Luca Guadagnino once called himself a frustrated interior designer. “Hmm,” he says. “But I am not frustrated any more.” This is obvious the minute you walk into his Milan apartment. Architectural renderings are stuck above his work desk. The bookshelves next to his coffee table display 12 rows of tile samples: stone, marble and wood in various shades of grey, black and brown. Elsewhere there are tacked-up mood boards (Sixties Bob Dylan; Ringo Starr on timpani at Abbey Road; lots of modernist chairs; a page of fireplaces). On his coffee table sits the new issue of World of Interiors alongside Walled Gardens by Jules Hudson and Rose by Ellen Willmott, the latter book comprised of watercolours of flowers printed on high-spec matt paper. By the sofa there are catalogues for Bellora, the Italian linen and luxury bedding company; Flos, the lighting people; and Farrow & Ball.
Aside from some mid-century dining chairs and a concave metal table with a pair of little Hermès sailboats on it — gifts to attendees of a Venice store launch — the flat has the interrupted appearance of somewhere someone has just moved into. That is because Guadagnino has just moved in. A blanket has been thrown over a sofa, a framed poster for his hit film Call Me by Your Name rests against a wall under the hook it is presumably destined for and home comforts are thin on the ground. Winningly, for an Oscar-nominated director of arthouse movies, these include a PlayStation with a game called Police on top of the pile as well as a DVD of Roman Polanski’s Weekend of a Champion, a 1972 documentary on Jackie Stewart.
Guadagnino’s other home is a 300sq m apartment on the second floor of a 17th-century palazzo in Crema, a 45-minute drive from Milan. That place is fully decked out with 18th-century Japanese painted panels and doors lavishly embellished in the Lombard Baroque style. The curtains are Hermès, the chairs Cassina and the sofa covered in Loro Piana cashmere. Guadagnino worked with a paint company to create a brand-new palette of colours, using a different one in every room. There are 19th-century church candlesticks mounted as lamps.
As a film-maker and a homemaker he is a perfectionist. He once told The New York Times that his partner, Ferdinando Cito Filomarino, also a film-maker, “wants to kill me. We have no bedside tables because I can’t find any I like yet.”
But this is where he stays when he is in Milan. So I assume the tiles and mood boards are because he’s getting started on the renovations. It won't be the last time he corrects me.
“No, no,” he says. “This is for a client.”
Guadagnino recently realised his dream to set up his own interior design company. The stuff around us is for a series of commissions for a fashionable retail brand, the name of which he asks me not to mention. This presents more of a problem for Esquire’s photographer, who has come with the brief to shoot Guadagnino “at home” but is told he cannot show any of this work-in-progress. Since it covers almost every surface in the flat he has to make do with taking the director’s portrait against some doors.
In contrast to the Crema apartment, Guadagnino’s Milan flat is so anonymous and on such an unprepossessing street that when the photographer and I arrive we assume we must have the wrong address. Then, minutes before our appointment, someone who looks very much like Guadagnino, wild-haired, dressed-down in a grey polo shirt, jeans, grey socks and trainers, bolts from a side door and crosses the road. When a cleaning lady gestures that we can ascend in the lift, we are met on the sixth floor by Guadagnino’s assistant. He is kept busy making espressos and getting bottles of mineral water — served on a fetching lavender tea tray — but mostly by answering Guadagnino’s mobile, which rings constantly. “Rings constantly” is usually shorthand for “goes off a few times” but I mean this literally: as soon as he puts it down, he has to pick it up again. By the end of our time together Guadagnino will have a to-do list. This will complement the two lists already on his magazine pile. One is typed and outlines his travel commitments for the next five days: Milan to Paris to Milan to London and back to Milan again. The other is handwritten, marked “Urgenti” and concerns end-credit sequences, calls to Amazon and a catch-up with a producer who makes TV commercials. Guadagnino — who rises from a chaise longue to greet us; he had dashed out to buy his morning paper, Il Manifesto — is gearing up for the November launch of his new movie.
“Busy, yes,” he says. “Busy deciding what to say yes to and what to say no to.”
Guadagnino was hot property even before last year’s Oscars, thanks to I Am Love (2009) and A Bigger Splash (2015), high-spirited dramas starring Tilda Swinton and filmed in sumptuous settings with sumptuous wardrobes. Then came Call Me by Your Name, equally sumptuous but concerning a summer fling between graduate student Oliver (played by Armie Hammer) and Elio (played by Timothée Chalamet), the teenage son of the professor with whom Oliver is working and at whose lavish estate in northern Italy he’s staying. A film that would have once remained an arthouse concern exploded, topping many “best of 2017” lists, being nominated for four Oscars (it won Best Adapted Screenplay for James Ivory) and scooping up endless other awards, but most significantly becoming a box-office hit. At the time of writing it has grossed over $40m, having cost $3.5m to make, and cinemas are still showing it a year after it was released.
