When I catch Luca Guadagnino at the end of the New York Film Festival’s opening weekend, he’s visibly tired.
Two nights ago, the Italian auteur and his cast—Julia Roberts, Andrew Garfield, Ayo Edebiri—opened the festival with his new film After the Hunt, a knotty drama about a Yale professor whose carefully calibrated life threatens to come apart after a mentee accuses a close colleague of sexual assault. Speaking to the crowd at Alice Tully Hall, Guadagnino told a story about being an up-and-coming filmmaker and meeting veteran directors who told him that film was already dead. This festival, he said, “celebrates cinema in a way that makes us know that cinema is actually alive.”
Since then, it’s been a non-stop grind of post-screening Q&As and press interviews for the director. By the time I sit down with him today—a Sunday—he's already done an international press conference that was apparently so compelling, it ran half an hour over. He’s been ushered from that straight into this press junket, where more interviews await him.
But Guadagnino is a known workhorse. And despite being worn out from the promo grind, he lights up when talking about his favourite topic: movies. After the Hunt is his third feature in two years, following the sweaty summer hit Challengers and the sad, sexy Queer, and he’s already wrapped his next film, Artificial, which stars a coterie of some of the hottest young actors around, from Anora’s Yura Borisov to Monsters breakout Cooper Koch.
So what makes cinema’s most hardworking sensualist run? In a wide-ranging interview, Guadagnino talked to GQ about that indefatigable work ethic, the influence of Mike Nichols, his reverence for Pedro Almodovar, and why he dreams of running a film festival one day.
GQ: In preparation for this conversation, I was re-reading the Fantastic Man issue you guest-edited in 2022. There's a quote in there from your mother Alia, who says you work too hard and she would prefer if you rested more. She said, “How many times have I told him, ‘Luca, when you are at home, turn off your phone, turn off the computer. Take at least an hour and rest.” Where do you think that drive to work comes from?
Luca Guadagnino: I would say simply and essentially it comes from two things. One is my passion for the craft, my enthusiasm and energy that I get from the idea of making things with people that I want to make things with and that I feel inspired by. And [the other is] the possibilities that I have, to do what I do with amazing personalities and with amazing support of producers and studios, in particular MGM Amazon, that really allow me to explore in complete control the depths of what I'd like to do. So if having this opportunity to do it, and to do it the way I can control it, and with partners that are so inspiring, the simple, most straightforward question that I ask myself is, why not?
I feel that in the last few years, many, many of my colleagues, we have been very prolific. Many of us, if you think of Yorgos Lanthimos or Wes Anderson. I don't think that I'm especially different from many other wonderful colleagues that I love.
It makes me think of the six years between I Am Love and A Bigger Splash.
In that moment of my life, I said to myself, Never again. Because I'm a real maker. I like to do things. The idea of not being able to do things was really maddening to me.
You thought of it as wasting time?
I'm wasting time and wasting the quest I have in my mind for what I want to say and how I want to say it. For me, the great goal of my life is to compose a filmography that I can be proud of. And that, it's a sort of body of work that as a whole speaks for itself.
I find it interesting that recently the screenwriters we've been working with are all American. What about the American sensibility resonates with you?
Well, that's true and not true. Because, for instance, I work a lot with this wonderful, wonderful Italian screenwriter called Francesca Maneri. So I like people that I like. I'm a lucky director and I'm a lucky person.
But it is true that for the last five years or so, they've been American screenwriters. It makes me think about something Julia mentioned on the press tour, how working with you reminds her of Mike Nichols. I remember a few years ago, when I was talking to Justin Kuritzkes for Challengers, we talked about Mike Nichols and he mentioned that he was one of the first filmmakers you and him bonded over.
Totally.
What's your favourite Mike Nichols film?
I think Carnal Knowledge is amazing. I think all his movies are great. I love Wolf. I love Working Girl. The Graduate is one of the great classics of American cinema... I often go back to Working Girl.
I know Roberto Rossellini's Journey to Italy is one of your favourite films—it's a favourite of mine too. When Roberto Rossellini and Ingrid Bergman made that film, it was after Ingrid had been, for lack of a better word, “cancelled” because of her affair with Rossellini. And it made me think about After The Hunt and how it is also about cancellation and you're actively engaging with the discourse of the—
I think I'm engaging with the discourse of messed-up interaction between messed-up people, who want to impose their truth over the other, and who want to sit in the chair of power as a sort of prevalence over the other, instead of being open to the other and willful to understand themselves into the eyes of the other. And that's their tragedy, in a way. And that's also the kind of ticking-bomb tension that they exert.
People have called it a movie about the #MeToo movement. But I do see your point that it’s more about people who are unable to communicate.
When you do a movie, you want the movie to perform as universally as possible. So this is for me about communication more than anything else.
So when you think about a film like Journey to Italy and what Ingrid and Roberto were going through at the time and how the film, I know at the time when it came out it wasn't received well—
It was destroyed.
Obviously now we know it's—
One of the greatest movies ever made.
Exactly. How do you look back at a film like that?
I can tell you that in 1996, I went to the movies to watch a movie that, the second I saw it, I adored and recognised as a major artwork and a great masterpiece. But that was destroyed. And then now, 30 years later, it's considered a great classic and a masterpiece in itself. It's Showgirls by Paul Verhoeven. So I am lucky because I witnessed that moment.
I think that Rossellini was an incredible humanist and that he was able to go very deep into the representation of human behaviour and that maybe that was too close to home [for some]. I don't know, it's a great movie. It's like, we could talk about it for like three days.
I'm very sorry that I have seen it because, can you imagine watching it for the first time? The epiphany you would feel.
