“Charles” Nick HookerVisually lavish portrait of German-French fashion designer Karl LagerfeldWho drove Fendi and Chanel -fashion for decades, are great fun because we are not just happy for his fantastic paths – the clothes! The models! – But we are also treated with an obsessive creator at work.
As hooker reads to debut film At Telluride Film Festival on Saturday, August 30he told IndieWire about how he implemented himself in Lagerfeld’s world to get a complete portrait of the man. Whore (“Aka, Mr. Chow,” “Agnelli”) understood that he had to talk to the people who worked with him to get behind the impressive white pony-tailed Lagerfeld facade.
He eventually came to several of these hard-to-reach fashionistas by setting such as Tilda Swinton, Paloma Picasso, Vanessa Paradis, Lily-Rose Depp, Tom Ford, Penélope Cruz and many more, all of which are shown in the film. He also gained access to Chanel via Lagerfeld Cinema William Middleton (“Paradise Now: The Extraordinary Life of Karl Lagerfeld”).
The filmmaker was fascinated by how a young boy from Hamburg survived the Second World War, fled to Paris and took over the fashion world. Hooker believes that the bombing of Hamburg, Operation Gomorrah, drove Lagerfeld to escape into his creative psyche.
“Karl, surrounded by this intense darkness and by the terrible traum,” said Hooker to IndieWire, “at that moment he found this way out, a way to create a zone of creativity for himself that was security. Creativity became a form of resistance, almost became a form of protection. And he knocked into his imagination and his creativity on a primal, primal on a.
Hooker and his team had full access to Karl’s archive at Fendi (chaotic) and Chanel (organized). “An unpleasant time was spent getting those tracks, rhythmically and with the clothes that were important for his career,” said producer Susan Hootstein.
The story of Inès de la Fressange, an early model and museum for Lagerfeld at Chanel from 1983 to 1990, is particularly convincing. “Ines was a great, great beauty, and someone that Karl thought inspiring,” Hooker said. “Karl had one thing for aristocratic women. She was a real mouse in the old -fashioned sense, she inspired him.” But when she fell and loves and got married, Lagerfeld felt abandoned and fired her.
Later, Lagerfeld’s runways became huge productions on a large scale. “It was theater,” said producer Julia Nottingham. “The theater that Karl created on fashion.”
And when Hooker could not tell the Lagerfeld story with existing audiovisual material, he popped in some animation and a Lagerfeld voice, created with artificial intelligence. “It’s from Interviews It was on print, and we had the original sound, ties from these interviews, but they were clumsy and cracked, “he said.” We used it about four or five times. The animation also allowed us to get over ideas that can only be visually expressed. “
In recent years, Lagerfeld took many headlines for comments he made to the press. But when Hooker looked at them, he said, “they didn’t amount to anything, really, when it comes to me. I didn’t feel limited. The most important thing for me was that the movie was very close to him. I wanted to try to get the audience as close to his creative spirit and energy as possible.”
When it comes to Lagerfeld’s personal life, he had a great love, Jacques de Bascher, a decadent Dandy which he supported during an 18-year-old asexual relationship. “Karl was extremely disciplined,” Hooker said. “He had a creative libido, all his creative and fleshly energy was 100 percent directed at his work and at his creativity. That’s why he never ended in steam. It was refreshing to see an arc of a story that did not involve drugs and decadence. You have someone with a German streak in them.”
Take a first look at “Karl”, including IndieWire -exclusively still above.
