a good month, last we talked about her movie Arrival (click for T&T post) but she’s also the central character in designer/filmmaker Tom Ford’s Nocturnal Animals. Ford said it took him 7 years to get another film to the screen after 2009’s critically acclaimed A Single Man (click for T&T post) starring Colin Firth, because he had a child, built 100 stores and had a hard time finding material he could completely control. Nocturnal Animals is based on a novel by Austin Wright called “Tony and Susan”, but Ford admits to changing a lot while keeping the basic premise, which he feels is really about finding people in your life that mean something to you and not letting go of them, and what can happen to you when you do. 

Like A Single Man, Nocturnal Animals is also very stylized and gorgeous, a feast for the senses. Well, the parts that take place in Amy Adams world, as Susan a chic art gallery owner living in the hills of LA – but then it’s juxtaposed against a story her ex-husband wrote and dedicated to her, that’s set in rural Texas and deals with the brutal rape and kidnapping of a man’s wife and child. Her ex-husband is played by Jake Gyllenhaal so as she’s reading the story, of course she pictures him has the main character. In flashbacks you find out she’d always been very critical of his work, but she’s completely engrossed in this manuscript, which contains a lot of symbolism about their past relationship, but it’s the story itself that seems to have her transfixed.

The Playlist.com: O.K., so what made you decide to place her in Los
Angeles, living in this beautiful home in the hills?

Tom Ford: Make it personal. Connect it to something that I can relate
to, something that I’ve been through. Take that materialism which is
present in the book, blow it up to something that I’ve struggled with.
I’m lucky, I’m a lucky person. I’ve been able to have all of these
things that our culture tells you you should have, and I went through a
period where they overtook my life and I let my relationships with
people go, not in the way that she does. I had no sense of spirituality
or connection with the universe or any sort of balance at all… READ MORE