After creating a worldwide makeup brand, overseeing editorials for magazines, and publishing a photograph book on his private island off the coast of Bora-Bora, François Nars is taking to the silver screen for his latest project. 

As Nars Cosmetics, now owned by Shiseido, gears as much as have fun its thirtieth anniversary, the French-born makeup artist, photographer and inventive director of the brand has made a documentary about his life, work and most of all his inspiration, particularly in cinema, called “Unknown Beauty: François Nars.”

Nevertheless it won’t be what you expect as he’s replaced the same old talking heads structure with footage of screen sirens similar to Catherine Deneuve and Marlene Dietrich, comprising 85 percent of the documentary. 

“I actually desired to keep away from your basic documentary while you just sit on the chair after which the camera is on you and you might have so many individuals talking about you,” Nars said over the phone from the Paris hotel room he just arrived in after spending time in his native south of France.

“I wanted it to be very educational and really show people what drove me all those years and all of the aesthetics that basically built up my creative world since I used to be a child,” he continued.

With the intention to achieve his vision, he tapped director Lisa Immordino Vreeland — the filmmaker behind documentaries about Diana Vreeland (her husband Alexander Vreeland’s grandmother) and Peggy Guggenheim. “He’s a really private man. We actually discover so much about him and the best way he looks on the world,” she said of Nars.

Together, they handpicked clips from greater than 50 of his favorite movies from the golden age of Old Hollywood to the Nouvelle Vague, of which getting the rights to make use of isn’t any easy feat. Altogether, the documentary was three years within the making. 

“The film is structured in a really different way. I normally have a complete story arc,” explained Vreeland. “This is basically a visible essay. It’s a meditative film.”

She described Nars’ interest in cinema as “this superb line of obsession and fervour after which also extreme knowledge, since it’s not only a visible, it’s also an mental understanding of what it’s.” 

Nars said the movie stars that inspired him at eight years old are still major influences today. “That actually made a huge impact on my mind and about what I believed beauty must be.” 

Lending poignance to the story are never-before-seen movies and pictures from Nars’ own childhood within the Pyrenees and summers in Biarritz, featuring his mother Claudette, his first muse who later became a favourite photographic subject. 

“She was chargeable for my love for beauty. She was very glamorous and a natural beauty, which helped me develop also a certain sense of what makeup must be. She was really a really key element. She’s all the time present in my mind,” he said of how his mother influenced his journey.

The movie clips and film of his mother are collaged with backstage footage from what Nars calls the glory days of creativity in fashion — runway videos from Paris within the ’70s; supermodels like Christy Turlington and Naomi Campbell goofing off between takes on Steven Meisel shoots within the ’90s — and commentary from a few of Nars’ muses and collaborators, like actors Charlotte Rampling who narrates much of the documentary, Lauren Hutton and art director Fabien Baron.

Nars knows whereof he speaks. He was within the thick of this scene. After becoming a mainstay within the Paris fashion world, he decamped to Latest York City in 1984, working for publications similar to Harper’s Bazaar, Elle and Vogue, and collaborating with designers including Karl Lagerfeld, Marc Jacobs, Dolce & Gabbana and Anna Sui for his or her runway shows. Then got here the ad campaigns with Versace, Calvin Klein, Ralph Lauren and Barneys Latest York.

“Moving from Paris to Latest York was so exciting. I used to be so lucky to work for Vogue instantly and begin working with all the good photographers. I arrived at the proper time in Latest York,” Nars recounted. 

He launched his namesake cosmetics line a decade later with a group of 12 lipsticks at Barneys Latest York. Over the past three a long time, it has grown to encompass a full range of makeup and skincare, including products which have reached long-term blockbuster status like Orgasm Blush and The Multiple in Copacabana. He sold his company to Shiseido in 2000 and purchased Motu Tané, his French Polynesian island.

Sine then, he has released plenty of books. In his most up-to-date limited-edition tome Persona, Nars published greater than 300 portraits of creative figures.

His hope for the documentary, which is able to premiere in Latest York next week, is that it is going to function a source of inspiration for others.

“Hopefully people will want to look at the flicks that we speak about within the documentary in full and, and hopefully fall in love with them like I did and hopefully encourage them,” Nars said.