Frédéric Tcheng is the director of Dior
& I, a documentary about creative director Raf Simons’ first collection for
the storied Parisian house, which is in cinemas 27 March. Here is what he
learned about the rarefied world of couture during filming.
Simons is notoriously private – but Tcheng won him over in the end
“Raf said no [to the documentary] initially, which I can understand. He
didn’t want to engage in the image-driven world of publicity, and it’s not an
easy thing to have cameras pointed at you in one of the most challenging periods
of your career. But we convinced him to allow us in for a trial period of one
week, and once he appreciated that we were not going to focus on just him but on
the atelier, that seemed to reassure him.” Raf Simons takes inspiration from a 1950s gown from the
Christian Dior archive Photograph: Dior & I
Not everyone was so shy, however...
“One woman in the atelier, Lulu, who was in charge of sourcing buttons and
zippers and mannequins, really wanted to be on camera – so much so that she had
a fight with another seamstress about it.”
The Dior atelier is run on Coke Zero
“I have never seen people drink so much Coke Zero. They are literally
obsessed with it. One day I saw a crate of hundreds of cans that had been
delivered to the office, and the next day they had all gone, and another came.
Every day there were the same conversations: where are the cold cokes? People
would fetch them from different fridges.”
John Galliano ended up on the cutting room floor
“There was a version which included some of the news reports about Galliano,
[Simons’ predecessor at Dior, who left after he was caught an antisemitic rant
in a bar in Paris] but in the end I felt that didn’t make sense in the film.
Everything that happened before Raf arrived, with the Galliano scandal, had been
covered a lot and it felt as though it belonged to the news cycle, not in the
reality of the present. It also became clear that Raf was digging into the first
10 years of the house – that’s what he was having a dialogue with, so it made
sense to focus on that.”
Christian Dior played an important part in the film – from beyond the
grave
“While researching the film, I found a tiny little grey Christian Dior
autobiography, with such an emotional depiction of work as designer, with every
step described in such fascinating detail. I would read it at night, after a
long day shooting [at the atelier] and would feel I was reading what I had seen
that same day. There was a very interesting relationship between the past and
the present. A sense that history repeats itself but it’s a brand new journey
for the people going through it.” Simons’ assistant, Pieter Mulier, right, helps take up a
hem. Photograph: Dior & I
Simons’ assistant, Pieter Mulier, is the atelier’s unofficial boss
“Pieter is an incredible force to be reckoned with. He manages to get so much
done with a smile. He was pivotal – he held so many keys – he was our ‘go to’
person. He was always so charming. He charmed everyone.” Raf Simons meets his new team at Dior. Photograph: Dior
& I
Raf’s wardrobe was laden with meaning – particularly his shorts
“Raf has a uniform – his clothes are bordering on clerical, although with
completely outrageous shoes. I also loved his shorts. Psychologically, when he
showed up in shorts to the office, it marked a turning point in collection. The
sun is out and Raf feels comfortable enough to show up in shorts at Dior.”
Simons likes his music loud
“Raf is a fan of Plastikman and Nine Inch Nails, which he plays at volume,
which was kind of a nightmare for us as it meant we couldn’t use some of what we
were filming. He would turn the music up and sing the lyrics very loudly. His
team found it endearing but [it made it] hard [for them] to focus.” Hard work at the atelier. Photograph: Dior & I
Everyone in the atelier had creative input
“The seamstresses referred to the dresses they were making as their babies –
they put a lot of themselves into their work. They have an inner life and are
engaged and involved in their work. I hope that the film showed fashion in a
different light – that it’s a collaborative art form, not just a one man show,
as the media portrays it.” The atelier workers choose a dress from the collection to
sew. Photograph: Dior & I
Simons stayed away during the edit
“After the premier, Raf called me and explained that he had kept his distance
until then because he did not want to influence my decisions while making the
film. I thought it was remarkable that he would be thoughtful like that.”
It is five years since Polly Samson published a book, and she wrote her new
one, The Kindness, through what she calls “horrible times”. Two years
ago her father, a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany who came to England on the
Kindertransport as a boy in 1938, died in hospital in “utterly miserable”
circumstances after a mistakenly prescribed double dose of antibiotics destroyed
his liver.
