![]() ![]() I was saying, Hold on, like, How did I know that? I’d forgotten a lot. I hadn’t read it for 20 years myself, and I went back and read it this year. I had to do a lot of work to rationalize all these different viewpoints by sifting through all my research to try to find out what was the closest to the truth. Everybody had a different perspective, and everybody was at odds. In each interview, I would try to cull a few details that I could add to my scenes. The descriptive and scenic language is so detailed. I was impressed by how intensive your interviewing process must have been. I could have written a whole other book on Severin. I think I must have spent five or six hours with him. I was a single mom with a 3-year-old, so I couldn’t go to a chateau in the south of France, but I went to London. You have two choices: next weekend at my chateau in the south of France or the weekend after in my townhouse in London.” And he says, “Miss Forden, it’s Severin Wunderman. It would mean a lot to me if you would read these pages and tell me if there’s anything wildly inaccurate or if there’s anything you want to add.” And I’d just fed the last page into the fax machine and my phone rings and it’s him. Wunderman, I know you didn’t want to be interviewed for the book, but I’ve done this work. In those days, it was still fax, so I slipped the three pages into the fax machine with a cover letter and I said, “Dear Mr. I interviewed people all around the watch license, and I distilled it into three pages. I’m a very wealthy man, and I’m going to make the movie and your book is going to be nothing.” I was literally shaking in my boots. I knew Aldo, and I know everything about the story. He said, “ I’m going to write the Gucci book. I asked if he would talk to me, and he called me on my Motorola Brick cell phone when I was in the courtroom - the trial had started. The fees from the licensing kept the company afloat. At one point, I had reached out to Severin Wunderman, the watch manufacturer whose licensing of Gucci watches was always extraordinarily successful. I was uncertain about whether this book was going to be successful. Well, I didn’t feel the weight of that because I couldn’t have imagined it, but I did feel it was a really daunting enterprise and I felt very small. Did you feel the weight of that when you were writing it? Your book has become sort of the definitive telling of Gucci’s history. It took a while to complete the turnaround, but he was right. Sure enough, six months later, sales were through the roof. At the end, he said, “Give me just six months and I promise you, the wind will be back in our sails.” And they didn’t give him six months they forced him out well before that. He was spending all this money and he was running the company to the ground, but he had a longer-term vision, and he probably miscalculated how willing his Investcorp partners were in bankrolling him. And then the tragedy of him not being able to do it - I found that compelling, and I wanted to cement his legacy because I felt that he was going to be forgotten. The force of his desire to revive Gucci was very infectious. He was delighted, but he was also determined. The Cut spoke to her about how a family business turned murderous and what it was like to tell the Gucci story. The renewed interest in the story has been a chance for Forden to reflect on the events she meticulously narrated 20 years ago and to see the story from a new lens: that of a viewer. Scott’s script is based on Forden’s book of the same name, first published in 2000.įorden’s book, which centers on the story of Maurizio Gucci’s murder but also tells the company’s complete history, starting with its founder Guccio Gucci, has surged back onto the New York Times Best Sellers list. But long before the public started obsessing over the Gucci family story, journalist Sara Gay Forden was literally writing the book on it. It was further confirmation that HOG was a must-see every detail of it was impeccable, from Jared Leto calling a pink corduroy suit “chic-ah” (he’s not wrong), to Adam Driver looking glamorous in huge glasses and huge sweaters, to the way Lady Gaga says “but I am fer” and murderously taps her little espresso spoon. And then when the trailer finally dropped, the excitement was explosive. The second those gorgeously strange photos from set started trickling out, it was clear the movie was going to be huge - a Zeitgeisty perfect marriage of true crime and camp. Photo-Illustration: by The Cut Photos: Getty Imagesįor all of 2021, we’ve been anticipating the release of Ridley Scott’s House of Gucci. ![]()
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