Words Stephen Greco Photography Alistair-Young

Published in No 18

Frédéric Tcheng says he was nervous before showing a rough cut of his 2023 film Invisible Beauty to the person whose life and work the film is based on, Bethann Hardison, the former fashion model and agent who became a formidable champion for greater representation of people of color in the fashion industry. The film had given him an opportunity “to go much deeper than in any of my other films and explore the different sides of a human being.” He didn’t want to disappoint himself or Hardison. “I knew that she would tell me the truth about the film,” he says. “That's just how she goes about life.” But Hardison’s reaction pleased the filmmaker. “I could tell immediately that she was... I don't know, lost for words. She said, ‘I can see it now. You've made me a believer in my own story.’”

 Born in France, Tcheng studied civil engineering in Paris and then earned an MFA in film from Columbia University. His solo directorial debut, Dior and I, premiered in 2014 at the 2014 Tribeca Film Festival and was hailed by the Hollywood Reporter as one of the “Best Fashion Documentaries of the Decade.” In riveting films about fashion icons like Halston, Valentino, and Diana Vreeland, Tcheng has shown us the fashion world from multiple points of view. Invisible Beauty, which premiered at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival and is now available on Hulu, “should be required viewing,” said the Washington Post. But while Tcheng is celebrated for films about the fashion world, a project he is working on is “more personal”: a short film begun just before the pandemic and shot on the rustic, forested property he co-owns in New York’s Orange County. “I call it a sci-fi nature documentary,” he says. “It's a very odd film, but very meditative. It's mostly about looking at the land and looking at nature. It's this other part of me that's very interested in the environment and science. I used to be an engineer, so evolution and technology and our place in the environment are things that I'm interested in.”

Tcheng spoke with me recently via Zoom from the rudimentary cabin that he and his husband Owen Wright, an entrepreneur, built on their land and will inhabit until the house they are currently constructing there is finished.

SG Is your new sci-fi film finished or a work in progress?

FT It's almost finished. I've started submitting it to festivals. It's called LUCA.

SG “Luca” like the man’s name?

FT LUCA stands for “Last Universal Common Ancestor.” It’s a scientific term given to the single cell that four billion years ago gave rise to all life on Earth. That was the original starting point for the film.

SG That sounds very different from what you normally do.

FT It was really fun to do on the side. I shot on the land that we have here.

SG What kind of land do you have?

FT Well, we have a lot of water. I don’t know if you can hear, there’s a creek that's to the right of me, and a creek to the left of me. There’s a pond and the river in front of me — the Neversink River, which goes into the Delaware a little bit further and actually feeds New York City.

SG I know the area. I grew up in Ellenville, to the north of you, along the same canal route as your town — the old Delaware and Hudson….

FT No way!

SG Yes, way.

FT I mean, the canal was a big part of the history here. We're actually on one arm of the canal, a feeding arm. And so, we have this old dam that's bordering our property, and it's really beautiful, this old concrete structure. And then further down, in the village, there is even a museum. I actually emailed them a couple of weeks ago because I'm interested in the silent films from this area. It was Hollywood before Hollywood.

SG I remember learning that.

FT Kind of funny, me being a filmmaker, that I ended up here. D.W. Griffith spent a couple of summers here, along with Mary Pickford, before they moved to Hollywood. And other filmmakers, too. They made forty films here, or something like that, and I've watched some of them recently, because they had the titles at the Neversink Museum and I was able to find them on YouTube. And obviously they're a little cringey, because it's Native Americans being played by white people, but not as racist as what Griffith ended up doing in Hollywood later. I'm using some of these archival films now in LUCA.

SG Are you working with actors?

FT There's one actor — a friend of mine, Edem Dela-Seshie. He's not a professional actor, although he’s been in an art film. I had a very loose script that had sci-fi kind of overtones, and we shot in February 2020 for one day, just to see what Edem looked like in the landscape. And then the pandemic happened, and obviously it became much more complicated to shoot. But I continued, just filming the landscape. And then eventually I met a family of beavers that lived in that old dam, and so the film sort of morphed into this nature documentary.

SG How did you find your property and what are you doing with it?

FT So there was no house when we got the land, in 2015. We have these sixteen acres of pine forest, and there's lots of different areas to it — the river, the hill, the plateau, and so many different types of trees. I think it was logged a long, long time ago, but it was probably too steep to be actually exploited. My husband bought it three months before I met him, and so actually our third date was on the land. He was like, “Do you want to go camping?”

