Luca Guadagnino’s Wild World: Inside the Director’s Big Year

Luca Guadagnino is playing the long game. As a kid, he devoured biographies of great directors. As a filmmaker himself, “what I’m trying to do, chiseling and sculpting one movie after the other, is about the ambition of that young kid, thinking in terms of filmography,” the Palermo native tells me. “I’m designing a great thread in terms of how one movie follows the other. I’m not saying the movies are great; I’m saying the way the pattern works, it’s something that I am really carefully trying to put together.”

achieve the tennis onscreen, we had to work so hard in conceiving it way before we were on set—block it way before, and know every shot way before, which is something that I rarely did in the past,” Guadagnino says. He and cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom, who lensed the director’s Call Me by Your Name and Suspiria, storyboarded the tennis sequences with rigorous precision. “I learned that I don’t have to be fearful of a lot of programmation,” Guadagnino says. “[It] actually gave me so much more freedom once we got on the set.”

He worked off the script by first-time screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes, who had already linked up with producers Amy Pascal and Rachel O’Connor by the time it reached the director. Guadagnino and Kuritzkes initially spent a few days together in Milan and hashed out ideas, including Guadagnino’s suggestion for an intimate scene between the three characters, which didn’t exist in the original draft. “Luca made it clear that they should literally touch,” Kuritzkes says. He wrote what became his favorite scene in the film, a steamy three-way hotel-room encounter that’s structured like a mini play. “A good note is annoying because you know you’ll have to do it, and a bad note is stressful because you know you have to figure out a way to not do it,” Kuritzkes says, before grinning. “Luca is consistently very annoying.”

Jonathan Anderson also met Guadagnino in Milan—albeit many years ago. The Loewe creative director didn’t have an interest in designing for movies, but saw a kindred spirit in the filmmaker. “We were meant to be having a coffee for 30 minutes, and I think we ended up being there for seven hours,” he says, describing a common experience for those that meet Guadagnino. “I think we speak every day 1734382323.”

Anderson admits that, to this day, he has no idea why Guadagnino asked him to serve as costume designer on Challengers, given his lack of experience in film. But clearly, he’s a natural: The film’s costumes are an essential ingredient, from the tennis outfits to that now ubiquitous “I Told Ya” tee, which was inspired by an image of John F. Kennedy Jr. wearing one in a park. “It was insane to watch—you could buy them on Amazon the minute the film came out,” Anderson says. “You realize the power of cinema and the power of the cult behind Luca.”

Guadagnino considers his ability to assemble a powerful group of artisans for each film to be one of his primary strengths. “I don’t think the director coordinates the job of everyone. I think the director is a psychoanalyst who makes everyone speak on the bad and tell the truth about themselves so that, eventually, that truth can be part of the beautiful greater truth of the movie,” he says. He prefers collaborators to surprise either him, themselves, or both. Oscar-winning composers Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross had previously scored the director’s Bones and All. When approaching them about the music for Challengers, Guadagnino provided unexpected guidance: “What if the whole movie was super-loud, in-your-face techno music?”

“Not probably how we would’ve started ourselves—we wouldn’t have thought of that organically,” Reznor says. “We were delighted to see if this could work, if he had the courage to commit to it and keep it loud—and he absolutely did.”

Because Challengers was so thoroughly storyboarded, the film could be edited during production. “At the end of every week, we had almost finished editing everything we had shot that week,” Guadagnino says. Queer, however, posed far more daring challenges.

Set in ’50s Mexico City, Queer follows Lee (Craig), a washed-up wanderer who falls hard for an enigmatic younger man named Allerton (Drew Starkey). Their sexy affair takes up the film’s first half before the movie delves into more esoteric territory, from an extended ayahuasca sequence to a movingly romantic coda. Guadagnino asked Anderson back to design the costumes; Anderson made sure “every single [piece] was original” and true to the place and period. (There were no duplications made for any of the leads’ looks.) Mukdeeprom returned too, shooting this one on lavishly designed soundstages with enveloping tridimensional lighting. And Guadagnino handed Kuritzkes the Burroughs novel back on the Challengers set, before asking him to adapt it. “I saw my job as being kind of a medium between these two artists—Burroughs on one hand and Luca on the other,” Kuritzkes says. “It was a completely new way of writing for me.”

