Mag­ic and Loss: On the mak­ing of Queer

While it was I who wrote ​‘Junky’, I felt that I was being writ­ten in ​‘Queer’,” William S. Bur­roughs reflect­ed in 1985, when his novel­la was final­ly pub­lished some 33 years after it was writ­ten. A brac­ing, unfil­tered, semi-auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal work inspired by his com­plex rela­tion­ship with Adel­bert Lewis Mark­er (a waifish twen­tysome­thing he met in Mex­i­co City) ​‘Queer’ – a slim 119 pages – was orig­i­nal­ly intend­ed as an exten­sion to ​‘Junky’, but after it was reject­ed due to the explic­it homo­sex­u­al con­tent, Bur­roughs lost inter­est. Even now ​‘Queer’ has not achieved the fame of ​‘Naked Lunch’ or ​‘Junky’; a great shame, as its rest­less melan­choly and trans­ac­tion­al ten­der­ness leave a mark on the soul like a brand, red and raw.

One per­son for­ev­er changed by Bur­roughs’ con­fes­sion­al account of desire and addic­tion was Luca Guadagni­no, who first read ​‘Queer’ when he was 17. ​“My teenage self must have been com­pelled by the beau­ti­ful writ­ing – the way in which he was find­ing a lan­guage to tell a love sto­ry that felt clas­sic, but his point of view was every­thing,” reflects Guadagni­no, loung­ing on a sofa in a Claridge’s hotel room on a bright Octo­ber after­noon. ​“I read every­thing in the Bur­roughs canon after that, which solid­i­fied my pas­sion for ​‘Queer’, because in that it felt like he was mak­ing love to the desire for a con­fes­sion that he had inside him­self, where­as in ​‘Naked Lunch’ Bur­roughs becomes more guard­ed when it comes to him as a person.”

‘Queer’ stayed with Guadagni­no. There was an attempt­ed adap­ta­tion of the book in 2011 by Steve Busce­mi that nev­er came to fruition; the rights remained with the Bur­roughs estate. It wasn’t until the sum­mer of 2022, while direct­ing his ten­nis love tri­an­gle dram­e­dy Chal­lengers with screen­writer Justin Kuritzkes, that Guadagni­no realised the tim­ing was just right. ​“I said to him, ​‘Lis­ten, there’s this book I’ve want­ed to make into a movie for­ev­er. Would you like to read it?’”

Guadagni­no recalls with a smile. ​“I gave him the book in the morn­ing, and by the evening, we were talk­ing about it, and that con­ver­sa­tion was very inspir­ing. I find Justin’s ambi­tion inspir­ing – it’s not ambi­tion to be famous or rich, but ambi­tion to make beau­ti­ful things.”

The pair secured the rights to ​‘Queer’, and as Kuritzkes began work­ing on the script, Guadagni­no set his sights on cast­ing. But who could play an icon­o­clast like William Lee, so naked­ly an avatar for Bur­roughs him­self? In Guadagnino’s mind, it always had to be Daniel Craig, who was elat­ed at the prospect. ​“I was already such a huge fan of his,” Craig explains over Zoom, in between wran­gling his family’s new kit­tens into their car­ri­ers for a vet appoint­ment. ​“We’d want­ed to work togeth­er for many years. And when I read Justin’s script, I just saw with­in the char­ac­ter some­body who I kind of thought I recog­nised and I thought was incred­i­bly inter­est­ing and com­pli­cat­ed.” Although William Lee might share the loqua­cious drawl, inquis­i­tive streak and queer­ness of Detec­tive Benoit Blanc, Craig’s most famous role after Bond, the sim­i­lar­i­ties end there.

In both Bur­roughs’ and Guadagnino’s ver­sions of Queer, Lee is a shifty, phi­lan­der­ing writer, lay­ing low in Mex­i­co and spend­ing his time drink­ing, shoot­ing hero­in, or chanc­ing it with who­ev­er he can talk into bed. He is charis­mat­ic with an under­cur­rent of seed­i­ness, but most­ly Lee is lone­ly – des­per­ate­ly reach­ing out in the sticky dark­ness, hop­ing some­one might reach back.

That some­one arrives in the form of Eugene Aller­ton, a young ex-ser­vice­man and recent trans­fer to Mex­i­co City, lithe and bright and com­plete­ly enig­mat­ic, who always holds Lee at a tan­ta­lis­ing dis­tance. He’s played by Drew Starkey, hith­er­to known to legions of teenagers as part of the Net­flix adven­ture dra­ma series, Out­er Banks, where he plays a drug addict with anger issues. Aller­ton couldn’t be more dif­fer­ent; a coquet­tish study in silences, he is a beguil­ing foil to Lee, who is smit­ten from the moment he first lays eyes on him. ​“Daniel I want­ed, and Daniel I got,” Guadagni­no recalls, ​“It was a long cast­ing process to find Aller­ton. But I was in Lon­don two years ago, for Bones and All, and I watched a tape of Drew for anoth­er movie, and I thought he was great. I want­ed him for Aller­ton immediately.”

Like Craig, Starkey was already an admir­er of Guadagni­no. ​“There’s some­thing about my gen­er­a­tion that strikes a chord. He leads with some type of truth,” he mus­es, in a room down the hall from the direc­tor, ahead of Queer’s UK pre­mière. Starkey has just asked me – polite­ly, apolo­get­i­cal­ly – if he can eat his lunch (an omelette) while we talk. ​“There’s this naked hon­esty that’s show­ing on screen, and I think with Amer­i­can film cul­ture, that was lack­ing for so long. And I love the sense of rever­ie with his films,” Starkey adds. ​“It’s like watch­ing a memory.”

With the heart and soul of Queer in place, Guadagni­no round­ed out the cast with his ​“dear friend” Leslie Manville, play­ing Doc­tor Cot­ter (a male role in the nov­el), an ayahuas­ca expert Lee and Aller­ton seek out in the depths of the Ecuado­ri­an jun­gle, and Jason Schwartz­man as Lee’s hap­less, hilar­i­ous asso­ciate Joe Guidry. Starkey was star-struck, par­tic­u­lar­ly by Schwartz­man, who proved a balm for his nerves about his biggest role to date. ​“I’m on set and I’m rid­dled with anx­i­ety. And he comes in the same way,” Starkey recalls bright­ly. ​“He also has
his inse­cu­ri­ties, but he’s so excit­ed to be there.”

But Allerton’s tac­i­turn nature, com­bined with the real­i­ty that we only ever see him through the prism of Lee, pro­vid­ed a chal­lenge to Starkey. How does one por­tray a man who exists through the lens of anoth­er? He lev­els with me, with a wry smile: ​“There’s always a sense of, ​‘I don’t know what I’m doing and I don’t know who this per­son is,’ but Eugene was a much tougher code to crack. I watched a lot of movies for inspi­ra­tion – Body Heat, Paris, Texas, some Felli­ni, Beau Tra­vail… Sweaty movies. But real­ly, it didn’t start to come togeth­er until the table read.”

If Starkey was wor­ried about find­ing a way into Aller­ton, the pres­sure of going up against a pro like Daniel Craig nev­er showed to the man him­self. ​“Play­ing oppo­site him made things very easy,” Craig notes. ​“He’s incred­i­bly hard-work­ing and ded­i­cat­ed, but also has this light­ness to him – on set you have to be able to remain as inven­tive and cre­ative as pos­si­ble, and open your­self up to what’s going on around you. Drew absolute­ly does that.”

And how does one get a grasp on a char­ac­ter as slip­pery and self-aggran­dis­ing as William Lee, an adept actor him­self? ​“My key was Bur­roughs,” Craig explains. ​“What I found real­ly fas­ci­nat­ing was watch­ing William Bur­roughs in inter­views, this sort of façade that he had as a lit­er­ary per­son and very serious,and then I’d see bits of footage occa­sion­al­ly that you get, which were more pri­vate moments of him relax­ing at home, being high,in com­pa­ny with peo­ple. Those two things were my way in.”

