Los Angeles/ December 2016 – The International Press Academy established the Auteur Award in 2005 to honor filmmakers whose singular vision and unique artistic control are reflected in films that influence audiences and fellow artists alike.
This year’s Auteur Award recipient is Tom Ford, film director, fashion designer, screenwriter and film producer.
Ford dazzled those who love movies with his latest film “Nocturnal Animals,” nominated for the IPA’s Best Picture of the Year. Ford is also nominated as Best Director of the Year and star Amy Adams is nominated for the movie as Best Actress.
The film is an adaptation of Austin Wright’s novel and follows Tony (played by Jake Gyllenhaal) who is driving through Texas with his wife and daughter when their car is hit by menacing hoodlums. Amy Adams plays the heroine of the story.
His first film was the Oscar-nominated “A Single Man” The Christopher Isherwood adaptation became a critical hit in 2009 that earned star Colin Firth a BAFTA award and an Oscar nomination for the role of a gay college professor who is haunted by the loss of his longtime lover in the 1960s.
Firth calls Ford “”one of the best directors I’ve worked with in 30 years. Tom’s elegance and composure are obvious to everyone. He’s immaculate, calm, articulate and gentle.”
Ford holds many honors, including the GLAAD Media Vito Russo Award, the CFDA Geoffrey Beene Lifetime Achievement Award and the Bodil Award for Best American Film for “A Single Man.” He also won the Silver Lion Grand Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival for “Nocturnal Animals.”
Ford is the perfect pick for the Auteur Award. He is an edgy, trend-setting modernist who speaks longingly and nostalgically about the past. He says the early images of beauty in his childhood came from his mother and grandmother, his fashion role models. “My mother was chic and classic and my paternal grandmother was stylish in a very Texas way—everything big and flashy from jewelry to car.”
When he rose to the top of the fashion world, he reinvented Gucci’s image, combining these two styles into a Texas-inspired flashiness—somehow also chic—with a Western feel. “The images of beauty you get in your childhood stick with you for life,” he says.
Ford has won countless fashion awards for his work with Gucci and his own Tom Ford brand, including five Council of Fashion Designers of America awards and four VH1/Vogue Fashion Awards. He was named GQ designer of the year in 2001. Ford’s talents span the world of top fashion and now his second career as an honored filmmaker.
Though Ford is one of the biggest influences on design and fashion of the late 20th Century, he is much more moved by creating movies than by creating new fashions. A man who thinks a great deal about death, he sees the immortality of a film. Watching an old movie from the 1930’s, he weeps with the people even though they are long gone. “All the actors are dead, everyone who worked on it, but you’re feeling the emotion,” he says. “It’s alive forever … Every time you watch it the same thing happens. And it’s forever, forever, forever.”
Ford joins past Auteur Award recipients Guillermo del Toro, Baz Luhrmann, Robert Altman, George Clooney, Julian Schnabel, Roger Corman, Alex Gibney, Peter Bogdanovich and Paul Williams. Journalist, novelist, director Martyn Burke, who made the Peabody Award-winning documentary “Under Fire: Journalists in Combat,” accepted the award last year.
