BONES AND ALL
Sicilian-born Luca Guadagnino is a chronicler of the sensual, of the sublime and occasionally ridiculous. He’s a sensationalist in the best sense of the term, a cartographer of the more embarrassing, least examined borders of human experience. His closest analogue, to my mind, is Nagisa Ōshima, another artist unafraid of digging into our most intimate, most carnal aspects and somehow mining high-minded art from all that primate muck. At his best, I would slot Guadagnino’s pictures in with the likes of Hiroshi Teshigahara’s Woman in the Dunes or Derek Jarman’s The Last of England: erotic rather than titillating; taboo rather than polite. His movies are about the freedom of becoming lost.
Guadagnino’s new film, Bones and All, is a teen cannibal love story that lands somewhere between Near Dark and Trouble Every Day in tone and texture. Consider this high praise: If he hadn’t already made so many masterpieces, I would call it his masterpiece. I was thrilled to talk with Mr. Guadagnino in advance of the film’s Thanksgiving bow, savouring the opportunity to tell him how I found in his work a sense of desperate Romanticism.
LUCA GUADAGNINO: Desperate Romanticism. That’s something that I feel I am: a desperate Romanticist. I feel very, very well defined by this. You know, I was in a relationship for so many years that ended after 11 years and I was completely lost. And a friend of mine told me, “You are lost because you are an Über-Romanticist.” If you’re getting that from my movies, I think you are nailing it, and I’m grateful because I love the idea of marrying desperation with Romanticism. I like the idea that there is a sense of longing that is so profound that it reverberates through space. And I like the idea that when you meet someone, you recognize yourself in their gaze, and you, for your part, you welcome their otherness into your own gaze. In that recognition and being recognized is when you start to transform. When you awaken. Those transformative qualities, [that] shattering of your preconceptions and the strengths of their reconstituted natures that come through in the idea of Romanticism and that process, to answer your question, are not only very dear to me and very interesting, but I think very cinematic. I think if what you are working on together is to get to this place of recognition, my job to capture it is very easy.
FILM FREAK CENTRAL: Your collaborations with the composer John Adams, with Thom Yorke on Suspiria, the careful curation of needle drops in your films–how does music inform these moments of sublimity?
I try to be savvy with music in a way in which I know that music can trigger emotional threads that can lead me to big ideas and even to individual scene compositions. I’m usually inspired by short pieces that I like to play over and over, not a vast landscape of music for each project. Usually what I’ll do is repeat a piece that has spoken to me for as many times as I can listen to something in a day on repeat. I find when I do that, something in the repetition of it concentrates me, focuses me, and helps me to visualize how to frame these emotions the music evokes into images captured in a movie. I find that the act of close listening is important in every aspect of filmmaking, I think you need to listen to the characters and listen to their world and how they both fit, or don’t, into the larger world. For Bones and All, I told our team that–as you said at the top of our conversation–that there was some kind of desperate Romanticism that I wanted us to find in this love story. To capture the impossibility these people were facing, their need for contact, their need to survive. I had amazing collaborators, too. When I spoke to Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, both just wonderful, I said, “Guys, let’s evoke if we can a pure, breathless Romanticism in the music while, if you can, finding a distinctly American sound.” And they’re geniuses, of course. They got it. This guitar, this lonely guitar who goes into a sort of like crescendo. A starting point–and that’s how we developed the score from there, an entire mood. I relied a lot on diegetic sound, too. I wanted the music in the movie to come from radios, so, a period piece, we’d maybe hear Joy Division or New Order… We thought a lot about the kinds of things kids like these, rebels and outcasts, would be into–specifically what [Timothée Chalamet’s] Lee would have listened to. This movie is made in his image–rather, the image we built of him.
Can you walk me through the John Adams score in the bookstore sequence in I Am Love–starting with Tilda’s hair, which evokes Carlotta from another film about smothering, obsessive love: Vertigo.