There's a scene in After The Hunt where Alma is rummaging through her apartment and we see a framed poster of The Flower of My Secret, and I was curious why you chose to give that moment to that Almodovar film.
I think Alma loves that movie. I think Alma is a cosmopolitan. I think her and Frederick have been travelling the world a lot. You see that alongside the work of art that hangs in the apartment, that belongs to the heritage of the family of Frederick, there is a lot of contemporary international art that maybe Alma has bought around the world and bought. A very smart idea that Stefano developed in the set of the apartment.
I think she loves that movie because I think she admires Pedro the filmmaker, but I think she really loved the character of Leocadia [in the movie]. I think Alma is drawn to Leocadia’s crisis. She is drawn to the idea that she also secrets herself. And at the same time, I think that she loves the form of that movie. In fact, she listens to the soundtrack. She plays Miles Davis' “Solea,” which is one of the pieces of music that is in that movie. And lastly, because every movie that I do is about the characters, but every character in the movie in a way reflects part of myself, I love that movie. And I love Pedro Almodovar.
One of the great, great, great moments of my life was when we were at the premiere of Queer in Venice last year, and the movie finished and we had this beautiful reception from the audience in the theatre. And I was so happy, and looking around and turning to say thank you to the people. And there, I saw Pedro, and that was amazing.
Did he tell you anything?
We just hugged.
Wow, that's even better.
I'm very shy in front of Pedro because he's such a master.
Speaking of Miles Davis, the film references him, Morrissey, Woody Allen—these great artists who've been “cancelled” in different ways. I'm curious, how do you personally engage with the work of artists who've been cancelled?
I mean, I might dismiss the work of people myself. It depends. It depends on how I feel inspired by something that I see. That's not exactly my way of thinking, though.
I know you're someone who studies the lives of great filmmakers. I remember in an old interview you did, you were talking about reading a Howard Hawks monograph.
I do. I love that monograph.
Whose life are you studying right now?
Recently, I am reading a book that's called Psycho-Sexual [by David Greven], and that makes comparisons between the opus of Alfred Hitchcock and the work of De Palma, Scorsese and [William] Friedkin. Beautiful book.
What do you learn from studying their lives, from the filmmakers? Are you figuring out the arc of their careers and thinking about yours?
I think that was something that I might have done when I was young and I was trying to understand and detect the mechanism of the cinema industry and the cinema machine for sure. But at the same time, I think when you understand, first of all, great artists and great directors are very free. They're very liberated by the idea of the judgment of the other, by the idea of the pettiness of life. Every great director has an approach to life that is so open, so free, and so fascinating to look at.
A director like Bernardo Bertolucci was very much rooted in his beautiful region that is Emilia, and yet he was a cosmopolitan man who was able to become this great poetic filmmaker who was working in different territories of the world, from China to France to Tibet to Italy, and he was making films with many different personalities, and he was living a life that was so vivid and so free. I think the lesson that I like to learn from people is freedom.
Do you feel free now when you're working?
I want to be free when I work. I want to be really able to express myself at the top of my game, if I manage. I feel very humbled by the great chances that I have and the support that I have. Sometimes I do feel free and sometimes I do feel chained by my passions.
You've had so many great successes. There are certain films where there's an immediate consensus the moment they come out. They’re celebrated as masterpieces, like Call Me By Your Name and Challengers. But every so often, you put out something that's more challenging. I saw After The Hunt again last night, just to see it with a non-festival or press audience.
How did they react?
You know what I found interesting? People were so much more willing to laugh at the funny moments. In the room, it felt like the audience was very engaged. On the way out, people were arguing about it. And I imagine that's the point of the film.
It's the beauty of it.
Andrew Garfield's character Hank says in After the Hunt that we live in a shallow cultural moment. Do you agree with that?
I don't. I think we live in a complex, conflicting, sometimes difficult, but many times surprising and challenging in a beautiful way [time]. And don't believe the hype.
When you put out a film that consciously creates conversation, how do you ride the waves of the different ways it's received?
When the movie's out, the movie's out and I go to the next. If I start to think of the reactions of people to my work, and I start to take that as a sort of metric, of my work and my emotional statuses, I would be in a place I don't want to be. No, no, no. I think the movie's done. It's out. And I never know that a movie is going to be controversial or not. I do the movie that I want to do in the way I want to do with the people that I want to do it with.
It’s also just how you work, right? Like, you're also already on Artificial now.
I wrapped.
What? That's so crazy. Just a few months ago, I was talking to Cooper Hoffman for a story and I think it hadn’t been announced yet.
Cooper Hoffman is a complete genius. He's a flat-out genius actor, a wonderful human being, and he's great in my movie. Not to take anything away from the amazing cast of Artificial, but because you mentioned Cooper… I adore Cooper.
In December last year, you gave your list of best films of the year to Indiewire. You put [slow cinema filmmaker] Lav Diaz’s Phantosmia on there.
Amazing.
I was so shocked that you even saw it. I'm Filipino, so it was a big deal to us.
Lav Diaz is one of the great directors. I'm a cinephile and I know cinema. Honestly, I love the great canon of Anglo-Saxon cinema, but that's one part of what cinema is about. So when there is a movie by Lav Diaz coming out, that's an event and I'm there. There’s the great director of Kinatay, Brillante Mendoza. These people are amazing. Amazing.
And also, Filipino cinema starts for me with Lino Brocka. He’s an incredible [director in the] canon.
It's why you really thrive on the festival circuit.
My dream is to become the director of a major festival, to make my bouquet of movies for the world to see.
