DIRECTOR CHRISTINA VOROS & PRODUCER JAMES FRANCO
'THE DIRECTOR' (2013) is an intimate portrait of Gucci’s Creative Director, FridaGiannini, THE DIRECTOR spans 18 months behind the walls of the iconic Italian fashion house, exploring the intricacies and inspiration behind the quietly brilliant power woman, whose own evolution as the creative force behind force the brand is as nuanced as that of the storied fashion house itself.
Q&A WITH DIRECTOR CHRISTINA VOROS
Q: How did you decide to make a portrait film about FridaGiannini and Gucci?
CHRISTINA: I was born into a family of designers. My great aunts, Vali and Mimi, had made costumes for the opera and the circus in their native Hungary before immigrating to the US where they opened up a couture shop on the Upper East Side in the 1960’s. As a child I grew up underfoot in Vali and Mimi’s shop, immersed in the textures of velvet and sequins and the incessant whirring of sewing machines. The art of fashion has always fascinated me.
The advent of the film was peculiar. I was in Paris, prepping the first feature that James (Franco) and I worked on together, THE BROKEN TOWER, and he arrived to set the first day of the shoot having just come from a screening of LA DOLCE VITA in Romehosted by Gucci – the brand had apparently helped to restore the print. And he said – I want to do a film about Frida. At that point James and I had only worked together as director and cinematographer, so I just filed it in my mind for the time being. (“Note to self, look up who Frida is”). Of course at that point in her career she’d been at Gucci for six years and as creative director for four years. But since I wasn't deep into the contemporary fashion scene, I was an ignoramus and really had no idea who she was.
That same night, my great aunt Vali passed away (at an astonishing 97). The next day James said, “I think you should go to Rome and start shooting this movie.” That’s how it began. Then there were months of discussions and deliberations on the how, what, when and where. It was a bit of a cajoling sell at the beginning because as soon as I started my research on Frida I was thinking, “How do people NOT know who this woman is, she’s amazing! What a wonderful subject for a film.” In many ways, high fashion and documentary film are absolutely antithetical to one another. One is about a fabricating perfection; the other is about unraveling it.
Q: What do you think makes Gucci such an iconic fashion house?
CHRISTINA: I think it has a great deal to do with the brands reverence for history and craftsmanship. I recall my father’s Gucci loafers in the 70’s, and I remember coveting them, they had this aura of luxurious old-world cool. Even as a teenager I remember associating the name with a certain timeless modern gravitas. That has always been my impression of the brand.
Q: Can you discuss how FridaGiannini is taking inspiration back from the cinema (ie.Cinecittà)?
CHRISTINA: In exploring Gucci’s history, I really came to understand that the interplay between fashion and cinema has always been integral to both industries. I don’t think I ever really thought about it before making this film. Gucci really is perhaps one of the most striking examples of that. It’s a strange Mobius strip of influence that is quite fascinating. One could almost say they are dependent ecosystems, both rooted in the aspirational and the creation of dreams.
Early on in production we filmed a Gucci photo shoot with James at Cinecittà (a large film studio located in Rome considered to be the hub of Italian cinema), and for the longest time I couldn’t find a way to make it work in the film. It was beautiful, but I couldn’t place its meaning until Frida started talking about the way cinema has influenced her collections and the fashion industry in general. There was a critical interplay between the disciplines that it became important to me to touch on in the film because, in many ways, Gucci became an international brand due to the influence of American actors coming to Cinecittà and discovering the brand and bringing it back west with them.
Now that I am going back and actually looking for it, you see Gucci everywhere – fromItalian Cinema of the 60's to BLAZING SADDLES to PRETTY WOMAN. Some of that is straight up product placement. But a Gucci bag in a film is not the same as a MacBook or a Coke can. It's shorthand. The brand has become so iconic that the symbolism of it stands for something now. It says something about a character.
Q: What kind of preparations and research did you do prior to shooting?
CHRISTINA: I bought Rosetta stone in Italian and read 3 articles on Frida. I've had filmmaker friends tell me that I do things backwards, but for a portrait or process pieces I often consider research as the second stage, not the first. I like to start by knowing only as much about a person as they are willing to share with me, and to get to know them without the filter of someone else's perspective, or their press persona. After we'd been shooting for 6 months I went back and read everything I could, watched every video I could find online. One of the loveliest things to me about Frida is that she is incredibly real. She is poised in public but being in front of the cameras is not where she would rather be. So the research I did post factum was helpful in terms of stitching together the chronology, and certain facts, but as such a private person there was little in the research that taught me as much as sitting in a room with her and watching her work.
