The second Patrizia Reggiani (Lady Gaga) laid her eyes on Maurizio Gucci (Adam Driver), she knew there was something. He was awkward and shuffling behind a bar and even though it was a chance encounter, Patrizia recognized the importance of this meeting. Suddenly, it felt like love at first sight—not just for the man of her dreams, but the life of her dreams.
House of Gucci delves into the world of the Gucci family and their fashion empire, beginning with that fateful meeting. When Patrizia marries into the family and is overcome by the temptation to put her cards into the business, she devises a plan to control interest in Gucci.
The story is based on the novel of the same name, The House of Gucci: A Sensational Story of Murder, Madness, Glamour, and Greed, written by Sara Gay Forden, with screenwriters Roberto Bentivegna and Becky Johnston bringing it to life on the big screen as a feature film directed by Ridley Scott.
Bentivegna approached writing the screenplay by deciding what parts of the book to dramatize, with Forden available to guide the way.
“It was quite tricky because it's such a big story,” he says of having to make decisions on what to keep in and what to leave out, explaining that some are “going to be true to the script, but untrue to facts.”
“After I read the book, it was really just a process of discovery and of making strong choices at the beginning in terms of what to put in the script, what to leave out, [how] to tell the story from which point of view, which characters to include,” he adds.
While he wasn’t able to include everything, he focused on maintaining the essence of the Gucci family and the story of the business.
“As long as you keep the essence of what you're doing truthful, and you're not going on some wild tangents—like Gucci goes to space—then I think you're okay,” he says.
He particularly looked for scenes with “dramatic fuel.”
“You read something and you're like, ‘Okay, that's something that I can work with—that has an engine behind that. That has a motivation."
As he read the book, he started to find parts that could be aspects of a character’s narrative, and not “something completely out there. You start to kind of compile a list of events that you feel are dramatically interesting,” he explains.
But of course, it’s also not a documentary. Some details and events are bound to be invented or be a hybrid of truth and fiction. By balancing the truth with the dramatization of Gucci, Bentivegna created interest amid the corporate events.
He brought in story elements like Aldo Gucci’s (Al Pacino) interest in a shoe during a board meeting and the family's favorite pie in Patrizia’s lap to make the business scenes interesting and build on who these characters are. You see humor and humanity all at once, even as Aldo signs over his shares—making a mundane task such as putting pen to paper more visually interesting and important to the narrative.
“I was always looking for a way to dramatize it in a way that would be visually interesting, rather than scenes of people in boardrooms,” Bentivegna admits, getting to the point where he had the scenes crafted was “quite a ride."
“You can't predict how people are going to react, you also can't predict how you're going to react to how people react,” he says, recalling a conversation with Scott (Blade Runner, Gladiator) where the filmmaker told Bentivegna, “don’t read the press.”
“You just have to be very true to yourself,” Bentivegna says.
House of Gucci is Bentivegna’s first feature project, while all of his previous writing projects have been various shorts. Looking forward to what he can take into his next feature project, he says, “I don't have any like clear answers that I'm giving myself of what to do or what not to do. You can't really please everybody, you know, in that way a movie is like food or music or anything; it's subjective,” he says.
Bentivegna also found the tone of the film subjective. House of Gucci flows between the emotional and comedic sides of a family—and the relationships within it.
“When people talk about tone, I think it's something instinctive,” he says. “It's not that you have it or you don't have it, but I don't think you intellectually know that it's going on. If you look at one of the great masters of that like Scorsese, there are scenes in all of his movies that are hilarious. And then there are scenes that are just incredibly brutal and dramatic.”
Bentivegna returned to the elementary adage: Write what you know. Although he tries to write beyond what he knows, there was no way of escaping his background while writing House of Gucci. The film took place in Milan where he grew up, not to mention being about a top fashion house and his mother was in the world of fashion as he grew up.
“I'm of two minds about it because I love the idea that writing implies escapism, and the creation or the discovery of new things that are not you,” he says. “It was like taking a trip in the mind's eye back to where I grew up, including little details from my childhood: the food, the places, and the colors.”
Overall it was an emotional experience for Bentivegna, especially as his first feature film, realizing that House of Gucci was a “big moment” for him on multiple levels.
“As much as I tried to sort of push that notion away, it ended up being a self-fulfilling prophecy,” he says.
House of Gucci is now available to stream and on DVD and Blu-Ray.