Guadagnino’s next film is Suspiria, a version of Dario Argento’s 1977 horror classic about an American ballet student accepted into a prestigious German dance school. After a series of murders, maggots falling from ceilings, a room filled with barbed wire, lots of screaming and buckets of Day-Glo Seventies’ blood, it is revealed the institution is run by a coven of witches. If Suspiria is a campy cult classic that seems dated by today’s horrors, the trailer for Guadagnino’s film suggests proceedings will be brought sharply up to date. Over atonal synthesiser music, Dakota Johnson, playing the American student, holds herself and sobs. Tilda Swinton, playing the troupe’s artistic director, malevolently sucks on roll-ups. Groups of women stare at the screen looking stone-cold evil. There is blood, a hook, maggots and someone climbing a door frame.
Esquire: The Suspiria trailer is fantastic and disturbing. I can’t stop watching it.
Luca Guadagnino: Ah! You didn’t like it and yet you keep going back to it? That is the idea. You are repulsed, yet you cannot look away.
You showed a scene at the Las Vegas industry convention CinemaCon, at lunch, over quinoa salad and white chocolate tarts. People left the room in disgust. Variety said you “dared the crowd not to vomit".
That was an interesting situation because it was the first time any footage of Suspiria was presented to an audience. The way the audience reacted was very strong.
Strong is a good word.
Well, people were really shocked. Stunned! Some left the room, some were speechless.
Was that something you were anticipating? I don’t know. Because even if you do a horror movie, for me it’s [just] images that I have made on set, so it is very difficult to say. But of course once the effect of the debate becomes so strong outside, it makes me happy. It means that we did a good job.
You won’t make a film unless you have cast it yourself. Why?
That has to do with the duty of a director. And the people I work with in general are the people I love and admire and I feel motivated to look at them. In this specific case [Suspiria] it’s all of this, plus the fact that both Tilda and Dakota are people that are part of my life, my sisters. And that feeling of being a sort of sibling-hood is important to me.
Not every director has that luxury. How… I can’t talk for other directors. I can only talk for myself.
You don’t just direct. You’re a complete auteur. You oversee everything…
Well, that’s how I grew up. I grew up with the knowledge that being a director means someone who coordinates and orchestrates a very large number of great personalities to the common goal of the movie. I am happy with my films and that is an expression of my absolute control.
Thom Yorke has done his first soundtrack for Suspiria. You persuaded Sufjan Stevens to contribute to Call Me by Your Name, after his manager told you he’d never write for film.
I just ask these people. Why not? I am lucky and they say yes.
Can you remember the impact Suspiria had on you as a child?
I’d simply have been shocked. Because I realised that everything was possible with this movie. So it was a very important intellectual exercise and an emotional experience. I think I was hyperventilating, probably.
Suspiria is part of Italian horror genre Giallo.
I’ve always loved horror in general. I don’t know why. I can’t intellectualise something I was drawn to. But now I am almost 50 [he’s 47] I can tell you it is a very interesting experience to see the effect of violence and how this can, in a way, influence the form of a movie. If you think of a movie like Cat People by Jacques Tourneur [1942] or even Cat People by Paul Schrader [1982], you can see, in these two films, the interrogation of human nature and the most basic animal instincts that lead to violence explored in totally different perspectives by the language of film.
The conclusion being we’re all capable of such violence?
Oh yeah.
You’ve been clear that your Suspiria is a homage not a remake.
Well, I wouldn’t judge people lazy because they call this movie a remake. I mean, it is a remake. But I wish for people to look at this with open minds and open hearts and open brains and open guts. Just to soak into this movie in a way where there is openness that is not pre-judged, not judgemental. It is very personal and it reflects my feelings I had watching Suspiria.
Remakes don’t tend to be very good.
There are some great films that are remakes. The Thing by John Carpenter [1982, based loosely on 1951 B-movie The Thing from Another World]. The Fly [1986, from a 1958 film]. I think Hitchcock remade himself three times [The Man Who Knew Too Much, 1934 and 1956; other movies referenced earlier ones]. I like the idea of a reflection of something that repeats. Film has always been like that and we always look at things and base new things on what we see.