The year before that, Samson’s friend, the journalist Cassandra Jardine, died
of lung cancer. And the year before that, Samson’s eldest son Charlie went to
prison after admitting “violent disorder” for his part in an attack on Topshop
that followed the tuition fee protests of December 2010, during which he was
pictured on the bonnet of Prince Charles’s car and hanging from a flag on the
Cenotaph.
At times she found it difficult to focus on anything else. The first draft of
the story that grew into The Kindness was framed by an account of a
prison visit. Then there was a plan for an intriguing combination of novella and
linked short stories. But over the course of the miles-long walks she takes from
her house on a bustling corner of the sea front at Hove, Samson gathered
her material together and stitched it into the densely plotted, dynamic domestic
thriller – with an English idyll of ivy-covered house, meadow and hammock on the
cover – that is sitting on the coffee table in front of us.
“It’s the most gleeful sort of writing there is,” she says from the large
sofa where she is smoking roll-ups and looking out to sea. “For days I’d be
thinking, how does this happen? How do the characters not know this information
or how do we not know it? All those technical problems. That’s the thing about
walking – or sleeping, it’s the same – it just solves them and then you can’t
wait to get back to the top of the house.”
By coincidence, following the triumph of Helen Macdonald’s memoir H Is
for Hawk, The Kindness opens with a falconry scene, but swiftly
moves indoors to trace the contours of grief. Julian has lost both partner Julia
and daughter Mira, and is stuck in a country house with their ghosts, his
overbearing mum and needy former girlfriend.
From empty picture frames and beds the novel moves backwards, to the couple’s
ever-so-romantic beginnings, their grotty L-shaped flat, and the accidental
pregnancy and miscarriage that preceded Mira. On a whim, we learn, Julian moved
the family back to his picturesque childhood home, Firdaws. Then childhood
cancer struck: blood tests, scans, tubes, “pale, curdy sick”.
The novel is contemporary but deeply indebted to the past. Samson’s
grandmother used to say the family lost “just two aunts” in the Holocaust, but
since her father’s death, and aided by a trunk of papers she inherited, Samson
has become obsessed with piecing together the truth. In particular she is
interested in her great-uncle Heino, who killed himself in the 1970s and whose
black-and-white photograph of painter Mark Rothko sits behind her on a shelf.
The feelings of living people mean she must be careful what she reveals, but she
has drawn on family secrets in The Kindness and recently went to Paris
to meet the woman Heino loved in later life.
“My father was from Hamburg and most of his family got out, but like a lot of
people he didn’t want to talk about Germany, the war or the Holocaust,” she
says. “It was sealed off, and when we went to live in Cornwall” – in 1970 when
she was eight – “ties were pretty much severed with everyone except my
grandmother. I had no access to my Jewish family at all but they did all the
things I do – they wrote, they took pictures – and finding out about them has
given me a much stronger sense of who I am.”
Samson’s husband is David Gilmour, the musician, best known for being in Pink
Floyd, with whom she has two sons and a daughter. Gilmour, who is 16 years her
senior, has four adult children from his first marriage and Samson’s son Charlie
also comes from a previous relationship, though Gilmour adopted him. They are a
modern blended family, but what is striking about Samson’s background is that
this is nothing new. Second and third marriages and webs of siblings go back at
least two generations to her grandmother, an East End chambermaid of Jewish or
Romany origins who married the scion of a well-to-do Shanghai family but was
sent back to England following the 1937 Japanese invasion, leaving her husband
to start again.
Samson’s mother Esther was six at the time, and she and her brothers went
first to a children’s home and then to what Samson calls “pretty scary foster
parents”. She survived to fall in with a group of Spanish communist students,
marry a Chinese-American war hero and smuggle herself to China. There, she found
a set of half-siblings, though not her father, and stayed for 10 years, serving
in the Red Army and working as an interpreter for journalists including the
Daily Worker’s Alan Winnington, who became her second husband.
