Tom Ford's directing debut A Single Man made him a very wanted filmmaker in Hollywood.
The big screen adaptation of the Christopher Isherwood novel of the same name earned one Oscar nomination and three Golden Globe noms.
Now, seven years later, Ford's second directorial outing, Nocturnal Animals, is already being touted for award season. Just last week, he won the Silver Lion Grand Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival.
He promises not to wait as long to make his next film. "I know what it is but I'm not ready to talk about it yet," Ford told me at the Toronto International Film Festival. "It's not going to be seven years. Let's say two and a half or three. I think it takes three years if you're a director to make a film. You got to write it, you got to get it out there, you got to finance it, you got to make it [and] edit it so let's hope for three years."
Nocturnal Animals follows an art gallery owner (Amy Adams) who confronts her past when she receives a copy of a disturbing novel written by her ex-husband. The cast also includes Armie Hammer as Adams' current husband, Jake Gyllenhaal as her ex and a character in the novel as well as Michael Shannon as a Texas detective and Aaron Taylor-Johnson as the leader of a trio of violent hillbillies.
Why did Ford wait so long between projects?
"I opened 100 stores, had a child, he's four years old now and I promised myself and him that I wasn't going to make a movie for awhile," he explained. "I did not intend it would be seven years but I believe a movie should say something and this movie is really about loyalty. It's about finding the people in your life that you believe in, that believe in you, that you love and holding onto that. So it's a cautionary tale of what can happen if you don't do that. "
Fortunately, Ford has those people in his life—he married his husband Richard Buckley two years ago after being together for 27 years.
Nocturnal Animals (check out its first trailer below) is in theaters on Dec. 9.