Watch The Trailer For Bertrand Bonello’s SAINT LAURENT

Opening in select theaters May 8, Gaspard Ulliel is Yves Saint Laurent in the first trailer for Sony Pictures Classics’ SAINT LAURENT, a film by Bertrand Bonello.

1967-1976. As one of history’s greatest fashion designers entered a decade of freedom, neither came out of it in one piece.

(Yahoo! Movies)

Why did the filmmakers restrict themselves to ten years in Saint Laurent’s life and career, between 1967 and 1976? The director says, “we chose to restrict ourselves to two emblematic collections, the Liberation collection in 1971 and the Russian Ballet collection in 1976. The first provoked outrage: in 1971, with hippie chic booming, Saint Laurent dressed women like their mothers, drawing on his passion for his own, for 1940s movie stars and so on. The newspapers were in uproar, but six months later everybody was wearing vintage. As for the second collection, it has oriental influences, from Gauguin, Delacroix, Matisse, to the Russian Orient. We divided the script into three chapters. We called the first, up to the 1940 collection, just before the famous photo of Saint Laurent posing naked, ”The Young Man.” The second, from that photo to the end of his affair with de Bascher, became ”The Star.” And the third, 1976, ”YSL”: Yves becomes a brand; he’s lost touch with who he is. That’s when the contrast is greatest between above and below. A psychiatrist who knew his psychiatrist called him the ”lift attendant.” He was constantly going up and down.”

When asked for his reaction upon learning there was another film (2014’s YVES SAINT LAURENT, The Weinstein Co.) about Saint Laurent in preparation, Bonello said, “I was very surprised, obviously. We had been working on the project several months when Jalil Lespert’s film was announced. Naturally, it complicated matters, and we had to overcome many obstacles to ensure this film got made. Despite the fact that we were much further down the line, the priority of the other movie’s producers was to overtake us. I had no desire to botch my film simply to wage a sterile war. I came to terms with it, telling myself that another, more official picture could take care of the obligatory biopic aspects, thus relieving me of them. To some extent, Lespert’s film gave me greater freedom.”

Photo by Carole Bethuel, © 2014 Mandarin Cinema-EuropaCorp-Orange Studio-Arte France Cinema-Scope Pictures, Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics