Luca Guadagni­no: ​‘I hate drama’

Ital­ian chron­i­cler of desire Luca Guadagni­no takes a road trip across Ronald Reagan’s Amer­i­ca in Bones and All, adapt­ed from a young adult nov­el about a pair of can­ni­bals who fall in love while try­ing to find them­selves. Com­bin­ing the hor­ror of Sus­piria with the del­i­cate romance of Call Me By Your Name, his lat­est film is a ten­der, trag­ic, time­less love sto­ry that sees him reunite with Tim­o­th­ée Cha­la­met. After a rap­tur­ous pre­mière at the Venice Film Fes­ti­val, audi­ences are set to fall in love with Tay­lor Rus­sell, who plays recent­ly aban­doned teenag­er Maren, as she sets out to find the moth­er she’s nev­er met. We caught up with one of the busiest men in Hol­ly­wood as he works on the final cut of his next film, ten­nis dra­ma Challengers.

LWLies: You were a lit­tle hes­i­tant to take on the script for Bones and All, even though you’ve worked with David Kaj­ganich a few times now. Why did you change your mind?

Guadagni­no: I was hes­i­tant because I was busy and I had so many things on my plate, as they say. I felt that in engag­ing, in read­ing the script and giv­ing a false promise to David about being inter­est­ed, I could make him lose time, and I didn’t want that at all. Because I love him. He kind of insist­ed and my school of thought is when some­one asks you more than once to some­thing, then you have to sur­ren­der and say yes.

So I said ​‘Okay, I’ll read it’ but with a caveat that I was read­ing it because I wan­na read some­thing writ­ten by him, not because I was going to con­sid­er it. Of course, once I start­ed read­ing it, I felt so pow­er­ful­ly pulled into this world of drifters, of the dis­en­fran­chised, in this fable through Amer­i­ca, which remind­ed me of the Grimm Broth­ers’ sto­ries about Europe. The char­ac­ters were so beau­ti­ful­ly fleshed out, so pre­cise, the ver­nac­u­lar was so inspir­ing… and the oppor­tu­ni­ty that the script gave me to think of Tim­o­th­ée as my part­ner for this. All of these ele­ments made me com­plete­ly sur­ren­der and say yes.

How did you approach Tim­o­th­ée about the oppor­tu­ni­ty – did you have to sell it to him, or did he jump at the chance to reunite?

I don’t have to sell any­thing to him. I just called my friend Bri­an Sward­strom, his agent, because my rule is even if you are friends with actors you can­not approach them direct­ly with the pro­pos­al. But I also have the priv­i­lege of being friends with him. So I said ​‘Bri­an what do you think about this?’ ​‘Oh, I love it’. ​‘Should I give it to Tim­o­th­ée?’ ​‘Sure’. So we gave it to him. He was in Rome, I was in Milan, so I went to Rome. We had a beau­ti­ful con­ver­sa­tion that led to anoth­er con­ver­sa­tion, a few days after­wards, that led to anoth­er con­ver­sa­tion and gave me and David and Tim­o­th­ée the beau­ti­ful chance to spend time togeth­er, elab­o­rat­ing on these ideas, and turn­ing David’s script into the script that we even­tu­al­ly shot.

What did Tim­o­th­ée con­tribute to Lee’s character?

I can give you an exam­ple – he didn’t think that Lee had to feel pro­tec­tive in the life of Maren, the way it was com­ing across in the first draft. He thought that Maren and Lee, both of them, had to feel lost and frag­ile. A beau­ti­ful idea. That’s a real Cha­la­met touch.

Were there any films or cul­tur­al ref­er­ence points you gave to Tim­o­th­ee and Taylor?

I gave them Sans Toit Ni Loi, by Agnes Var­da, which is Vagabond in Eng­lish, Ger­many Year Zero, by Rober­to Rosseli­ni. Chan­tal Akerman’s Jeanne Diel­man, Bresson’s A Man Escaped. I like the Aker­man because this char­ac­ter doesn’t do any­thing. Aker­man is almost clin­i­cal in fol­low­ing this woman’s rou­tines. I think that is an amaz­ing per­for­mance, both in terms of how the direc­tor under­stands the per­for­mance and the char­ac­ter, and the actress under­stands the char­ac­ter and per­for­mance. It was impor­tant to me that Tay­lor knew I wasn’t look­ing for the dra­ma, I hate drama.

Real­ly?

I hate when you see actors act­ing. I don’t believe in act­ing, as much as I believe in performance.

What would you say the dif­fer­ence is between the two?

Per­for­mance is in every­thing and becom­ing and behav­iour – act­ing is resort­ing to the tool­box that you might have learnt in some the­atri­cal act­ing school or what you think is the way you think an actor should act.

Hav­ing done Sus­piria, you must be quite au fait with prac­ti­cal effects by now. How do you man­age to cre­ate con­vinc­ing can­ni­bal­ism on-screen? 

By por­tray­ing it as a mat­ter of fact thing. By know­ing exact­ly what would hap­pen in real­i­ty. So I spoke a lot with pathol­o­gists – they told me that the tear the skin of some­one it is not easy. It’s very tough. They need to have very strong jaws, that dif­fi­cult and also the… taste is not great, the bet­ter taste is around the white part of fat, because it have more taste. That’s why it can be dan­ger­ous, because if they eat like they do, feast­ing on the body, they can be scratched by the bone pro­trud­ing. In fact, you see they have a lot of scars. Like ani­mals. Sul­ly doesn’t have part of his ear. Jason Hamer, the Pros­thet­ic Make Up Artist and Fer­nan­do Perez, the Make Up Artist, they did such an incred­i­ble job there, and so it was fun. And the flies, did you like the flies in the movie?

I loved the flies. So was that CGI, or did you have a fly wrangler?

No, no. When we shot, we knew that we were going to put some CG flies and the sound of them in the scenes, but then sud­den­ly a cou­ple of flies showed up, because of the syrup we used for blood. So you see, that was great, because we filmed the real flies and then once we had to enhance them, the visu­al effects peo­ple could see how the real flies moved and just repli­cate that.

You had some flies des­per­ate to star in the new Luca Guadagni­no film. 

Yeah. You know that because of the Humane Soci­ety, if you want to have a fly in the inte­ri­or you have the cre­ate a cage around the set, so that you can catch the fly and release it in nature. So that meant that we have to make a cage in the liv­ing room set, and itwas very com­pli­cat­ed so we said no. We’d use CG. But then the flies came by themselves. 

You col­lab­o­rat­ed again with cos­tume design­er Giu­lia Pier­san­ti on this film. What was her vision for Maren and Lee’s style?

Giu­lia had this idea that a lot of the cloth­ing is ran­dom, that they find in hous­es, in places that they roam. Maren for instance, she wears this Bar­bour coat that belonged to her father and that he left behind when he aban­doned her. It’s a sym­bol of her hug­ging him even if he left her. And then the more she falls into love with Lee, she peels lay­ers of cloth­ing off, and she becomes more and more fem­i­nine. Then for Lee, Giu­lia had this idea that Lee was one of the first of the grunge gen­er­a­tion, as epit­o­mised by the trag­ic fig­ure of Kurt Cobain. He encom­pass­es this impos­si­bil­i­ty and this des­per­a­tion, the emo­tion­al fragili­ty of that gen­er­a­tion. You see that in him.