Samson’s parents met in East Berlin, when the British Communist party gave
her father the job of trying to get Winnington out of China, where he was stuck
without a passport. They fell in love and had Polly before marrying in 1969, but
Winnington remained a long-distance member of the family, with his son and
Esther’s child by her previous relationship brought up with Polly, who grew up
calling her biological father “Lance” and Winnington “Daddy”. Polly Samson with her husband David Gilmour.Photograph: Dave M Benett/Getty Images
Asked whether her first novel, Out of the Picture (2001), which she
dedicated to Charlie and is all about a young woman’s attempts to reconnect with
her absent artist-father, expressed the hope that Charlie might in some way
reconnect with his own lost parent, the poet Heathcote Williams, Samson says she
wonders if the book wasn’t more about herself. Contact with Winnington, the
second father of her early years, suddenly stopped: “No one thought I might have
a yearning and looking back now I think I did.” She later learned he had kept
one of her baby shoes all his life.
Samson’s parents stuck with the Communist party through the Soviet invasion
of Czechslovakia and gave up their membership quietly in the 1970s. Her father
went from the Daily Worker (now the Morning Star) to the Packet group of local
newspapers in Cornwall, where her half-Chinese mother became head of a village
school.
“My parents very much enjoyed each other’s company and didn’t really need
anyone else,” she says. “We lived in an old tin-mining village that even people
in the next town had never heard of. They didn’t have a lot of friends or
do much socialising. Maybe they just wanted a rest.”
Samson had virtually dropped out of school by 14, but at her grandmother’s
urging she moved to London and got a secretarial job in publishing, from where
she rose to become head publicist at Jonathan Cape. She began a relationship
with Williams, moved back to Cornwall and in 1989 had their son. When Williams
walked out, Samson returned to London in a “terrible state” and was offered
a place to stay by Jardine, a virtual stranger who became a close friend.
She married Gilmour five years later, only deciding she
believed in marriage as they arrived at Marylebone town hall. Today they preside
over their “huge tribe of children” and the vast German shepherd she got from a
rescue home at the height of her anxiety about Charlie’s incarceration. She has
taken up smoking again, suffers from stage fright so acute that she takes
beta-blockers before public appearances, and travels to London each week to
see a psychotherapist.
A “really, really secret writer” for many years, Samson wrote her first novel
in six weeks because she wanted it finished before her short stories came out
and bad reviews crushed her confidence. In the event critics were enthusiastic:
her new novel has received much advance praise and she has moved to a new
publisher after a prolonged courtship. At Gilmour’s urging she also revealed
herself as his lyricist, and lights up with excitement when she plays me rough
versions of a couple of tracks on his forthcoming album. One was inspired by
book two of Paradise
Lost; another by a painting on the wall above the fireplace.
Samson suffered a pang about her own lack of education when she delivered her
son Charlie to Cambridge. She struggled in her 20s, she says, when “everyone
else had a gang from university”. Reading Paradise Lost, which features
in her novel as well as Gilmour’s song, she thought: “I would love to be going
to lectures. I would love someone to set me an essay on this.” When stuck with
her writing she took to spending long days at the piano, having begun lessons to
help her children before deciding to take the exams herself.
Her last book of short stories had the ironic title Perfect Lives.
Since then Samson has had what she calls “about the most horrible experience of
my life”, visiting her son in prison: “They make it about as unpleasant as they
can. The glass is smeared with semen and you speak through a kind of box.
I had one or two of my younger children with me and it was terrible for them.”
She remains angry about what happened, and critical of legislation that meant
Charlie was convicted of “violent disorder” although he didn’t attack
anyone.
But as she sets out for her afternoon walk with songs to write rather than
a plot twist to resolve – she is where she wants to be: “I feel like I’ve hit my
lyrical stride,” she says. “I am so in the mood for this.”
Audrey Hepburn was a distinctive personality that has successfully charmed generation after generation. She won the Best Actress in a Leading Role Oscar for this picture and her popularity, along with her career, never looked back. During her film career she would receive four additional Best Actress nominations.
