TIFF 2016: FASHION DESIGNER TURNED DIRECTOR TOM FORD TALKS ABOUT HIS SECOND MOVIE “NOCTURNAL ANIMALS”

Amy Adams, Jake Gyllenhaal and Armie Hammer lead an all-star cast in director Tom Ford’s second feature film about a woman who is forced to confront the demons of her past.

Based on the novel Tony and Susan by Austin Wright, the story follows Susan (Adams), a successful Los Angeles art-gallery owner who finds her paradise troubled by the frequent absences of her second husband (Hammer), a handsome young doctor, due to his incessant travelling.

Susan is rattled further when a manuscript arrives on her desk, written by her long-estranged first husband, Tony (Gyllenhaal) that piques her interest in an unsuspecting way.

Alone, with her current husband away in New York, Susan opens the manuscript and is propelled into the fictional life of a teacher whose drive to his summer house with his family is about to turn into a nightmare.

As Susan gets deeper into the book, she is forced to examine her own past and where her current life will take her.

“We’re constantly bombarded with things,” Ford said at the Princess of Wales Theatre at the  TIFF premiere. “Buy this, you’re going to feel this way, get that, you’re going to be happy, have this and you’re going to get the guy of your life. We sort of push a sort of happiness that isn’t life. Life is happy, life is sad, life is painful. And I realize that I am one of the people creating all these products and I’ve often been very torn about that and that’s what this film is about.”

Nocturnal Animals premieres at TIFF 2016.