Related Images is a column in which filmmakers invite readers behind the scenes, into their sketchbooks, or otherwise through the looking glass to learn more about their creative processes.
Who Is Sabato de Sarno? A Gucci Story is now showing exclusively on MUBI from March 15, 2024.
Who Is Sabato De Sarno? A Gucci Story (Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman, 2024).
Gucci called out of the blue, asking if we wanted to make a doc about their new creative director and his first fashion show. Sabato De Sarno (the new creative director) said he liked our film A Brief History of John Baldessari (2011) about the artist John Baldessari, and could it be something like that? He said the length was flexible, but they were imagining something between six and eight minutes. We didn't know much about Gucci, or Sabato, but we were curious, which for us is a great starting point for a documentary. A few days later we were on a plane to Milan.
“Something like Baldessari” is tough, because it’s extremely post-heavy—jam packed with multi-media imagery, music, and fast-paced montage. It requires months of editing, archival research, and rights clearances. Sabato and Gucci (and their legal department) had the right disposition for the process.
An image from our deck going into the shoot. It turned out to be pretty accurate.
We spent five days backstage with Sabato and the Gucci creative team as they hustled their way from sketches on paper to luxurious clothes on models. In the same five days, we watched them set up a hugely complicated runway show outdoors… and then set up another simpler one indoors when the weather acted up.
The original plan was that the film would be finished four days after the show, but thankfully Gucci moved off of that idea. Back in New York, we struggled to jam all of this story into six minutes. The first cut we shared was 27 minutes long. The marketing team at Gucci wasn’t quite sure what to do with it. We tried in vain to create a version under ten minutes, until Sabato himself stepped in and said he loved the long version and we could forget about trying to make it shorter. It ended up being twenty minutes. It is a credit to Gucci, and to Sabato, that they were so creatively open. It was very European. They were like, “You guys are artists, do your thing. We trust you.”
So much happened that week in Milan, and even more in the four months we spent editing. Here’s some of it…
Sabato was really open and let us follow him almost everywhere. He has an infectious creative spirit and it’s always fun to be around him. That’s me in the background with the Blackmagic camera. I had just seen Passages (2023) and was inspired by the crazy mesh tank top Franz Rogowski wears to meet the parents. This one is mesh too. The fashion heads seemed to appreciate it.
Sabato’s dog, Luce, is a big part of his life. We knew she had to be a big part of the film. For a while we thought the film might be told from Luce’s POV, with Paul Mescal doing her voice. So we secretly shot a lot of footage from “dog level.” After a few days in the edit, we scrapped the idea, and Sabato never knew.
Photograph by Henry Joost.
This is Sabato backstage moments before the show. The combined nervous energy was awesome—like 200 friends putting on a Broadway show. The difference is a fashion show only lasts eighteen minutes and is only performed once—with “no second chance.” And they do this three or four times per year!
Photograph by Henry Joost.
There was so much going on backstage during the show, we shot four cameras. Our DP, Mike Simmonds, with a big Alexa, Henry with Super 8mm, and me with a Blackmagic and a Leica Q. The show itself was already being filmed by another production company with tons of cameras.
Throughout the five-day shoot we had a permanent interview setup in one of the Gucci outbuildings. We would grab people whenever they were available. We were so taken with the elegant way Mark Ronson draped himself over that stool and held the position for an hour. He also gave us great sound bites.
We needed somebody to hold objects for the camera. This handsome gentleman, Andrea Savio, was our key grip and has an amazing face. Here he is holding Sabato’s manifesto. Andrea mentioned later that we were not the first directors to put him in a movie, which he is happy to do as long as he doesn’t have dialogue.
Photograph by Henry Joost.
We knew we needed an Italian producer, who spoke not just Italian, but also the language of fashion. Fortunately, I had just met Emanuela Matranga on the set of Queer, directed by Luca Guadagnino. Turns out her father had worked with Henry’s father in Egypt in the 1980s!
Photograph by Fadia Ghaab.
Most of the models were walking in their first runway show. Now they’re on billboards all over the world. Taking photos of them makes you feel like a great photographer; taking photos with them is not great for self-confidence.
This is us with our cinematographer, Mike Simmonds. We’ve shot two features and so many shorts and commercials together.
It may come as no surprise that people who work for Gucci are incredibly well dressed, far cooler than those on a typical film set. Remo, in particular, was really inspiring. Maybe because his style seems so attainable, until you ask him where exactly he got everything (a vintage store in Japan?). As soon as we returned to New York, I gave Henry a pair of shoes pretty similar to Remo’s for his birthday.
Photograph by Henry Joost.
Here’s Mike with the Big Camera, an Alexa Whatever. A big way this film differs from our Baldessari film is that it incorporates vérité footage. Baldessari is just one interview about the past. This film tells a story happening in real time. We made a creative decision before the shoot started to split the style of the photography into two components: vérité and fixed. All of the vérité footage was shot with 16mm zoom lenses and a reduced sensor for inherent grain, the “fixed” interviews were shot on 35mm prime lenses on a full-frame sensor. Our colorist, Tom Poole, thought we were cool for doing this.
Speaking of post-production…
For most of our docs, we like to ask the subject who they want to narrate. John Baldessari instantly said Tom Waits. Sabato said, without hesitation, Paul Mescal. Both excellent choices. We recorded with Paul the day before he went to Malta to finish shooting Gladiator 2. That was a great motivating deadline for us (and writer Gabriel Nussbaum) to finish the script.
Side note: Paul was a good sport about Henry’s temp voice-over, which he did in a thick Irish accent (think: Lucky Charms).
Since we didn’t have a script going into the shoot, most of the story was shaped in post, through archival footage and motion graphics. We went back and forth with our editor, Matt Posey, and his team at PS260 for months and 50 versions of the film, tweaking hundreds of moments, big and small. We are insane about this stuff and would keep tweaking forever if we could.
Every film about a journey needs a map. We wanted to find a different way to do the Indiana Jones map. This image of baby Sabato on his tiny Vespa felt right. I’m surprised how long it took us to realize.
Sabato means Saturday. We tried to come up with as many ways as possible of visually saying Sabato. Turns out some vintage day-and-date watches were made in Italian.
We didn't notice in the moment, but when we looked at the backstage footage we saw Ryan Gosling blow a kiss to Sabato’s mom in the smoothest, most “Hey Girl” meme kind of way. Remember those?
It started out as a freeze-frame joke on text message, and we ended up adding our own version of this meme to the film.
Photograph by Michael Simmonds.
Henry & Rel. Happily working together for eighteen years.
This film is one of the highlights. It reignited our love for documentaries and inspired us to dress a little better on set.