Did Call Me by Your Name alter things for you?
I’m always the same person, doing what I’m doing and loving what I’m loving doing.
It was such a big hit, though. [Huge pause] Er… yeah. I mean: good. You know? What should I say? It’s a little bit embarrassing…
You shouldn’t be embarrassed.
But when you say something like, “Oh, your movie’s super-successful”, I am less Catholic than Protestant, because retaining a sense of modesty is always important. And yes, Call Me by Your Name was a fantastic success, a great box-office success. We’ve been nominated or won so many awards and the reason I’m happy with the film is because sometimes I have someone approaching me and telling me that the movie changed their perspective on love, or their relationship. So
I think that the real measure of accomplishment lies in the way in which someone can be affected by your work. But to talk about the actual success of it like something that can be counted into a box? I mean… cool. But I think if you do a personal movie and then you get this kind of reaction from an audience, then that’s great.
People are surprised you plan four more films with the Call Me by Your Name characters. It appeared to be a standalone story.
Because they are thinking in the wrong way. Because people think that my idea is to make a sequel. But that is not correct. My idea is to chronicle the lives of the characters of this movie so that eventually, if we have enough of these stories, we can say that this is a chronicle, not a sequel.
An “untitled” second film has been announced as your next project.
I’m thinking of things.
You’re thinking?
I’m thinking. I’m thinking right now.
When luca guadagnino was five, he sat on his mother’s knee, enraptured by David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia. He progressed to Jean-Luc Godard and the Nouvelle Vague while the rest of us were watching Indiana Jones and Ghostbusters. By eight he was shooting his own films using a Super 8 camera. His mother was Algerian, his father Sicilian, and though he was born in Palermo, he grew up in Ethiopia, where his father taught history and Italian. As a teenager, he was lonely — his Italian classmates teased him for looking different, using ethnic slurs — but driven. He convinced the headmaster to let him direct the end-of-year play, choosing something by Eugène Ionesco, the avant-garde French-Romanian playwright noted for his meditations on solitude and the insignificance of human existence. It got booed.
He studied literature at the University of Palermo, and graduated from Sapienza University of Rome in the faculty of history and cinema with a thesis on the director Jonathan Demme, who remains a hero. For a time he became a film critic, contributing to newspapers. While at Palermo, he met Patrizia Allegra, a presence on Sicily’s cultural scene who would take the 19-year-old cinephile to dinner parties, introducing him to film-
makers Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet. While he was at Sapienza he befriended Laura Betti, muse of the great director Pier Paolo Pasolini. Already a terrific cook — along with horticulture, food is another Guadagnino passion — Betti would deploy him at dinner parties cutting fresh fettuccine for the painter Valerio Adami and the director Bernardo Bertolucci.
When Guadagnino happened across Caravaggio, Derek Jarman’s experimental 1986 film starring Tilda Swinton as muse to the Baroque Italian painter, he knew he had found his own muse. By the time of Sally Potter’s Orlando (1992), he had become “obsessed”.
After Swinton’s agent failed to respond to an unsolicited script, “The Penny Arcade Peep Show”, inspired by William S Burroughs’ The Wild Boys, he cornered her at an official engagement in Rome. She was already a star, he was 11 years her junior. But somehow he convinced her and for a few days she moved into his flat. Though they never finished the Burroughs film (he ran out of money), they resolved to become partners in crime. Artsy thriller The Protagonists (1999) and one-hander Tilda Swinton: The Love Factory (2002) followed. By 2005, he had decided to go completely independent, raising money himself. His breakthrough came with I Am Love, which he and Swinton had spent 12 years developing.
The location of that film, Villa Necchi Campiglio in Milan, was as much the star as she was, built in 1935 as a home and status symbol for upper-class industrialists by Piero Portaluppi, the Italian modernist architect of choice to society in the Twenties and Thirties. Swinton, playing the matriarch in a family of similarly haute bourgeois textile manufacturers, swishes through corridors and into kitchens in dresses tailored by Raf Simons and Jil Sander and clutches Hermès totes. For the wealthy men of the movie, of which there are many, Fendi created a wardrobe of dark, double-breasted suits.
In A Bigger Splash, Swinton wore Raf Simons shirt-dresses and Dior’s signature mirrored sunglasses, playing Bowie-esque rock star Marianne Lane who has lost her voice but who finds a way to serenade Ralph Fiennes around the gobsmackingly beautiful Sicilian island of Pantelleria. This time, her wardrobe inspired a shopping feature on vogue.com.
