Lady Gaga and Ridley Scott talk about the movie ‘House of Gucci’: when beauty turns to ugliness

Por Kyle Buchanan

The day after the premiere of The Gucci house in London, Lady Gaga He met me in a hotel room near Trafalgar Square and clarified something for me.

“If I’m honest, I feel like it’s been made public that I worked on my accent for so long and that I was playing the character for so long,” Gaga commented Wednesday, her platinum hair cascading over one eye. “But if I could explain and clarify …”.

The 35-year-old superstar was referring to recent headlines about his acting technique on the set of the drama directed by Ridley Scott, which hit theaters just before Thanksgiving. To play Patrizia Reggiani, who plotted the murder of her Gucci heir husband in 1995, Gaga spoke with a vivid Italian accent for nine months and got so deeply into character that she thought and felt like Patrizia even when the cameras weren’t rolling. .

However, as he told me, he had his reasons. And the same happened with Patrizia.

Based on the book The House of Gucci: A Sensational Story of Murder, Madness, Glamour, and Greed, from Sara Gay Forden, the film tells the story of the ambitious Patrizia as she falls in love with Maurizio Gucci (Adam Driver) and marries to enter the dynastic Italian luxury brand. The family business does not have much appeal for Maurizio, a man of letters, and the real power is his father Rodolfo (Jeremy Irons) and his uncle Aldo (Al Pacino). If an outsider like Patrizia wants to be a true force at Gucci, she will have to put the rest of the family members against each other. In the end, even Patrizia and Maurizio find themselves at odds, and her rage towards him soon turns to murder.

“I was in a really tough place in my life when this script came to me,” Gaga said of her first starring role since A star Is Born (2018). He was struggling with depression while recording his 2020 album, Chromatica, and the woman whose real name is Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta She even struggled with the idea of ​​whether she really wanted to remain Lady Gaga. When The Gucci house He offered to become someone else, he took the opportunity.

Now that he’s on the other side, he smiles as he talks about Scott’s confidence in his transformation. “I’ve never had a better experience with a director,” he says. “He loves artists and some directors don’t. They love themselves. As 83-year-old Scott joined us via video call, Gaga talked about how that bond allowed her to do her deepest character study to date.

Here are edited snippets of our conversation.

Q: Gaga, the film begins with a line about people who look at Gucci windows, wishing they could buy even the second cheapest item in the store. What was your life like once you were not only able to afford all those things, but were even offered them?

Lady Gaga: As soon as you ask me that question, it instantly catapults me to when I said those words on set. I remember thinking that me It was the second cheapest item, that Patrizia was the second cheapest item in the store, that it would never be the best.

I also thought that when I could finally buy beautiful things or they offered them to me, there was always something inside me, scratching my heart, telling me that it did not belong to me. However, I think part of being an artist is just this endless idea that we are not good enough. Material things are wonderful, but in this movie we see how power and privilege can be inherently bad.

Q: Patrizia is ambitious in the way she goes after Maurizio, but at first you support them as a couple.

Gaga: One of the first things I said to Ridley was “I don’t know if she had really loved Maurizio.” And he said, “Yes, he loved it.”

Ridley Scott: The bottom line for me was that, no matter how bad it got, there was something you liked about these people. She goes after him on purpose, but I think she’s delighted with his chivalrous demeanor, and that evolves into affection and love. Love is a powerful bond, but you have to be very careful, because love can easily turn to hate in an instant.

Q: Tell us about the permanence of Patrizia’s accent for so many months. It was exhausting?

Gaga: I think it would have had more effect on me if no I would have practiced it so much. I would talk like this with my mother, with my friends, so that I, Stefani, could talk like this and it would be totally natural. It’s like muscle memory, so that when you’re on the scene, the accent doesn’t get in the way of the visceral quality of what’s going on in the room.

If I have a show of jazz next week, if I don’t rehearse ahead of time, my voice isn’t quite ready for the show. My approach to that is no different from my commitment to music. However, I want to be clear: I don’t think it’s about sensationalizing the acting method or being in character as the only way to get things done. It would have been more difficult for me to get in and out of character on set than to stay on set.

Scott: There was a moment when I thought: “Wait, was it always like this? I’ve forgotten”. The first meeting we had, she was being, dare I say, American …

Gaga: I’m American! I am Italian-American.

Scott: But then I thought, “I’m not going to question this, because it’s working for me.”

