“Guys, let’s be adults in the room for a second,” Luca Guadagnino said, getting candid at the Venice Film Festival press conference for his new film “Queer.” “There is no way around the fact that nobody would ever know James Bond’s desires, period.”
How did we get there? A journalist posed a question to the film’s star, Daniel Craig, who played 007 in five installments and has since retired the role after “No Time to Die,” about whether there could ever be a gay James Bond. “The important thing is that [James Bond] does his missions properly,” Guadagnino joked over the question, which Craig did not answer. It was asked because, in Guadagnino’s new film, a William S. Burroughs adaptation, Craig plays William Lee, a gay expatriate wandering bars in Mexico City who falls for a discharged Navyman played by “Outer Banks” star Drew Starkey. And in a film filled with a few explicit gay sex scenes. (Read IndieWire’s Grade A review of “Queer” here.)
Venice competition entry “Queer” world-premiered here on the Lido Tuesday night. Ahead of the debut, Guadagnino gave an entertaining press Q&A with his crew and cast, including stars Craig, Drew Starkey, Jason Schwartzman, Lesley Manville, and Omar Apollo, and screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes (who wrote Guadagnino’s “Challengers”) and costumer Jonathan Anderson (head of Loewe, who also designed the “Challengers” looks).
As this is a Burroughs adaptation, Craig plays the author’s stand-in as a debauched drug addict who chases booze, drugs, and sex in Mexico. Guadagnino, candid elsewhere in the Q&A when asked about his interest in addicts onscreen as they relate not just to “Queer” but other movies like “Bones and All,” said, “I am a gentleman who goes to sleep very early, never took drugs in my life, never smoked a cigarette, and I am going onto a diet, and I lost 15 kilos. So I’m quite rigorous about my addictions.”
Explaining why he made the movie, which A24 recently bought for a 2024 release, Guadagnino said, “I was a lonely boy in Palermo, a megalomaniac and dreaming of building worlds through cinema. I read this slim book [‘Queer’] … and I fell into the vivid imagination of this writer that I didn’t know at the time, the profound connection that he was achingly describing on the page between these two characters.”
He added, “The romanticism of the idea of the adventure, and the adventure with someone you want and love, all of these really transformed me and changed me forever, and because I want to be loyal to that young boy, I kept thinking, ‘I have to bring this to the screen’… I wanted, hopefully, to let the audience [into] a sort of idea of self: Who are we when we are alone, and who are we looking for? Who do we want beside us, no matter who you are? Are you a drug addict living in Mexico City, which, by the way, is a Mexico City that exists in the mind of the character? Or you love a man, you love a woman, whoever you love, who are you, and [when] you are alone in that bed, left with the feeling of how you have felt for someone else?”
When asked about “Queer’s” erotic scenes involving sex and nudity, Craig said, “There is some choreography in the movie, which is a very important part of the movie,” referring to a kind of hallucinatory dance that occurs later in the film. “Drew and I started rehearsals on that months before we started filming,” which helped for more literally naked moments that occur earlier in the movie. “You know as far as I do: There’s nothing intimate about filming a sex scene on a movie set. You’re in a room full of people watching you. We just wanted to make it as touching and as real, as natural, as we possibly could. Drew was a wonderful, beautiful, fantastic actor to work with, and we had a laugh. We tried to make it fun.”
Starkey said, “We jumped into rehearsals pretty early on, not just the intimate scenes, but throughout the course of the movie, that freed us up, freed our bodies up, and we felt open to trying new things. When you’re rolling around on the floor with someone the second day of knowing each other, that’s a good way to get to know someone.”
On casting Craig, Guadagnino said, “I have been an admirer of this gentleman [pointing to Craig] for a long time, and I had this intuition that I suffocated within me because I’m pragmatic. When you make movies, you cannot daydream … I thought about Daniel Craig, and thought he’s never going to say yes … he said yes, and the yes was a definitive yes. He is one of the greatest actors. It is a privilege to work with somebody like him. One of the characteristics of the great actors that you love and see onscreen and are affected by, I would say is the generosity of approach, the capacity of being very mortal onscreen, and very few are, and very few iconic legendary actors allow that fragility to be seen, and one of them is Daniel for sure.”
“Queer” is in contention for the Golden Lion at Venice.
