by Until he reached 45, few would have thought that Luca Guadagnino – a bald, bearded, gay Italian who achieved minor publicity with his first two features – would be the toast of every film festival, fashion world, queer culture, horror culture, and interior design supplements around the world.
He is probably one of the Renaissance men of our age. From the neck up, Guadagnino maintains a slightly rude, curly Stanley Kubrick vibe, which he often talks about in interviews. Everything below is wonderfully styled – as are his films, of course.
When he cast Tilda Swinton as Emma Recchi, the frustrated wife of a Milanese industrialist in his third Italian film, I Am Love (2009), the film first gained Guadagnino significant critical attention. So did Antonella Cannarozzi’s clothes: she was nominated for the Oscar for Best Costume Design. Swinton, whose character is chasing a Madame Bovary-esque affair with a chef, sports a stunning recreation of the Jil Sander SS08 collection, which turned the heads of fashionistas everywhere.
Currently, Guadagnino has solidified his brand of outrageous chic by collaborating hard with Jonathan Andersonthe creative director of LOEWE, who designed the garments for the two films this year: the tennis-casual “athleisure” of the sex-love triangle Challengers, and now the suit-and-Trilby look of Queer, Guadagnino’s long, sexually explicit adaptation, Daniel- Craig-star of William S. Burroughs, which was just revealed in Venice.
Guadagnino is a man of style, that’s for sure, and not just in the sartorial sense. “My secret wish is to be an interior designer,” he admitted in 2016, in an interview with the New York Times that was mainly about the remodeling job in his own home. This was a 3,200 square foot apartment on the second floor of a 17th century palazzo, in Crema, Lombardy, which had been empty for 40 years when he acquired it. It took six months to put authentic frescoes back behind the rotten wallpaper, and four more mixing pigments until the color scheme for the dining room was perfect.
In 2022, he founded his own design studio in Milan, Studio Luca Guadagnino, which he launched during Design Week with an installation called “Accanto al fuoco” (“By the fire”). “Standing in that wonderfully lush, fully enclosed room,” wrote World of Interiors, “it was as if one had stepped into the jewel box of a Milanese mistress.”
All these accounts might make sense, perhaps, if Guadagnino were best known as a production designer for the likes of Almodóvar, but his status as a top-notch director with the hottest names in Hollywood is mine and on his call now subject to it.
Unlike, say, Tom Ford, he’s a real filmmaker, not a fake one. His films married art, cinephilia and celebrity – take A Bigger Splash (2015), with its title nod to David Hockney, a remake of the Alain Delon/Romy Schneider drama La Piscine (1969), and cast Swinton as a famous rock global on it. star who has lost her voice, and Ralph Fiennes rampant as a priapic ex-lover.
It was the second part of Guadagnino’s so-called “Dian Trilogy” and catapulted the director to a relatively higher level of fame. The third part, Call Me By Your Name (2017), would push him to the apex as a first class auteur, also driving Timothée Chalamet, 21 years old to instant stardom as a hormonal teenager suffering the agony of the first love Guadagnino has been able to bask in the glory of the production of “Chalamania” ever since.
That film was intended to be co-directed by James Ivory, who adapted André Aciman’s novel, but Ivory and Guadagnino argued about – among other things – the level of nudity that would be shown. As it turned out, this was only minor enough, with the scandalous use of a sullied peach standing in for much of the sex in the book between Elio (Chalamet) and Oliver (a pre-cancelled Armie Hammer).
Although Chalamet scored an Oscar nomination and Guadagnino narrowly missed out, Ivory, ironically, won one, for Best Adapted Screenplay. (The credit of the script has to go to arbitration by the Writers Guild of America, with many speculating that Guadagnino heavily rewrote it.)
In any case, the film was a rare arthouse phenomenon. It only cost $3.5m, and grossed over $43m at the worldwide box office. Guadagnino didn’t want it to be described as a “gay movie” – and indeed, there were endless online debates about whether it was gay enough: the actors were straight, first, and that was a concern it is the physical relationship of these characters. stealthy implication, as if the film did not want us peeping.
By design, it certainly wasn’t extrapolation gay, and they could speak to many audiences at once: literary audiences who grew up with Merchant-Ivory’s Maurice, straight (or bisexual) Gen Z audiences of any gender. Everyone available, then, except a dyed-in-the-wool homophobe and a few angry militant queers.
Guadagnino would go on to make two more high-profile features, Suspira (2018) and Bones and All (2022) that wouldn’t make much of the impact of Call Me, but landed on a much safer commercial footing with Challengers.. That film was expensive, at $55m, but it took $94m worldwide.
More importantly, he garnered the column inch. He may be remembered as much for his flirtatious press tour – with stars Zendaya, Josh O’Connor and Mike Fist endlessly chasing each other on the circuit – as for the rapid erosion of his own drama.
There was the same zing and swing, thanks to Anderson’s clothes, the slick pop that was his shot/cut style, and the Berlin Techno-EDM of the score, with Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. The film was a polished package that felt soft again when it got down to business: a “three” scene begins and ends between the leads and the kiss, as if everyone involved was too shy to go further.
Guadagnino’s actors clearly trust him – they keep coming back. If anything, he was overly cautious in protecting them from objectification, but he certainly has a knack for making them look good: in his hands, straight male stars come across as cool, harmless, and it usually wins crowds of new fans. .
Gradually, however, he enticed 56-year-old Daniel Craig to take far greater risks in Queer, as an American flâneur on sex tourism in 1940s Mexico. In fact, there is talk of Craig receiving his first Oscar nomination for this role. Robbie Collin’s review called the film’s three sexual encounters “about as graphic as a modern male movie star allows”, suggesting that Guadagnino has gone out of his way to criticize certain erotic disturbances in his work.
After Queer, we won’t have to wait long for another Guadagnino hit, either. He has already shot the juicy-sounding drama After the Hunt, due for release next year, in which Julia Roberts is a scandal-ridden college professor, opposite Ayo Edebiri, Andrew Garfield, Chloë Sevigny and a wisecracking father eternal Call Me By Your Name, Michael Stuhlbarg. He is also rumored to be in talks to direct a film in the James Gunn DC universe.
“Every one of my characters is an outcast,” Guadagnino once declared. And he’s still himself, in a not-so-poor way: he became so famous after Call Me By Your Name that he had to move out of that 17th-century palazzo and settle for an unknown address in Milan instead that.
As if his CV needed further rounding out, he was once a professional chef, too – a past life that informed I Am Love, with its memorable orgasmic scene involving loads of dragonflies. It is difficult to predict what other delightful side the director will take as a favorite pastime, while at the same time maintaining an amazing current work rate in the cinema.
