When Ian Bonhôte and Peter Ettedgui approached Alexander McQueen’s family about telling the late designer’s story in documentary form, the answer was a firm no. The brand, under the creative direction of Sarah Burton, also declined. For the former, the tragic story of McQueen’s suicide in February 2010 was still too raw to tell. For the latter, there was a need to look forward, rather than backwards, so that its current creative director could write her own chapter at the house.
But the appetite for a film was there. When Bonhôte (producer and co-director) and Ettedgui (writer and co-director) proposed their concept to a series of distributors in February 2017, it was financed within three days. “We wanted to make a really respectful cinematic version of Lee’s story,” Bonhôte tells Vogue. “You could go very tabloid and sensationalist, but we wanted to put his work at the film’s centre, and to try to tell his life from the fashion shows. People were excited about this.”
They took on the project, as Ettedgui says, with “zero access and zero original archive at our fingertips” and worked 18-20 hour days for a year to shape a piece of cinema that would “immerse viewers in the passion and the energy of McQueen, and the journey that his inner circle went on with him.” The stress, toil and tears it took to produce the film before a competitor’s scripted, dramatised version of McQueen’s life paid off. The profile that will come to light on the June 8 release date is, as Vogue international editor Suzy Menkes said, “the most sensitive vision about a creative who never lost his rough edges, and who put his life – the bloody history of distant warriors in Scotland and childhood abuse within his family – on stage.”