Oh, thank you for that, because that sequence is dear to me. I still remember how I shot that sequence, holding the camera and trying to encompass through these tentative motions, maybe in a bit of a childish way, the idea of the suspense an older woman would feel in her attraction to a younger man. I wanted to move the camera in harmony with the music, make them both the tool to describe the response of attraction. I like the idea of choreography between the camera and the actor and the music. I think it’s, it’s magnificent. Everything is choreography. Even when you walk the street, you are kind of like moving to a grand rhythm of the crowd. It’s a dance–just another way to express yourself. Dakota [Johnson] got that immediately in A Bigger Splash and especially Suspiria. I love her. She’s amazing. Amazing. She’s my friend and she’s amazing. She’s so witty and she’s so wicked. She has just a wonderful sense of humour.
You are so dialled in on the humanity of your characters.
For me, making movies is about the characters. Everything needs to be filtered through the lens of the characters. That’s where it starts and ends. It’s important that we are following them–that the movie is just… Let’s say what they say and mean what they mean and meet them where they are and not where they are not. I try to really approach my work from this standpoint, to make sure that my work is always and only humanistic work. I’m not interested in filmmaking as some sort of a tool to execute the rules of a textbook that seeks to define art by genre or form. I’m interested in the movie being defined by character–if you call that anything, I guess you’d call it humanistic, but…
You’re uncomfortable with labels, and I think you defy them for the most part. But I have described your films as–sometimes uncomfortably–truthful.
(laughs) Well, you know, postmodernism believes that there is not such a thing as truth, right? I think if you refer to the pursuit of truth, there’s a danger of it becoming a thing that’s distracting. There’s a real danger during the process of making something that we don’t start from a place of determinism. The dangers arise from being too assertive in the face of the complexities of the reality. You can’t dictate truth, you can only uncover it. In the moment, I like to think more in terms of conflict. I think we carry within each of us a lot of conflict, and we are each so complex we carry a lot of different ways of being that, you know? Maybe hide our complexities from others to make us easier to deal with. We make ourselves, as a whole, less multidimensional than we are because people need to understand us and not be intimated or frightened by us if we’re too discursive. The fact is that we are filled with imperfections and conflict and we love each other anyways.
To continue on a theme: the Romanticists saw Nature as the first testament of God. Can you talk to me about the use of Nature in your pictures? I’m thinking of the quarry in A Bigger Splash, the whole of Call Me By Your Name, images of submersion, long shots of the plains of the American midwest in Bones & All…
I like to think of nature, at least in how we perceive it, to be an extension of the emotional landscape of the characters. Expressionism. It’s a projection and, more than that, a magnification. Nature is like a magnifying glass of what they feel and what they’re going through, and cinema has this great ability which, through juxtaposition, you can draw lines around these parallels, can make [a] metaphor of nature. When Lee confesses to Maren his secret about his identity and his relationship with his father, that moment happens in the vastness of the landscape of Nebraska. The emptiness, the brownness, of Nebraska expresses the loneliness the boy is going through all his life, but from a story perspective, it also reveals the necessity for this character to gain freedom from the chains of his condition and the relationship with his parents–his father in particular. It’s a mirror. It’s a… It’s a projection of what they feel inside.
“I think discomfort is vital in the experience of art–the unfamiliar comes from the familiar. I think in order to create a sense of universality, to experience the recognition of the wholeness of self, you have to tackle and deal with what is left out in our sense of self.”
You know, I think a lot about William Blake when I watch your movies, too. He has this quote, “Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires.”
Can you repeat it again? Because it’s beautiful and I wanna make sure that I understood it.
“Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires.” It’s from a piece he wrote called The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.
It’s beautiful.
It’s very much like a passage from Call Me By Your Name where the mother reads from the Heptameron by d’Angouleme and poses the question, in reference to matters of the heart, “Is it better to speak or to die?”
TO SPEAK! Many people die, but I speak.
(laughs) We’ve talked about music. Tell me about literature.
Literature has a very strong impact on me. The arts are a great inspiration for me, and I’m fascinated by the challenges of translation from one medium to another. I have heard people say that a book, that literature, is distinct, even foreign to the power of cinematic images, but I don’t think so. I think that in literature you can find as many powerful images as in the actual visual language of cinema or television or any of the visual arts. They are no less real for having been created in your mind. You have to interpret it. And filmmaking is always interpretation. You are interpreting, you are reading through the lens of reality, you are reading through the lens of juxtaposition, through the lens of your knowledge of human behaviour and the way in which we relate to one another. You take all of this information and then you process it and you synthesize it into an image, and then the juxtaposition of images becomes the narrative. All of this happens in you whether it’s on a page or on a canvas or on a screen.
