Luca Guadagnino was a lonely boy living in Palermo when he first read William S. Burroughs’ novella “Queer.” He would’ve been 14 when the book first came out in 1985, when gay liberation was already on its cultural downward slope because of AIDS, and the book was written in the early 1950s. But Burroughs’ story of American-expat-in-Mexico Lee and his obsessive romance with a lithe expat American soldier, Allerton, still emerged as an influential text for the queer literary canon but especially for Guadagnino’s imagination education.
Now, nearly four decades after first reading the book at 17, Guadagnino, one of the hottest filmmakers currently working — especially because of his other film this year “Challengers” — has finally realized the dream of bringing Burroughs’ world to the screen. Those men, Lee and Allerton, are played by Daniel Craig and Drew Starkey in respectively career-reinventing and career-inventing performances. And the film, as Guadagnino said during the Venice Film Festival when “Queer” first premiered, asks the question, or questions: “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?”
“Queer” is a movie I raved about in my review out of the Venice Film Festival, and in the months since what felt like the hottest Biennale on record, it feels like everything’s been said about a movie that has yet to even open. (It finally does from A24 on November 27.) Daniel Craig recently explained why he’d be terrified to take this movie on while still shackled to the Bond franchise — and while you can’t blame him, “Queer” certainly feels closer in kinship to his earlier movies kinkier and riskier than 007. Drew Starkey has talked about not needing an intimacy coordinator for the film’s sex scenes — of which there are two here, graphic with sweat and other fluids, at least relative to any other movie of “Queer’s” cultural proportion. Star Omar Apollo, who briefly plays a rentboy Lee picks up before tumbling into obsession and an out-of-sync love with Allerton that leads him to an Ecuadorian jungle in search of ayahuasca, also talked about going no-fears full-frontal for a movie that seems to return queer sex to the big screen courtesy of Guadagnino.
During the New York Film Festival, where “Queer” made its U.S. premiere, I sat down with Guadagnino for a wide-ranging and deep-digging conversation about the movie and its themes. This was before it was announced Guadagnino would tackle a new version of “American Psycho” with Scott Z. Burns. And before it was also announced Guadagnino would reteam with Craig for a DC project. It’s intriguing to imagine Guadagnino fitting his canvas into such globally established ones, especially for a director whose latest film borrows visually from Powell and Pressburger as much as it does “2001: A Space Odyssey,” “El Topo,” and Apichatpong Weerasethakul in its psychedelic melting down of a love relationship that’s doomed. And one I still think is unrequited, but Guadagnino said is just unsynchronized.
The following interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.
IndieWire: Beyond a love of the book dating back to your teenage years, what’s personal about “Queer” for you?
Luca Guadagnino: It’s about Allerton and Lee, Lee and Allerton. I don’t think it’s about Lee’s quest for Allerton. That means I’m able to project myself into this idea that sometimes you meet someone and that someone makes you see yourself in a way you are not able to see yourself. The strength of that could be too much to bear, and then you are running away from it. But at the same time, you know that it’s going to be an empty running-away-from because it’s going to be with you, anyways, all the time. To me, it’s about the unrelenting power and courage of connection and the bravery of it, but at the same time the cowardly aspect of running away from it… It’s very cinematic at the same time because it gives you the opportunity of using cinema for what it is, which is a story of ghosts, a story of transmigration. Cinema is about that invisible thing that makes people connect, whether it’s characters on screen or it’s the audience toward the movie.
You were 17 when you read the book. How are you reconnecting with your teenage self here? There’s a scene where Lee shoots up and nods off to New Order’s “Leave Me Alone,” off the 1983 album “Power, Corruption & Lies.“Were you listening to that as a kid?Then of course you have Sinead and Prince on the soundtrack, too.
I knew New Order very well at the time. Sinéad O’Connor [whose cover of Nirvana’s “All Apologies” opens the movie] was a big companion for me in my upbringing. “Leave Me Alone” is a song that made me feel very connected to this idea of anguish and loneliness, presumptiveness. It’s almost like the song is saying, “I don’t need anything but myself.” That moment is quite tragic. It’s happening while he is injecting heroin to soothe the anguish of this impossibility of connection with someone he knows he is connected with. To paraphrase it, it makes me think of the great moment Maurice Pialat, the great French filmmaker, won the Golden Palm [at Cannes 1987], and everybody was booing him, and he said, “If you don’t love me, then I don’t love you anymore.” That kind of Sisyphean arrogance that is met with a beautiful fragility. That’s why I thought the song is great. In a way, he is so arrogant and yet so fragile. He’s so ridiculous and yet so poetic.
Did you cast Daniel Craig because of “Love Is the Devil”? There he plays a queer man, the doomed lover of painter Francis Bacon, a libertine and tragic decadent who’s not unlike Lee.
