Guadagnino on A-Listers: 'I'm Enamored With Actors' — SkimNews
Get the Culture newsletter
Daily culture — film, music, books, the trends and ideas worth your attention. Free.
- Luca Guadagnino held a master class at the Venice Film Festival, discussing his rapport with Hollywood stars including Julia Roberts, Daniel Craig, Tilda Swinton, and Ralph Fiennes.
- Guadagnino said he is "enamored with actors," describing the collaborative process as "children playing on the beach, kind of creating these sandcastles."
- Julia Roberts arrived at last year's Venice wearing a cardigan emblazoned with Guadagnino's face and knit him a scarf as a birthday gift during the shoot of "After the Hunt."
- Guadagnino began his directing career with the 1999 film "The Protagonists" starring Tilda Swinton, whom he befriended by cornering her at a Derek Jarman retrospective in Rome.
- Guadagnino revealed he cannot swim and is "totally terrified" by water and pools — a notable admission given his 2015 film "A Bigger Splash" is set largely around a swimming pool.
- The blue flashes in "Call Me By Your Name" (2017) were a processing lab error, but Guadagnino kept them because they evoked "the butterflies in Elio's stomach."
- Venice will premiere Guadagnino's seven-hour Bernardo Bertolucci documentary "Joie de Vivre" in two parts on Sept. 8 and 9, with Guadagnino receiving the Cartier Glory to the Filmmaker Award.
Why it matters: Guadagnino's Venice profile — "After the Hunt" with Roberts last year, the Cartier Glory to the Filmmaker Award this year, and a seven-hour Bertolucci documentary unspooling across two nights — reflects the institutional coronation of a director whose career arc from a 1999 faux-doc with Swinton to launching Timothée Chalamet has reshaped how European art-house directors work with American movie stars.
Ask SkimNews
