Colin Firth made a dramatic entry in the awards picture last year when Tom Ford’s “A Single Man” screened at the Venice and Toronto Film Festivals. He won unanimous raves for his role as a college professor in the early 1960s who tries to hide his devastation after his partner of two decades is killed in an auto accident.
A stylish, lovely meditation on love, loss and acceptance, the film turned the fashion designer into a serious writer-director, and Firth into an immediate Oscar contender.
The actor is a Best Actor nominee, his first nomination in a 25-year career that has found him appearing in everything from the BBC miniseries “Pride and Prejudice” to films like “Shakespeare in Love,” “Bridget Jones’s Diary”and “Mamma Mia!”
Been traveling a lot lately?
It’s been crazy, really. I come out of the rabbit hole, blinking in the daylight. It’s kind of a culture shock, going from your day job into this sort of thing so rapidly.
I remember Renee Zellweger doing this when we were making “Bridget Jones’s Diary.” She would go to L.A. for the weekend to do press, and I said, “That’s insane. You cannot possibly do that.” And now that’s precisely what I’ve been doing. Which is not a complaint.
If you make an awards movie for Harvey Weinstein, you work.
Yes, you do. Although I’ve never had a single call from Harvey saying, “You must do this” or “you have to do that.”
You’re obliged to do it for one of two reasons, really. One is that you got paid, and this is why they pay you. They don’t pay you to do the acting, you do that because you like it. You get paid because they think you’ll be worth something when it comes time to talk about it.
Or the other reason is that you didn’t get paid, in which case it’s a tiny little movie which needs you to do it. And you probably worked in a fairly intimate atmosphere, where you’re very close to the people who need your support. Which is the case with this.
Despite the enormity of Tom’s fame, this is small stuff. We shot in 21 days, had no budget, and it’s entirely dependent on people’s response and word-of-mouth. That’s the only currency it has, really.
When Tom approached you, were you confident that his skills in other areas would translate into directing?
It didn’t seem like an unreasonable assumption, considering that the skills weren’t entirely unrelated. I know that it does not follow that because you’re a good photographer you’re a good filmmaker, or that because you can design eyewear and fragrance and clothes that you can command a narrative, or that because you can run a fashion house that you can run a film set.
But if you put those things together, and you look at a man who’s written a script that I think is pretty compelling and beautiful, and has the passion that he had and can speak so eloquently about it, and has chosen the actors that he’s chosen … I know that I’m talking about me – and quite frankly, vanity has no small part to play in this.