Guadagni­no is elu­sive about his own col­lab­o­ra­tive instincts. ​“Cre­ative process­es should be kept secret,” he decides grand­ly. ​“When I went to the Kubrick exhi­bi­tion, I was so dis­ap­point­ed, because one of the last rooms is for the star child [from 2001: A Space Odyssey, which is ref­er­enced in Queer] and there is this plas­tic pup­pet, there in the naked­ness of its own mor­tal­i­ty, as a prop, and I thought, ​‘Oh no, I can­not look at him like this, because my imag­i­na­tion will be per­vert­ed by this image when I watch the film.’ The mag­ic of the movies should be kept as such.”

Mag­ic is at the heart of Queer – and Bur­roughs’ work in gen­er­al. His life­long inter­est in the occult seeped into his writ­ing, and Guadagni­no trans­lates this onto the screen via ghost­ly appari­tions and a dev­as­tat­ing final act, in which Lee envi­sions Aller­ton again, years after their rev­e­la­to­ry trip to Ecuador. ​“I think fear eats the soul of Lee and Aller­ton,” Guadagni­no reflects, ref­er­enc­ing Fass­binder. ​“And the tragedy is the fear. For me, Queer is a love sto­ry – not a sto­ry of unre­quit­ed love, but a sto­ry of two char­ac­ters being in love with each oth­er at dif­fer­ent times, and in dif­fer­ent ways. The tragedy lies in those shift­ing moments. And cer­tain­ly, in the line, ​‘I’m not queer, I’m dis­em­bod­ied,’ which both Aller­ton and Lee say. Because at the end of the day, life is about the adher­ence between your self, your desires, your moral­i­ty, your anguish and your body, and if you act them out togeth­er or if you repress all of this.”

Speak­ing of repression…Our con­ver­sa­tion turns to David Cro­nen­berg, who direct­ed his own Bur­roughs adap­ta­tion, Naked Lunch, in 1991. Guadagni­no is an admir­er of Cronenberg’s, and has tried sev­er­al times to cast him in a film. ​“The Fly is one of my top five movies of all time,” he enthus­es. ​“It’s the most dev­as­tat­ing love sto­ry ever made. It’s about what love makes you into.”

I men­tion the dichoto­my between the warmth of his cin­e­ma, and the chilly, clin­i­cal strokes of Cro­nen­berg. ​“It’s because he’s Cana­di­an and I’m Sicil­ian,” Guadagni­no grins. ​“But Cro­nen­berg got it so right, in Naked Lunch,” he’s refer­ring to the scene where Bur­roughs infa­mous­ly kills his com­mon-law wife, Joan Vollmer, dur­ing a drunk­en game of William Tell. ​“Bur­roughs shoots her, but Vollmer places the glass on her head. Why does she do that? It’s about uncon­scious desire. It’s about what love does to us.”

The gap between real­i­ty and fan­ta­sy is where so many of Luca Guadagnino’s films exist: the phan­tom of a hand on the small of your back; the fever­ish night ter­rors of a detox­ing junkie. His films – which have their admir­ers and their detrac­tors – exist in the fan­tas­ti­cal realm. And for Starkey, whose ascent to star­dom is just begin­ning, that trans­lates into real­i­ty. He recalls a moment on set with Jason Schwartz­man: ​“We were stand­ing on this street that they built for Mex­i­co City. It’s beau­ti­ful. And he kind of just looks over at me and he says, ​‘Don’t you love this?’ And I was like, ​‘What?’ Jason ges­tures all around, and says, ​‘This! Look at where we’re at. Mak­ing movies! It’s incred­i­ble’.” Starkey laughs. ​“That lit­tle reminder… yeah, I do love this. This is magic.”