Rhyme and Reason: Quentin Jones
on Directing Cara Delevingne for Vogue's Punk Stories
Photo: Courtesy of Quentin Jones Behind the scenes in Punk Stories (Quentin Jones and Cara Delevingne)
With her model still 30,000 feet in the air at early afternoon, it seemed less than likely that Quentin Jones was going to be able to wrap her first Vogue-commissioned film by day’s end. “Poor Cara [Delevingne]
had to work so late the day before that she was forced to miss her
flight. She arrived on set at 3:00 p.m., the day before New York Fashion
Week started and had barely slept, having been sat in the back of the
next flight between two kids,” the filmmaker recalls, sympathetically.
“She had the worst nightmare getting here…and yet was so energetic,
bouncing off the walls the entire way through. She was pretty rock ’n’
roll about the whole thing.”
One look at Jones’ “Punk Stories,” which premiered today on Vogue.com, confirms the director’s report entirely. In the film, Delevingne embodies three different musician-inspired personae—a glammed-up Debbie Harry, a bleached-blonde Sid Vicious, and a snakeskin-clad Joan Jett—and many more costume changes as she sways, bobs, claps, jumps over sets, and plays air guitar without ever losing her distinctively guileful look. “Cara’s quite punky, anyway,” Jones says, “at least in spirit.”
She admits that “punk” and “logic’ are not concepts that easily go hand
in hand: “But I didn’t want to take it in a nostalgic direction,” she
says. “I wanted it to be modern and quite fresh, not too grungy or
melancholy.” The result is a new take on punk that filters its innate
anarchic messiness through Jones’ vivid, controlled lens, using
Delevingne as the vehicle for her translation. “Cara takes punk in a
youthful direction,” according to Jones. And never mind that the team
shot through the evening; Delevingne was up to walk the shows the very
next morning.
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