Legendary clothing designer Valentino Garavani dressed everyone from Jackie Onassis to Gwyneth Paltrow, and made — and spent! — millions doing it. But why should a Rumpus reader care? Love, love, and love. Garavani is the subject of a revelatory new documentary, Valentino: The Last Emperor, by Vanity Fair reporter and first-time filmmaker Matt Tyrnauer, who plumbs great depths from this world of frivolity and makes a persuasive argument for the word “uber-marriage.”
In the beginning of Valentino: The Last Emperor, the documentary about fashion designer Valentino Garavani and his final days as the head of his company, a reporter asks Giancarlo Giametti, Valentino’s longtime business partner and one-time lover, “How would you define, in one word, your choice to live in another man’s shadow?” After only a slight pause, Giammetti smiles and replies, “Happiness.”
Valentino: The Last Emperor is a well-crafted, intimate look into the world of Valentino, one full of fawning celebrities, gorgeous dresses, pampered pugs, private jets, fried-to-a-crisp suntans and, naturally, drama. But the heart of the movie is his relationship with Giametti, which is both incredibly complicated and enviously simple. It was this relationship that intrigued director and producer Matt Tyrnauer, who met the men in 2005 when he wrote a story on Valentino for Vanity Fair, where he is a Special Correspondent. Tyrnauer, who’d never made a movie before, wanted to capture what he refers to as their “uber-marriage,” a partnership spanning forty-five years that is, by all accounts, what allowed Valentino to become who he is—the last emperor of high fashion.
Tyrnauer spent over two years with Valentino and Giancarlo. Two hundred and seventy hours of footage were edited down into what Tyrnauer humbly calls, “a tiny little documentary,” a documentary that has, in fact, been an enormous success. The movie has been playing for over twelve consecutive weeks across America.
The Rumpus had a chance to talk with Matt after he’d just returned from San Antonio, Texas, where the movie recently opened.
Rumpus: Can you tell us more about how you came up with the idea for the movie and how you pulled it off?
Tyrnauer: I was assigned a story on Valentino for Vanity Fair and I went in as a total fashion…I don’t want to say idiot, but novice. I am an Italiaholic—beyond an Italiaphile—and I was really pleased to go to Rome for two weeks and do the piece, but I didn’t hope for Valentino being interesting. But when I met Valentino and Giancarlo I became very interested in their story. I cast the magazine story as the story of a marriage, and it was the first time anyone had ever written about both of them.
I asked them to do the movie right after the article was published because their relationship blew me away. Their world is so cut off from reality. Valentino lives in the fantasy bubble that Giancarlo maintained for him for half a century. They agreed to do the film without too much prodding. Then I had dilemma—I had never made movie before, though I always wanted to, especially about some of these amazing characters I’ve met.
The one thing I knew I wanted to do was capture the relationship and I started plotting how to do that. I hired the best people I could find to make the movie because I knew as a novice I needed a lot of support. We dove in because I didn’t want them to change their minds. We just showed up immediately with a camera—a Sony Z1, which is a small HD camera. This camera had just come out, so we were lucky to have that quality of technology that was also compact. I was worried about was doing a fly-on-the wall film, which is what I wanted to do, with huge high-definition cameras, because they are very intrusive.
The people we hired we also very experienced. Tom Hurwitz was the cinematographer and Peter Miller was the sound man—they’re the leading cinema verite camera and sound people. The editor was Bob Eisenhardt, who is the leading verite editor. Between them they’ve probably made more than 200 movies, and they were enormously helpful in guiding me through the process.
Rumpus: How large was the crew?
Tyrnauer: It was basically a one-camera movie. For the big party at the end, we had three or four cameras, but on a daily basis we used one. The crew ranged from twelve to fourteen for the big parties and events and it was two most of the time, which was myself and the co-producer Frederic Tcheng. We shot most of the movie together and with Fred mostly operating the camera.
Rumpus: Who are your favorite directors? Did they influence this movie?
Tyrnauer: I had a lot of ideas about movies and have studied film all my life. My favorite directors are Robert Aldrich, John Ford, Fellini and Robert Altman, and I looked to all of them for inspiration.
Rumpus: The movie would have been important no matter what, but because you were able to capture Valentino’s final year, it takes on major historical significance because you really captured the end of an era. How did the events that took place shape the movie?
Tyrnauer: No one knew what Valentino was going to do because he never said what he was going to do until the day he announced his retirement. When we started the first year no one talked about retiring, and when Valentino started getting questions about it in year two he kept denying it. We thought it was a bit of a drama that we had to follow and it turned out to be an amazing third act for the film. That was the documentarian’s luck—we were in the right place at the right time.
When we started, couture week in Paris was a full week, now it’s three days. There’s no doubt we were there as the era slipped away. You have Lagerfeld and Valentino and that’s about it. They are the last two and we got them together at the end of this movie. I was trying to plot a way to get Largerfeld into the movie and I was composing letters and going through mutual acquaintances and then he just walked right into our camera, which was great.
Rumpus: What is the significance of Valentino’s retirement, and how is the fashion world reacting? In literature and journalism everyone’s lamenting the “death of print.” Is it anything like that?
Tyrnauer: It’s more profound than that. There’s still Barnes and Noble, and you go to a newsstand and see hundreds of magazines and newspapers. Couture was always a niche market, so you just have to look at it in its isolated frame.