SG That’s sweet.

FT He picked me up in his truck and I was like, “Oh my God, who is this guy?” And we came here, and we stayed in a tent.

SG And you with your Louis Vuitton overnight bag, I suppose…

FT [Laughs] No, no. I know how to camp. I mean, I'm definitely a city boy, but I did go to Boy Scouts and my grandparents lived in a rural area, so I love being outdoors too. I definitely didn't have the same skills that Owen has. He’s just a professional outdoor person. For me, it was magical. It was like the land became this kind of garden of Eden, honestly.

The first summer that we were together, we got to know each other very well up here, swimming in the river and just running around naked. And it was just so freeing, so different. And so, it's very much part of our story. And Owen pretty quickly built a little cabin. It just has a wood stove and a bed, and that's how we've lived here for the last eight years — for two, three days at a time, mostly in the spring, summer, and fall. We don't come in the winter because there’s just too much snow. But it's become a little bit of a community, because not only our friends who bought with us, but also Owen's brother bought a house across the road, and they renovated it.

SG It sounds wonderful.

FT And for a year now we've been building a house.

SG Something of your own design?

FT We worked with an architect, but it's very much our own design. We're about two-thirds through. We'll be sealed in pretty soon. We're getting our windows next month.

SG That’s exciting. What is the style of the house, or its influences?

FT The idea was to have a house that was kind of integrated into the landscape as much as possible, almost an invisible house, because it’s cut into the hillside. And now that I think about it, it was a little ambitious. It’s concrete, steel, and wood. We’re using a concrete wall as a retaining wall, but also as an interior wall, and we love that look, which sort of gives a unity to all the rooms. And then we have a steel structure, because the house is cantilevered slightly, and a wood frame. We're trying to use as much wood as we can from the property, for the interior. It's a very mid-century house. If you think of Philip Johnson's Glass House, only on the side of a hill instead. It’s very much that esthetic.

SG Nice.

FT The other big design feature of the house is an atrium — a kind of central space around which the house is organized.

SG You must be eager to move in. Can you even work in your cabin?

FT No. I mean, I do phone calls and things like that when I'm up here. And if I really need to use the internet, I can go to my brother-in-law's house. But no, the cabin is not very conducive to work. Just now we're helping with the house, and Owen is teaching me how to do concrete and all this stuff. But usually, I like to relax up here and just walk down to the river, or paint. I've taken up painting since I've been up here. I paint on glass.

SG Tell me about that.

FT I've always been fascinated with stained-glass, and I was mesmerized by Duchamp’s big glass pieces, which you can view from both sides. And they really play with the light going through, and the transparency of it. So that's kind of what I do in my own way.

SG Do you exhibit your glass paintings?

FT No, though I've given some to friends here and there.

SG Is there a relationship at all between the process of painting on glass and that of putting images on what used to be actual film?

FT I don't know. But for me, there's definitely a fantasy that comes from film. Remember Teorema by Pasolini? There's a scene of the young son painting on glass, and I always found that kind of fascinating — very erotic and beautiful. And then the paintings that I do here have a lot to do with what I'm interested in and the LUCA film I'm making: very organic shapes and cellular shapes and things like that. I paint on both sides of the glass and just have fun with it.

SG So this film is really new territory for you.


FT I hope it’s going to have a nice festival life and everything, but it's not a commercial film in the same way that the other films are. I'm really interested in going into the narrative space and doing films that have the more scripted elements to it. In my film Halston [2019] I was able to experiment with scripted scenes and push the boundaries of documentary storytelling. I included a frame story as an homage to film noir and Citizen Kane — scenes with Tavi [Gevinson] playing an archivist who digs through the evidence of Halston’s life. I’ve always wanted to do narrative work. That’s my initial dream. Documentary imposed itself late to me, after I had a serious case of writer’s block in film school. But my approach to documentary has always been to treat it like a narrative. A story is a story.

Invisible Beauty’s Bethann Hardison was featured in Issue #12 of Upstate Diary.

Stephen Greco’s most recent novel is Such Good Friends (Kensington, 2023), about the friendship between Truman Capote and Lee Radziwill.

Alistair Taylor-Young is based between Paris and NY. He contributes to Conde Nast Traveler, Hermes, Armani, and Dior, among others. at-y.com