Funnyface, and Breakfast at Tiffany's. She was the every woman, beautiful, but not necessarily glamorous, sensual, but not overtly sexual, a woman whose naturalness appealed to both men and women. To say that Audrey Hepburn is a style icon is an understatement of epic proportions. For women that appreciate a classic look that will never fail, the look of Audrey Hepburn simply IS style.
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Born Oprah Gail Winfrey in 1954 on a farm in Mississippi, Oprah experienced hardships early in her life. At the age of 6, she was sexually abused and neglected when living with her mother in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Unlike so many other child abuse stories that end terribly, Oprah was able to leave the neglect behind and stay with her father, where she learned that life held so much more than the abuse she experienced. While Oprah excelled as a news anchor, her empathy towards the people in the news stories began to affect her emotionally to the point where she could not continue.
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2013 is all set to be an interesting year since month after month, there is
one or the biggie hitting the screens. While Bollywood is indeed spoilt with all
the choices that are being served on the platter, here is presenting those
Bollywood movies that should keep audience interested.
Himmatwala (Mar 2013)
Ajay Devgn and Sajid Khan – Both are on a roll and have proven their
credentials over the years. With the duo coming together for the first time, it
is expected that 'Himmatwala' would be a 'baap' of all entertainers. Moreover,
industry is waiting with bated breath to see how Tamanna Bhatia fills the big
shoes of Sridevi.
Ek Thi Daayan (Apr)
Emraan Hashmi, who has gathered superstar status, is finding himself in an
unusual space with 'Ek Thi Daayan' that has three leading ladies around him.
With Ekta Kapoor backing the film, it is expected that the marketing and
promotional plan would take a unique preposition. With horror element to it and
music playing a major role as well, 'Ek Thi Daayan' promises to be a
thrilling-n-horrifying entertainer.
Yeh Jawani Hai Deewani (May)
Ranbir Kapoor and Deepika Padukone coming together on screen after their very
public break-up is a reason big enough to check out what 'Yeh Jawani Hai
Deewani' has to offer. Moreover, with Karan Johar backing the film, it becomes
all the more exciting. As per the producer and his actors, in 'Yeh Jawani Hai
Deewani', director Ayan Mukerji has made an out and out commercial film after 'Wake Up Sid'.
Chennai Express (Expected in July)
The film is expected to be a biggie that should help Shahrukh Khan make his
way into the masses, and that too in a very big manner. Considering the fact
that it is none less than Rohit Shetty who is at the helm of affairs, there is
no reason why it should not be possible. For their millions of fans worldwide, 'Chennai Express' would be the most hyped film on its release.
Gunday (Second half 2013)
Filmmaker Ali Abbas Zafar, after 'Mere Brother Ki Dulhan', has now moved into
a drastically different territory with a dramatic action flick 'Gunday'. A
rustic outing set in Kolkata, it also brings together peers and rivals Ranveer
Singh and Arjun Kapoor, which should be good enough to expect a volatile
face-off. The very title of the film attracts your attention and promises to
offer 'masala'.
Salman's film with Sohail Khan (Aug)
What's the name of the movie? What is it about? Which genre does it belong
go? Is there a script on paper yet? Who would be the leading lady on the film?
None of these questions really matter for a Salman Khan starrer, especially
today when he is at the kind of peak that only a select few actors have enjoyed
in the past. All that is known for now is that he would be the leading man in
the film.
Krrish 3 (Nov)
Years in the making and expected to be nothing less than a blockbuster outing
for the 'baap-beta jodi' of Roshans, 'Krrish 3' carries only one burden and that
is that of expectations. The film took it's time to go on floors and it has been
quite some while since the shooting began. However, now that Roshans have
declared a Diwali arrival, the countdown has begun.
Dhoom 3 (Dec)
If 'Krrish 3' is a full meal then in comparison, 'Dhoom 3' should be lavish
dessert waiting to be savoured. The film is exactly a year away since it
releases on Christmas. Still, one can expect Yash Raj Films to keep the momentum
on for this high adrenaline thrilling outing which is expected to set new
records and take Bollywood into the kind of zone that only its Hollywood
counterparts have boasted of.