Guadagnino first read the novel when he was 17. The prospect of adapting it scared him in part because he felt so close to the material. “The movie was too personal—it was a little bit too candid as a movie, for people that know me,” he says. “But if you’re not vulnerable as a filmmaker, then you should change your job.” His colleagues felt that intense connection down to the little details. “We started disagreeing on the amount of wear…on certain clothing,” Anderson says. “At the studio, they have this amazing department where they age clothing, which is a kind of apothecary for clothing. These guys would throw potions and dust and dirt on things. You’ll be like, ‘I need this a week older,’ or, ‘I need it 10 years older.’ I think there was a lot of debate over how old something was going to be.”

Editor Marco Costa, who first met Guadagnino in his mid-20s as a second assistant editor on Suspiria, also felt Guadagnino’s determination to honor Burroughs. Unlike with Challengers, the team left the footage alone for a month before piecing it together. “We decided to edit the entire movie step by step, according to the script—we followed every line,” Costa says. “We had a chance to watch the whole thing with all the elements, and we realized that there was something that the movie was telling us—that the love story was more important than everything else.” This informed everything through to Reznor and Ross’s end-credits song, whose lyrics are actual lines from Burroughs’s final journal entry (again: a Guadagnino suggestion). “We came up with something that I felt really proud of,” Reznor says. That meant that a different original song initially meant to be included in Queer, recorded with star Omar Apollo, was left out of the movie; it now exists as a bonus track. “That’s not why the song was written—it didn’t feel right at the end,” Reznor says.

Then again, a lot didn’t make the final cut—leading to rampant speculation about the longer, more explicit versions that preceded it, which spread online and informed initial responses to Queer. “I feel bad about that because there is no original cut—the only cut is the one that we presented in Venice,” Guadagnino says. “I share longer cuts with my friends—not because I want to test the possibility that that is the cut, but because it’s a work in progress. But I learned a lesson.”

Guadagnino reads “everything.” He values the harsh critiques as much as he does the fawning raves, and notices how chatter about his work speeds up or peters out. In the near decade since his highly acclaimed A Bigger Splash, however, some trend lines of film writing have concerned him.

“I don’t believe that every opinion counts—I don’t believe that the reading of a movie by a very cultivated film critic who knows the history of cinema, who can talk about silent movies as much as they can talk about the last five years of filmmakers, is equally as important as someone whose perspective on something is based on knowledge that can go 30 years back. And I’m being generous,” he says. “I do see a tendency, in the past 10 years, of criticism bleeding into journalism and evaluation of film more than analysis of film…. [It’s] leading us more and more to a place of an immediate consensus that is burning and destroying films, instead of having a profound understanding of what we’re seeing.”

While Challengers received a much wider embrace from audiences, it’s as much a clash of classic and modern as Queer—inspired by the seductive, combative heroes of Preston Sturges and Ernst Lubitsch. Guadagnino has called Queer a tribute to the films of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, singling out its elongated, explicit sex scenes. For the discerning viewer, he hopes these two movies click as contrasting products of cinephilia: “It shows how much I love cinema, and how much I love the possibility that cinema offers.”

His next film, After the Hunt, ought to continue demonstrating that passion. “It’s a very different movie from what I’ve done so far,” Guadagnino says. A colleague recently pointed out its place in his oeuvre: “Three movies in a short span of time—Challengers, Queer, and After the Hunt—and two female-driven stories bookend a love story between men in the center.” Reznor and Ross are already signed on to score the film, while Costa has been hard at work editing. “We were talking a lot about time—it’s a movie about the internal tension of time,” Guadagnino says of the cutting process. “What is the unity between one second and the other? Infinite.”

This year marked the 25th anniversary of Guadagnino’s debut feature, The Protagonists, a crime thriller starring one of his most frequent collaborators, Tilda Swinton. The director thinks back to that time with some anxiety. “I had my movie in my mind, and I was really adamant to make the movie I had in my mind,” he says. “[But] there were the limits of money. There was my inexperience. That was a very cold shower.” Helming his follow-up, the erotic drama Melissa P., was a “traumatic” experience—he felt “disempowered,” unable to navigate the whims of those around him.

You can draw a line from those early, frustrating experiences to where Guadagnino finds himself now, working fast and at his prime. What seem like risks keep paying off—bringing in a fashion house’s creative director to lead an ambitious costume department; finding new notes for a pair of music legends to play. Hell, on Queer, he hired an architect as the production designer, with the job of recreating ’50s Mexico City on a bunch of soundstages in Rome. That’s Stefano Baisi, and he too is coming back as production designer for After the Hunt. It’ll be his second movie.

“They’re my friends—all of these people are my friends,” Guadagnino says. “That’s what I love about it: friendship.”

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