Q: GagaHow did you come up with Patrizia’s body language? His way of walking and dancing seems to have a much lower center of gravity than hers.

Gaga: In some acting techniques they call it “using the animal”. I used three animals for Patrizia. I started out as a house cat, who has that seductive quality, but can also be a bit distant, and I used that with her physique. He then transforms when he sees Aldo hug Maurizio. She thinks to herself: “Maybe I can convince Maurizio to get closer to the family, to become part of the family business.” In that scene I made the decision to transform from cat to fox.

Then when [un abogado de Gucci] He comes to my daughter’s school to hand me the divorce papers — which means that Maurizio didn’t have the courage to do it himself — I transform from a fox to a panther. It’s something I’ve worked on, studying the panther. What are the ways the panther seduces its prey? How is the panther slow before pouncing? What happens when the panther is so enraged by starvation and hunger that it goes into survival mode? I always felt that Patrizia was surviving her entire life.

Q: In what way?

Gaga: It was never as prestigious or shiny or as tailored as the Gucci. There was always something about her that was a bit embarrassing and a bit off. It is about a woman who wants more for herself, but in my opinion, all her power is really an illusion, in the same way that patriarchy is infinitely an illusion. It’s the way that, as a woman, I can feel like I have power, but as soon as a man says no to me; Then my whole world falls apart They just get rid of it, over and over again, and I think that’s what caused the murder.

Q: Ridley, few directors have been able to make major films during this pandemic. You have done two, including The last duel, who suffered a COVID-related lockdown last spring. How have you managed to deal with that storm?

Scott: My team is the best in the business. I remember I was doing the first one in a pretty nice place [en la campiña francesa] And I don’t love the countryside because it’s deep green and wet, and I start thinking about a vodca martini around three in the afternoon, which is fatal. Suddenly, that monster called COVID came on us, so I said, “Let’s close.” That helped a lot because it allowed me to edit what I was wearing, but also to prepare thoroughly for two months doing the storyboard of The Gucci house.

Gaga: I don’t know if you felt that way, Rid, but because the COVID pandemic was happening and the actors were in our rooms or on set, it seemed like life was floating. I think it’s part of the reason I liked to keep playing the character, because what else am I going to do when I get back to my hotel room? How could I turn it off? I have no interaction with the world other than with my actors and my director.

P: RidleyWhat did you think of the box office performance of The last duel? It got good reviews and featured big stars like Matt Damon and Adam Driver, but still underperformed in theaters.

Scott: It was too disappointing. The fatal thing is that, when you think you did it, you did not: I thought I had achieved it in Blade Runner and it was not so! I was crucified by a great critic of the time called Pauline Kael. That’s why I never read criticism, never. You have to be the one to decide, if you care about what the public thinks and what they may want, it is a fatal situation. A good movie finds itself and now Blade Runner it’s in the Library of Congress.

Q: But still, you should feel motivated when people get excited about your work. Even while filming The Gucci house, the photos from the set caused a sensation on the internet.

Scott: It’s true. There is nothing like success to feel good in the morning, right? At the same time, if you achieve any kind of achievement or success, don’t let it get to you. If you like what you’ve done, move on to the following.

Gaga: I could not agree more. When you make art to please people or seek praise, it is not sustainable. Basically, you are passionate about getting people to love you instead of being passionate about the job. I know I lost my way as an artist for a time when I started to worry about what would make people like me. Then I rebelled, thinking: why would I pursue a goal that won’t stop moving?

Q: So how did you feel when you left Patrizia behind and all that?

Gaga: To be honest, I was really prepared to let her go. She is a tremendously complicated person and when you live in survival mode all the time – and she was forever in survival mode — a very constant feeling of trauma is created. When I got on the plane back from Italy, I threw away my cigarettes. I threw away the alcohol, landed in Los Angeles, and cleaned up my life because I couldn’t go on living like this. Her life was killing me the same way it was killing her.

Q: And what does it feel like to be yourself again?

Gaga: It is very emotional. I joke with Ridley all the time, but I really did experience some kind of attachment panic when I left the set. I missed it so much. I felt the same as Patrizia: a life without Gucci was not worth it. The best moment of her life was being a Gucci and I can say, at the end of this movie, that the best moment of me life was being a Gucci. This is how art and life align. Ridley’s life is a masterpiece and you are lucky if you can be a part of it. (AND)