“Queer” the director Luca Guadagnino’s new film, is a tale of misplaced affection. It is also a movie that will leave neat freaks clutching their Tide pens.
Led by Daniel Craig at his elastic, drunken best, “Queer” follows Lee, a drug-addled older man who falls catastrophically in love with the much younger Allerton (played by Drew Starkey) in the steamy heat of 1950s Mexico. It morphs into a road film as the pair traverse the fecund South American jungle in search of ayahuasca. Along the way, their clothes acquire so many oil stains, sweat marks, muddy prints and smudges of unspecified origin that the audience can practically feel the grime through the screen.
“There’s nothing worse when you watch a film and it looks like it’s just been pressed,” said Jonathan Anderson, the fashion designer who was the film’s costume designer.
“Or they use some little cocoa powder to give a sense of dirtiness instead of making it really dirty,” Mr. Guadagnino added.
The mud-caked costumes are a beacon of the uncompromising authenticity that Mr. Guadagnino and Mr. Anderson strove for in working on “Queer,” which is adapted from William S. Burroughs’s 1985 novel of the same name. Mr. Craig’s hard-drinking, lecherous Lee is a thinly veiled version of Mr. Burroughs, such that Mr. Guadagnino referred to the character interchangeably as Lee and Burroughs.
The clothes are almost entirely authentic to the 1950s — save two rakish “Thin White Duke”-style ivory suits that appear in a fantasy sequence toward the film’s conclusion. The eggy yellow shirts, the faded swim trunks, the short-sleeved sweaters, even the crisp underwear were all period, sourced by Mr. Anderson from vintage dealers across North America. If any items had moth holes or distressed hems, that was just part of the appeal.
“I found this amazing guy in Montreal who was a strange obsessive over historical underwear,” Mr. Anderson said. “It was quite fascinating.”
“Queer” marks the pair’s second collaboration following “Challengers,” last year’s tennis threesome sweatfest. One would imagine that Mr. Anderson has enough occupying his time. For several years, he has been the fashion world’s resident critical darling as the creative director of Loewe as well as his own label, JW Anderson. His name is constantly being bandied about as a contender to be the next designer of Dior. And yet, costume designing is now a robust, second career for him.
“He’s not allowed to make movies with other filmmakers,” Mr. Guadagnino said, joking. It was mid-November, and he was sitting next to Mr. Anderson in the lobby of the Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles on the day after the film’s Hollywood premiere. The affection between the pair was 4K clear.
“We adore working and creating with each other,” Mr. Guadagnino said. “I adore Luca,” Mr. Anderson echoed. They teased that a third collaboration could be in the works. In October, it was announced that Mr. Guadagnino will direct a “new interpretation” of “American Psycho.”
In an edited interview, Mr. Guadagnino and Mr. Anderson elaborated on working together, sourcing those period clothes and the place of continuity in movies.
Let’s start with the fact that most of the clothes were authentic to the time period of the book. Why did sourcing them all matter to you both?
JONATHAN ANDERSON What I loved about this time period is that ultimately it is the birth of modern men’s wear. In the ’50s the war ends, and America goes into overdrive, everything’s industrialized. We’re able to make suits en masse, and it’s suddenly the birth of Sears and these kinds of shops where you could buy a suit off the rack.
LUCA GUADAGNINO Jonathan is not only a great designer, but he has a knowledge of what it means to dress in history.
Did sourcing such old clothes create any snags?
ANDERSON The suits were very difficult because body shapes have changed. Weirdly for Drew, everything fit because he really has the body type of that period.
There’s a term in the film press material that I really liked: “Uniform of a broken dandy.” Where do we see that in the movie?
GUADAGNINO Lee, before becoming the iconic Burroughs we know, is a kind of disheveled, childish man.
ANDERSON Allerton is also so together, which is what dandyism really is. But at the same time, there’s a hole in the sweater, and the belt is completely worn out.
Then there’s Joe Guidry (played by Jason Schwartzman), who clashes with the minimalism of Lee in his white suit by wearing this great, but still kind of ratty, technicolor plaid shirt. How did that look come together?
ANDERSON With Jason’s character, you could imagine that every single object was taken from someone he’d slept with. There’s something about this larger-than-life character where what makes them sexy is that they have the confidence to think they’re sexy.
GUADAGNINO They become forever sexy.
And, of course, he wears sandals.
ANDERSON We did this other film, “Challengers,” and there was a debate about sandals, so the minute we were doing this film, I was like, “We’re putting in sandals, and we’re going to show toes.” And Jason had this moment when he lifted his foot in the air, which was probably one of the most funniest days on set.
What about continuity? Was it hard to keep that up scene to scene with all the sweat and splotches?
GUADAGNINO I think continuity in filmmaking is for the poor of spirit. You know how much I fight with the costume supervisors when they say, “You cannot do this because you have to have continuity.” I say, “You do your job, make sure that you can get continuity. And if we have to fix something, we do it in the visual FX eventually.”
Among the most striking props in the film are the masks that are worn during the ayahuasca trip at the film’s climax. I understand those were actually from a JW Anderson collection, Jonathan?
ANDERSON I had done a show during the pandemic when I couldn’t use models, so I had these masks made. Then when Luca was describing this scene, I was like, “I have these masks,” but they were brightly colored. So we took them and made them quite antique. I love that they got a second life because they were sitting in a box and were never used beyond the show.
So after working on this movie, did either of you want to step into those pleated 1950s trousers or knits?
ANDERSON When I look at Drew in the film, I wish I could pull it off. I would like to wear knitwear and have that physique … I would need to go to the gym.
GUADAGNINO I think you would look even better than Drew in those clothes.
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