“Luca has a capacity to make him feel the host of the party when he’s shooting,” says Tilda Swinton. “Not an uptight adult gathering, but a party made up of children playing, unobserved, at the bottom of a secluded garden, presided over by an especially piratical 11-year-old. This mix of the intimate connection and the wider social whirl is a feat to pull off, and probably his particular superpower. In combination with his wide and impassioned knowledge of world cinema, his scrupulous attention to cinematic detail and atmosphere, his boldness, his willingness to be a joyous creative partner and the fact he has been such a brother-in-arms for me for over 20 years, Luca is a unique playmate in what I think of as the kindergarten of my working life.”
“Luca is full of surprising and inventive ideas,” says Ralph Fiennes. “His approach to character and people is very perceptive. He’s sensitive, with an original imagination and the combination of sensitivity and humour makes him unique.”
“He has the ability to capture complicated emotions unlike any director I’ve ever worked with,” says Dakota Johnson. “To have a rolling collaboration with him as my friend and director is a beautiful experience.”
For Call Me by Your Name, Guadagnino filmed with one lens to give the love story a deliberate intimacy. The setting is Villa Albergoni, a 16th-century mansion in Lombardy, somewhere it took his team weeks to decorate. The gardens appear so green and the skies so blue they look as if they’ve been painted for a children’s storybook (the film opens with the credit "Somewhere in Northern Italy…").
In it, Oliver is a classicist with philosophical training who reads Stendhal for fun and traces the etymology of “apricot” though Arabic, Latin and Greek, pointing out that one branch leads to the word “precocious”. Elio is a music prodigy who transcribes Schoenberg by ear.
Many of Guadagnino’s touchstones, the great Italian arthouse directors Roberto Rossellini, Luchino Visconti, Francesco Rosi, Federico Fellini and Bertolucci, also deployed majestic landscapes in their movies.
Fashion has fascinated Guadagnino since he was a boy, when he’d marvel at the Hermès handbags owned by his mother and his aunt, and study the silhouettes of characters played by Bette Davis. Today, pinned to his kitchen noticeboard are thank-you cards from Chanel and Hermès. His schedule reveals that the day after our interview he’s due at a Dior Homme fashion show in Paris. In 2012, he set-up the company Frenesy, for which he has directed short films and taken photographs for Salvatore Ferragamo, DKNY, Zegna and Sergio Rossi. At the Oscars he wore Prada, though he was torn between that and his other favourite, Armani. During Milan Fashion Week, he combined a pre-Oscars bash with an epic birthday party for Federico Marchetti, the CEO of Yoox Net-a-Porter Group, presenting him with a birthday cake in front of an A–Z of fashion. He had been advising Marchetti on renovations to his holiday home on the shores of Lake Como.
You once described your work as “another movie about rich people lounging by the pool”.
It’s fascinating that you’re asking me to comment on my comment.
This is what journalists do.
It’s because in my films you see people doing these things. But it’s also a joke.
You got into movies very early, heavily so. Often solitary kids’ hobbies are a way of withdrawing from the world.
I am very shy when it comes to intellectualising something. I can tell you that watching films, thinking of films, thinking from the perspective of cinema, that was, in a way, the oxygen that kept me alive. But how and why, I don’t know.
Pasolini, Fellini and Rossellini made incredibly beautiful films. Do you see yourself as part of that tradition?
No. I think nostalgia is not a good thing. You should not think of things in a nostalgic way.
You were introduced to Bertolucci while you were doing a degree in the history of cinema. That must have been quite a moment.
I gave myself the luxury of approaching these people and saying to them, “I love your work, can I get to know you?” And they were saying, “Yeah, sure!” Very open.
In that golden age of cinema, film-makers and fashion designers often collaborated on incredible wardrobes for movies. It’s a shame we’ve lost that.
We haven’t lost that at all! No! Why? Continuously you have collaborations to create things. I collaborate with Raf Simons at Dior and Jil Sander. Fendi. Zegna. Sergio Zambon. I constantly collaborate with designers. I don’t see that as something that is disappearing.
You do, but you’re in a minority of film-makers who see this as a priority.
OK.
You don’t think so?
I don’t know. I don’t think of myself as someone separate from myself. I am who I am, while I am.
The fashion world loves you. Why is that? You should ask them.
What’s the appeal of fashion to you?
It has no particular appeal more than anything else.
You have founded Frenesy: it makes films for fashion houses.
[Sighs] We have done some. But it is not the centre of our activity.
You’re not going to make more?