In the 20th century, women at a certain level of society were required to dress in three different outfits a day, more or less, and they were expected to have their clothing handmade. At the closing of the 19th century all clothes were handmade and there were different levels of that. By the end of the 20th century, only some clothes were handmade and there were certain levels of that. Couture was the highest level of that, so it was always something that was for the few, and the few became fewer after World War II. In the second half of the 20th century, women started to work and they didn’t have to change three times a day and they started to wear pants and jeans. And then in the 60’s there was a complete social revolution and couture became even more of a niche.
Valentino was born at exactly the right time to be Valentino. He was born to come into the workplace in the 50’s when there was huge economic boom and things were still done the old way. In the 60’s the jet set began and the world changed in his favor because there were more rich people and they needed clothes to go to all these parties. In the 70’s things started to settle down, but he was at the top of his profession so he got all the clients. He was the name, along with Yves Saint Laurent. Karl Lagerfeld came into the picture and Givenchy, but he was already at the top and he stayed there.
One of the great features of his story is that he’s the longest surviving kind of god of fashion. By the 80’s and 90’s it shifted to Hollywood and he was right there. Then he brought it in for the perfect landing just months before the global economy collapsed. What better timing could he possibly have?
Rumpus: In your Vanity Fair article you mention that Valentino has a long-term partner, but watching the movie that’s easy forget because we’re so focused on his relationship with Giancarlo and we never meet his boyfriend. Their relationship is so intensely symbiotic that it’s hard to imagine there’s room for anyone else.
Tyrnauer: Valentino has been with his boyfriend Bruce Hoeksema for more than twenty years. He and Giancarlo were together as lovers in the 60’s and they stayed together in what I call a kind of uber-marriage. They are the patriarchal figures in this sprawling family that includes a big entourage of workers and friends and lovers. It’s a particular way of conducting your life. They are definitely inseparable, and there have been other people in their lives over the decades.
Is there a rule that you have to sleep with the same person for fifty years in order to be devoted to them? I don’t think so. That’s the fantasy that a lot of people have and project onto people, and I find that a lot when I talk about them. People want to project this fantasy of everlasting, eternal sexual fidelity onto people because that’s what a love story is. Well, this is a little different, but it’s about an extraordinary friendship and a long-lasting relationship that has a great deal of love. And therefore it’s a love story. It s not traditional, it doesn’t conform to an American perspective on togetherness, but it’s a legitimate love story. That’s the way most people perceive it, that’s the way I perceive it and I think that’s the way most people perceive it as well. It seems to inspire a lot of people, which I’m happy about.
Rumpus: You hear stories about partnerships, particularly romantic ones, where there is one larger-than-life artist and a person supporting them to their own detriment—the long-suffering literary wife who stays up all night typing her husband’s manuscripts, for example, or someone who sacrifices their dreams so the other person can achieve theirs. It’s a negative story, but theirs is different.
Tyrnauer: I think that’s really the point of the film. Giancarlo completely devoted himself to another person and together they went on this incredible journey and kind of ruled the fashion world, but no one knew who Giancarlo was. Now finally they do and that’s the poignant thing. Valentino finally thanks Giancarlo on film when he receives France’s Legion d’Honneur, and he never had before that.
Rumpus: Do you think we can learn something from their relationship?
Tyrnauer: I think we can learn a lot. We can learn about keeping it together, about friendship and devoting yourself to another person, which is what Giancarlo did. After a screening in New York, I did a Q+A and a group came up afterwards and said that their professor of psychiatry at New York Presbyterian had sent them to see the movie to study their relationship.
They were very successful, and it’s very hard to work with the person who you’re in love with or have been in love with or are sleeping with or not sleeping with and are in love with. It’s very hard to do that and make it last because ego gets in the way.
Rumpus: Was working with them difficult?
Tyrnauer: It’s always a balancing act. You have to know when to leave, you have to know when to press and then when to back off. I’m used to dealing with really big egos, so I used those skills. But they are very difficult. They are into drama. Valentino was quitting the movie all the time. He would walk off the set and then Giancarlo would come in and say, “I’m sorry, we’re not doing the movie anymore.” I knew they were bluffing the whole time, more or less.
I think when we started filming for a second year and they saw we had the money to finish the film they started to pay more attention. It got more serious and they got more difficult in a certain way because they were a little more frightened.
And I think you know what they thought of the film—they hated it. That was a bit of a trial, but in the end they were very brave because they did give me final cut.
Rumpus: When did they come around?
Tyrnauer: The logjam broke at the Venice Film Festival. We had a huge red carpet, and Valentino being an icon in Italy he had five hundred paparazzi waiting for him. The movie played to a full house and we got a very big standing ovation and Valentino was overwhelmed. He saw how it played to a general audience and he saw that people worshipped him even more and he came around instantly, though they had threatened to not show up.
Rumpus: But the movie was going to be released no matter what.
Tyrnauer: The contract had an anti-injunction clause, which meant that they could not stop the movie legally. You need that if you’re going to make a movie that is your movie.
Rumpus: What’s next for you? You’re still writing for Vanity Fair, but is there another movie in the works?
Tyrnauer: I’m dying to do something else, but I haven’t picked a project yet.
Rumpus: Any interested in doing a fictional, narrative film?
Tyrnauer: It’s all telling stories. I’m open to anything.