I know you were a chef at one point.
When I was young, yes. I did that in order to sustain myself. Indeed.
Food is so central in your pictures. The ritual of it, the consumption of it.
When you talk about people, you have to see people through all their physiological necessities, right? And the act of eating is one of the essential ones: unavoidable, and so important we have made a ritual of it. In the practice of our everyday life, it’s one of the very few things that is a constant. I think if we ignore any aspect of what makes us human, [we] begin to dip into fantasy, a fantastic world unrelated to actual experience. I need to relate to what is my knowledge of the mundane. Food is important and tells a lot about behaviour, and that’s why I want to show it so much in my movies. And cannibalism now, the transgression of eating human flesh in order to survive. In order to survive, you lose your decency.
Transgression. I know you love Oshima…
I think discomfort is vital in the experience of art–the unfamiliar comes from the familiar. I think in order to create a sense of universality, to experience the recognition of the wholeness of self, you have to tackle and deal with what is left out in our sense of self. What is the unconscious? The problem of the unconscious comes with the provocation of holding something within you that is unknowable to you. Its obscurity provokes our ego. That’s something that I’m interested in. I don’t do it–transgress–for the sake of scandal or of shock. I think it’s really about the complexities of, “What is our perception of things?” And trying to break through to a place where maybe only through a sense of complex discomfort can you achieve knowledge of the sources and intensities of your desire. I love the idea of the unheimlich.
The uncanny.
I love the idea. Like the scene in Bones & All where Sully is making a chicken dinner for Maren in this very normal kitchen.
He’s even wearing an apron.
Yes! So banal! Very banal, and at the same time it’s very foreboding. You see that and you think, What does that mean? What’s this chicken vis-à-vis the fact that they’ve been speaking for a long time now about their natures and who they are really, down deep and underneath.
How do you capture the uncanny?
I think I simply let myself go, I guess, and I have great collaborators whom I trust explicitly. And also it’s about the pleasure of craft, and craft comes with creating elements that you can juxtapose. This is a very intimate conversation we are having because I’m exposing myself, but I think it comes also with my idea of seduction. I dunno why, but I’ve always been seduced by people who show me things in ways I don’t or can’t see them. Ordinary things that suddenly become revelatory to me. So when I seek to find truth in this work, I try to express that same quality of revelation in the ordinary. I don’t know if I succeed, but for me the work is to show things that maybe someone doesn’t see immediately. It’s a form of seduction.
Water is a key symbol of the unconscious–I think each of your films has at least one scene of submersion.
I can’t swim! If I go into water where I don’t touch the ground, I drown, so one of my greatest fears is drowning. So that’s why I have that in my movies, because I like to put myself into the difficult position, to confront my great fears, and in my role as a filmmaker to try to understand it.
Draw for me your connection between parents and grief.
We are all children of somebody, and we might be directly or indirectly parental figures, so I think this relationship between parents and children is an essential part of who we are. In general, I like to approach things from…a universal perspective. Like we, the human condition. I want to see it when it’s healthy, and see it when you can have an unhealthy relationship with an older person who transmits unhelpful, even destructive knowledge. I want to see how this most common of relationships can become tainted. When youth wants to be separate or when parents abandon–I want to explore all of that. And I think that longing for that relationship and grief, they go together, right? I was reading a book about the concept of abandonment, and the psychoanalyst who wrote the book was saying that when you are abandoned, you are grieving twice. You’re grieving the loss of your loved one, but you also, you’re grieving your loss of your self into the consciousness of the one who has abandoned you. So you are grieving twice. This is a very strong, very mysterious concept for me. Separation comes with grief. Change comes with grief. And tied into that is this question about power. What’s the dimensions of power in this kind of relationship? How do you swap power, position? What makes us disposable or makes us worthy of investment? I think if I can illuminate that somehow, that just seeing it act out on us has value. An adolescent who becomes an adult is grieving the death of the child he was. We are constantly motivated by grief. We die and are reborn every minute. We are grieving every day of our life and we don’t even know it.