Maybe. Yeah. Why not? I don’t think it’s a topic that is worth discussing.
Interior design is another way for you to express your love of aesthetics.
No. It doesn’t come from aesthetics. Interior design for me comes from the relationship between the space and the people that live in that space. It has nothing to do with aesthetics. I actually despise the approach that is aesthetics to interior design.
But it involves choosing materials, colours and furniture, as we can see around us.
I would say furniture and materials come as sustainment to the space.
Don’t aesthetics inform all you do? The colours and moods of your films are unique.
The colours in my movies are a reflection of the time of the day and the light that is in the situation. In the given situation.
I’ve read you pass your movies to Bertolucci to approve, before they’re released.
Yes.
That sounds nerve-racking.
It is more than nerve-racking. It’s very exciting. It’s a great gift to be able to have the perspective of someone so thoughtful over my work. I’m old enough to be able to accept criticism, or a point of view that confirms my intentions.
Is he a kind critic?
He is one of the most thoughtful connoisseurs of cinema that I know. He is masterful in his knowledge. He’s also kind as a person.
While he is having his photograph taken, Guadagnino cues up the first five minutes of Suspiria on his laptop for me. “A special treat,” he says. It is. He has only completed the final edit the day before and is flying to London in 48 hours to screen it in a private cinema for Amazon, which is distributing the film. Guadagnino has transposed the action to Berlin in 1977, the year the first Suspiria was released, setting it against the backdrop of student protests and terrorism. He has added a storyline in which an elderly psychoanalyst, Jozef Klemperer, played by a real elderly psychoanalyst, is battling his own troubles. Klemperer mopes about at home and in snowy streets, and the tone and mood is grimly riveting. In spite of the bleak palette — Guadagnino has reversed Dario Argento’s hyper-saturated colour scheme — it looks, it probably goes without saying by now, beautiful.
Two days later, Amazon invites me to the screening of the whole film, though it is ostensibly for its staff to work out how best to sell it. Guadagnino, who flew in that morning, gives a speech. He is expansive and passionate. It has been his life’s work, he says, since seeing the original over 30 years ago. That it is about the uncompromising force of motherhood. That it is deeply personal. That it uses no primary colours. That his last few movies spoke physically of love, passion and desire but Suspiria is not like this.
The film is quite something. The CinemaCon scene comes about an hour in and while it has become a marketing trope to say film festival audiences have been scandalised by early footage — similar happened with The Revenant and Deadpool, and anything by Lars von Trier — it really is horrible. I overhear one Amazon employee telling another the hype for the film is off the chart, that she’s never seen anything like it, that their biggest issue is now keeping a lid on the excitement. The combination of the director of the moment, an already loved film property and the horror genre seems irresistible. As a measure of excitement, as Esquire went to press, the running time for Suspiria was announced: an hour longer than Argento’s original, though at two hours 32 minutes it is no Lawrence of Arabia. Even this tidbit is greeted with frenzy, film blogs making it their lead story: “That means we’ll get plenty of gory, witch-y goodness,” says one.
Is now a good time for cinema?
It is always a good time. But it depends on how you see that and your perspective. It depends on what is your ambition. I would say narrative and the language of cinema will never fade out.
We hear a lot about Netflix and its impact on cinema. Would you work for them?
Which one is Netflix? I don’t have it. Is it where the next episode starts right after the last one?
Yes, that’s it. To keep you watching.
No, no, no. I could never do this. This is where they shrink the screen down to a box in the corner, even before the credit sequence has finished? Do you know how long I spend on my credits and titles? I enjoy very much this part of my work! In this case [Suspiria], I worked with the legendary Dan Perri, who created the logo for Star Wars, The Exorcist, A Nightmare On Elm Street.
You’re steeped in classic cinema, but I’ve noted some other films you’ve approved of: The Lone Ranger, Batman Returns with Danny DeVito as The Penguin — not even a Christopher Nolan one — and Paddington.
Oh, Paddington is a beautiful film!
Would you consider directing a blockbuster? Let’s say it like this: I give myself no limits. I wish to explore the meaning of cinema and the language of cinema and every possible expression of it. Yet, the only way in which I can execute this aim is having absolute control of my work. So if all those conditions are kept — which means control — then I would say, “Yes. I’m happy to go and deal with that kind of stuff.”
Luca Guadagnino’s “Paddington 3”, with Tilda Swinton as the baddie and Dakota Johnson as the love interest, but definitely not a sequel. You read it here first.
Suspiria is out on 2 November
