Luca Guadagnino Wants to Run a Film Festival
And I think both Justin and Nora, and Margherita Giusti—who I produced an animated short film that won a lot of awards around the world, and now we’re doing an animated feature with her. Or the wonderful Haley Gates—I produced her movie, Atropia, which won at Sundance. Or Dea Kulumbegashvili—I produced her second feature film, April. Or Diciannove—it’s all people who are very, very motivated and driven by beautiful ambitions of expressing themselves without compromise. They know what they want to do. So I will always be there to support young filmmakers.
But also behind the camera, I work with people that maybe are not your immediate idea of [film collaborators]. I remember when I did A Bigger Splash, I called my friend Giulia Piersanti, who is a masterful knitwear designer, and I said, ‘Come and do the costume design.’ She had never done [a movie] and she came on and she did it and now [with After the Hunt], this is I think her fifth feature film. She did a great job.
Or I was working with this young architect called Stefano Baisi when I asked him to do the production design. And again, like Giulia, he’d never done a movie and then he did Queer— which I think is incredible, in terms of the world-building. And also in this case [of After the Hunt] too, we shot everything in London, and Stefano managed to bring to life Yale.
What quality do you see in them? Obviously you’re not giving these opportunities to just anyone you meet on the street.
I think it’s about boldness, courage in their work, in their life. It’s interesting. I’m inspired by people that are courageous.
I imagine, for someone like you who’s been making films for a few decades now, it must be invigorating to work with people who are new and very hungry and excited.
Yeah, it’s fantastic because you see the world from a different perspective all the time.
I find it interesting that recently the screenwriters we’ve been working with are all American. What about the American sensibility resonates with you?
Well, that’s true and not true. Because, for instance, I work a lot with this wonderful, wonderful Italian screenwriter called Francesca Maneri. So I like people that I like. I’m a lucky director and I’m a lucky person.
Totally.
What’s your favorite Mike Nichols film?
I think Carnal Knowledge is amazing. I think all his movies are great. I love Wolf. I love Working Girl. The Graduate is one of the great classics of American cinema… I often go back to Working Girl.
I think I’m engaging with the discourse of messed-up interaction between messed-up people, who want to impose their truth over the other, and who want to sit in the chair of power as a sort of a prevalence over the other, instead of being open to the other and willful to understand themselves into the eyes of the other. And that’s their tragedy, in a way. And that’s also the kind of ticking-bomb tension that they exert.
I love how you use that ticking sound at the start and then I think at the end again.
It’s in the movie four times.
People have called it a movie about the #MeToo movement. But I do see your point that it’s more about people who are unable to communicate.
When you do a movie, you want the movie to perform as universally as possible. So this is for me about communication more than anything else.
So when you think about a film like Journey to Italy and what Ingrid and Roberto were going through at the time and how the film, I know at the time when it came out it wasn’t received well—
It was destroyed.
Obviously now we know it’s—
One of the greatest movies ever made.
Exactly. How do you look back at a film like that? Obviously now we recognize it as this masterpiece.
I can tell you that in 1996, I went to the movies to watch a movie that, the second I saw it, I adored and recognized as a major artwork and a great masterpiece. But that was destroyed. And then now, 30 years later, it’s considered a great classic and a masterpiece in itself. It’s Showgirls by Paul Verhoeven. So I am lucky because I witnessed that moment.
