Ridley Scott’s long-awaited and controversial film House of Gucci, opens in Italian movie theatres on 16 December. Inspired by the Gucci Dynasty, it focusses on the time when Patrizia Reggiani (Lady Gaga), a girl from a humble background, became a member of one of the most famous families in the fashion world.
House of Gucci was shot in 43 days and sequentially, mostly in and around Rome with many interiors built at Cinecittà and also on location in Northern Italy. The production shot several interiors and exteriors in Milan, including a scene designed to look like the centre of Manhattan, and in Villa Balbiano, a Palladian-style, Renaissance villa near Lake Como which represented Aldo Gucci’s luxurious Italian residence, complete with antique furnishing. The Dolomite mountain range in Italy stood in for the Alps where the Gucci family would spend the winter holidays. A key location in the story is Rodolfo Gucci’s home, which the production substituted with Villa Necchi in Milan, today a museum but formerly the residence of the Necchi family, without changing almost any of the furnishings or exteriors.
The key locations in the screenplay are Rome, Milan and New York; however, some of the New York settings, especially those portraying the fashion and design world from Studio 54, the iconic late 1970s discotheque, to the catwalks of the fashion shows presented in the film, were actually created in a large warehouse near Rome airport. Set design was key in adapting the original locations to create a vintage atmosphere, starting with the various Gucci shops featured in the film which each have an individual look. The Fifth Avenue Gucci Store in Manhattan (actually shot in Rome) "was all dark wood, gold and brown” says the production designer Arthur Max, "to encapsulate the wealthy environment of the last century”. In contrast, a fashion emporium in Milan, visited by Patrizia in the film, was over the top and modernist, all steel and silver. A special challenge, he continues, was transforming a modern bank building in glass and polished stone in Milan into an eccentric Gucci emporium on Canal Street, Lower Manhattan. Also visually interesting was the set created for Paolo Gucci’s design studio in Milan which used a real-life textile design studio in the Trastevere neighbourhood of Rome, “a very unusual place where five different textile designers work in an interconnected space” explains Max. "The architecture is modernist, which is very unusual for a city like Rome. I think it was originally a warehouse which they restructured. They knocked down many walls and installed large, Bauhaus style glass windows on one side. It was beautiful. Filled with light and two storeys high”.
Max allowed himself some poetic licence in creating the setting for the crucial homicide scene in the film. The real-life location in Milan was colourless and unimpressive and the production was looking for a more intense atmosphere. Max identified an area of Rome with wide roads that could credibly replace Milan. The area was a mixture of architectural styles, Gothic, Renaissance and Arabic, he says, which he knew from other productions he had done in Rome.