Oct 18
'Queer' Director Luca Guadagnino Staying Busy with Slate of Upcoming Projects
Kilian Melloy READ TIME: 2 MIN.
"Queer" is the second film this year from prolific Italian director Luca Guadagnino, but he's already got at least three more projects underway – including an adaptation of Pier Vittorio Tondelli's gay novel "Separate Rooms."
IndieWire provided the rundown in a report on the "Call Me By Your Name" director's appearance on the Filmmaker Toolkit podcast, which is associated with IndieWire.
Guadagnino discussed his documentary of fellow Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci, who, IndieWire relayed, is Guadagnino's "cinematic hero."
Saying that he is editing the doc at the moment, Guadagnino also let slip that the movie might not be finished with production. "I have a few more conversations I want to have," Guadagnino revealed, naming Martin Scorsese as a director with whom he'd love to discuss Bertolucci on camera.
"They're not interviews; it's a conversation," IndieWire quoted Guadagnino cautioning about the documentary's approach. "It's a very personal movie," he went on to add. "I am the protagonist of the movie. It could be called, 'Bertolucci and I,' which it's not going to be."
But that's just the beginning of the auteur's lineup of films currently in various stages of production.
"On the podcast, he called 'Queer' his most personal film, in part because he has wanted to adapt William S. Burroughs' unfinished novel into a film since he first read it at age 17," IndieWire reported of the director's next film, a gay romance starring Daniel Craig and Drew Starkey that's said to be stuffed with sizzling gay sex scenes. "Queer" is due in theaters next month.
"In addition to 'Queer,' another book left an equally big impact on the director as a teenager," IndieWire noted – none other than the 1901 first novel by Thomas Mann, "Buddenbrooks," a multigenerational saga of a German family.
Mann's novel, Guadagnino told the podcast, is "about the decadence of a Western society rooted in the most brutal form of repression, internal before being external."
"To understand the obscenity of repression being acted out upon people, I think you have to see and look into the repression that the people who are exerting repression over other people have within themselves," the "Challengers" director added, "not to justify them, but to go to the root of this heart of darkness."
Guadagnino tackled the adaptation of "Buddenbrooks" with Francesca Manieri, with whom he also collaborated on the HBO series "We Are Who We Are," about a questioning teenager who relocates to an Italian military base with his two mothers, one of whom assumes command of the facility.
The film, IndieWire added, is "one of the director's four dream projects, along with his 2018 remake of 'Suspiria,' 'Queer,' and adapting Pier Vittorio Tondelli's 'Separate Rooms,' which is already in the works with Manieri writing the script, and actors Léa Seydoux and Josh O'Connor attached," O'Connor having also been one of Guadagnino's stars in "Challengers."
Kilian Melloy serves as EDGE Media Network's Associate Arts Editor and Staff Contributor. His professional memberships include the National Lesbian & Gay Journalists Association, the Boston Online Film Critics Association, The Gay and Lesbian Entertainment Critics Association, and the Boston Theater Critics Association's Elliot Norton Awards Committee.
