Game, Set and Ensemble to André

American Vogue’s editor-at-large André Leon Talley says there was no acting up – just his usual dressing up – during the filming of the documentary The September Issue

It was easy for me to play me in the documentary The September Issue. R J Cutler, the director, allowed true cinéma vérité. He was granted total access by Anna Wintour, editor-in-chief of Vogue, who allowed him to follow the entire staff around for months. All he wanted to do while we were filming was to make me feel comfortable with his cameras and boom mics. Every time he wanted to shoot a scene, he would say, “I want it to be a part of your life.” In other words, we didn’t have a script.

There was a moment when we had to bond. I took RJ and his crew to lunch at L’Avenue, my favourite restaurant in Paris. It was during the haute couture season, and we had just come from a great Chanel couture collection by Karl Lagerfeld. It was the first week in Paris, and RJ’s crew had been eating out of the back of the vans all week, due to the busy schedule. Over that lunch, we all became friends.

The tennis scene didn’t happen until months later, in Los Angeles. I was there on a business trip and RJ wanted to film me doing what I do, without being at a desk or writing e-mails. I had taken up tennis earlier in the year in Paris. Back in Los Angeles, I played at public open courts – nothing fancy like the Beverly Hills courts – with my tall Austrian coach, Alexander. RJ made an appointment to meet me, and I crawled out of the car and onto the court in the sun and tried to hit the ball. Everything I wore that day was what I would normally wear when playing tennis. For me, it was more an exercise in getting dressed than getting efficient on the courts. I loved all the extras: the Vuitton tennis-racquet cover, the gym bag, the Vuitton tennis towel, and knitted cap and, of course, my Piaget watch and the Vuitton water-bottle box. (As I like Marc Jacobs and virtually everything he has done with Louis Vuitton, I am a big client of that house.)

My approach to tennis practice is the same approach I take to every day: get up, get dressed – and make sure you are turned out as well as you possibly can be.So, there we were at the courts – and nothing… No directions were given by RJ’s cameraman. That is how we were all filmed for this extraordinary glimpse into the world of Vogue. We just carried on doing what we do. We were never told to stop and start over again. Sometimes, when they felt there was a good line, they would say, “Would you repeat it?”

I really loved that tennis moment – I felt that it was one of my best scenes. The scene visiting Vera Wang, where I say something about the “famine of beauty” and how “my eyes are starving for beauty” at the fashion tents during New York Fashion Week is also a good scene. But there were, of course, many other scenes that were condemned to the cutting-room floor – so many! Don’t ask what they were. Well, I do think those Avenue lunch scenes were great, but they were cut.

The September Issue DVD will be released with outtakes. Stay tuned.

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