Q: What are some of the difficulties you and your team faced during production, and how did you overcome them?
CHRISTINA: When we began shooting I spoke no Italian. Now I can catch about 75% of most conversations. It made things a little tricky in the beginning. Frida and her team are incredibly close, very tightly knit and protective of each other. It was a hard seal to break in the beginning. However, by the 4th or 5th shoot we started to find that balance of being invisible but present, that is to say, people would greet you when you entered the room and then forget that you were there. In the beginning it was a bit of the reverse. People wouldn't really acknowledge your presence until you were in the way. Not in an unkind way, but in a manner that made it clear that they were protective of Frida and of each other, and we were in a place where cameras had never been allowed to go before. Developing trust with my subjects is always the most important element for me. In a world where image and perfection is everything, relaxing into the presence of a camera can be a difficult thing. But over time we got there. We finished shooting in October and I received numerous emails after the men's show in January saying, "It was so weird not to have you guys there, we missed you."
Q: Behind the walls of Gucci, have you made any major discoveries in regards to the creative process?
CHRISTINA: n exploring Frida's work, I've come to meditate a great deal on my own creative process. Unlike writing or painting which are more solitary endeavors, fashion and filmmaking are similar in that both require a tremendous collaborative effort; both are industries that synthesize many disparate elements into a specific idea or spectacle, and require many hands and minds to do so. Frida is a brilliant designer, but her role requires her to be so much more. She is a director and this tasks her to be as much of a leader as an artist. It was inspiring to be a fly on the wall inside her house, and it taught me a great deal about myself and the balance of creativity and leadership in my own process as a director in a different medium.
Q: Were there any footage or scenes that were left in the editing room that you think would have been beneficial to include in the film?
CHRISTINA: We collected a vast amount of footage over the last 18 months. Naturally we had to make decisions, it was important for me to give a sense of the breadth of what a year inside the house feels like, so certainly there are pieces that I wish we could have found a way to include. But when you try to include too much you risk never allowing the audience to really inhabit anything. So we were balancing the inclusion of a great variety of material with the pacing necessary to allow those events to be experienced.
Q: During production, what was one thing you learned or surprised you? What will you take away from this experience?
CHRISTINA: I was blown away by the vast scope of the design process both in terms of how many moving pieces there are, what a collaborative effort it really is, but also in terms of the sheer numbers. So many ideas are developed and so few dresses or bags actually make it to the runway. The level of scrutiny and the number of decisions that are made to narrow a collection down to a show is astonishing.
Q: There is a recurring theme between THE DIRECTOR and your previous film KINK, the influence of strong females, what is it about this idea that attracts you?
CHRISTINA: It's funny. At one point, being in production on both films at the same time, I remember thinking, "Wow, these movies really couldn't be more different," but looking at them together now there are a number of recurring themes. It has very much been the year of leather and horse bits. As a filmmaker I am really intrigued by watching the way something is made. I've always found portraits of process to be fascinating, ever since I was a kid and I'd watch those videos on “Mr. Rogers Neighborhood” where they'd show you how crayons or graham crackers were manufactured. Watching something start as an idea and end as a tangible object is tremendously satisfying, I think. And it's especially satisfying for me to watch that process unfold around a creative pursuit. In addition, as a woman I have been greatly influenced by female artists in my life, so naturally I am drawn towards stories about strong women, especially women who have carved out a place for themselves in industries that are still predominantly run by men.
And lastly I am drawn toward films that allow me to pull back the curtain to explore worlds that we don't get to see every day. Both films explore the machinery behind companies that produce highly popular and highly profitable products. They are both selling dreams of sorts, and when one learns how the dream is made you run the risk of diffusing some of its magic, so watching that kind of process in particular is specifically interesting to me. It's like witnessing some kind of secret alchemy.
Q: What would you like the audience to take away from the film?
CHRISTINA: Fashion permeates our world; brands drive us and define us as a society – even if we choose not to buy into the symbolism of what that means. In a globalized economy companies are the new nations, and there is a great deal to be examined in the ways in which art is commoditized. This complex ecosystem is a back drop for a very simple portrait of a remarkable woman in a fascinating place of creative power. My hope is that it takes the audience through a journey of subtle evolution and a greater understanding of an artist and of the industry on which she is leaving her indelible mark.
-OFFICIAL TRIBECA PRESS-
Edited by Vanessa McMahon