I’ve been a fan of Daniel seeing “Love Is the Devil.” He plays George Dyer, the late lover of Bacon, who dies, suicidal. In that movie, both he and Derek Jacobi were incredible. I started to look at him more and more. He made a movie [“Enduring Love”] that he was amazing in. Every movie I bumped into with Daniel Craig, they were revelatory for me.
But what about the Bond movies? Anything there that proved useful for casting this character?
When he started to do Bond, also there I found in him the embodiment of an icon and legend in a way that was not submissive to the legend but was confronting it and making its own legend out of it, which is the quality of a real star. As a film historian, because I am that, because I have studied that and continue doing that, I have a very profound interest in the history of stardom. Very few actors, very few stars can call themselves actors, and very few stars can reclaim the power of going above the icons they play, and he’s one. When I spoke to my agent Bryan Lourd, and we were talking about who we saw for the role, and when the name of Daniel came about, I thought, “I wish.” We tried, and he said yes immediately, which tells you that cinema is the place for miracles and that people can not be judged.
Aside from Cinecitta’s obvious allure, why did you decide to film there on soundstages rather than on-location somewhere else? This is a Mexico City of the mind where you deploy painted backdrops for the outer world. Even the jungle scene is a construction.
This could not be a period drama because if it was to become a period drama, then we would have betrayed the way in which Burroughs is as a writer, and we are not here to adapt his life. We are here to adapt his book. This is a writer who is feverish, who describes a completely visceral internal point-of-view on things, who projects in the reality of what he writes, not the reality of where he’s living, but his own imagination of it. [The bar] for instance is a place he had never seen in Mexico City. That’s a place he’d been in Vienna, in Austria 10 years before, and he brought it into Mexico City. We worked a lot on that. We really understood that this had to be the mise-en-scene of William S. Burroughs’ imagination.
Recently, I interviewed Gregg Araki, who said he’s struck by what he perceives to be Gen Z having less sex, especially because it was so formative for him growing coming of age in the late ’70s and into the ’80s. Does “Queer” engage with that current puritanism at all? Where does that come from?
Cycles in time are inevitable. Inevitably, puritanism is going to come out and come back and go away. What’s interesting is where puritanism comes from. I grew up in a place and world where I knew that puritanism meant conservatism, meant somehow the institutional power of it. It meant a sort of very severe disconnection between generations coming from older generations, a ruling class. Puritanism is now expressing itself tragically in those who were subject to puritanism, the youth. And also puritanism has always been imposed on people by institutions, the church, or the states, particularly the oppressive states. But now, it’s been driven to me by this invisible power of capitalism … on this kind of neopuritanism that is unaware of being puppeted this way.
“Queer” deals with sex quiteviscerally.That’s a political gesture for you, too.
The connection with the other is the most scandalous way of dealing with yourself. The power of changing your mind by the meeting of the other is a very profound power, and maybe you’re scared by it. The comfort of avoiding it is a false comfortability, because eventually, you dry out the beauty of life, the energy of life, and you end up in a corporate world. Which is in a way the twisted paradox that we are now living in. We are torn between a demand for the rigor of the respect of the other and at the same time we are not able to accept the possibility of the clash with the other. Without clash, there is not movement, and if we cannot accept that clash as a way to become better and stronger and united, so that we can see what the real enemy is, then we are at the mercy of the real enemy. Gregg has a point.
You see the romance between Lee and Allerton as mutual. I don’t. I think Lee loves Allerton a lot more than is reciprocated, but you disagree.
Absolutely. I am totally absolutely convinced of that, what’s in the book and what’s in the movie. And that’s how I directed Daniel and Drew, to play that way. The first person to recognize the other is actually Allerton. When Lee is roaming the night of Mexico City and stops by the cockfight, and he sees the ex-pats walking past, the last ex-pat walking past is Allerton, who looks at him. Being a voyeur and being a filmmaker, I give a huge importance to the act of looking. For me, the camera says, “Allerton recognizes Lee first.” In fact, when Lee looks up and see that this guy is looking at him, he’s struck by that. Many times, in the movie, you see that Allerton makes a push forward in the first place. He goes to the counter of the bar and offers Lee drinks. He waves at him when he’s talking to [John Dumé, a friend of Lee’s played by Drew Doege]. He goes into the bedroom and sits on the bed.
But still, Allerton, much like Burroughs’ lover Lewis Marker who inspired him, leaves Lee alone in the jungle finally and is gone.
The tragedy of these two guys is not that one is way more in love with the other one. It’s that they cannot find the possibility of contact lasting more than the moment in which it lasts. They are out of sync, and that’s the tragedy of their love story. And that’s their doom because they will always try to find the moment of synchronicity. Both of them are not able to learn a lesson in life that, no matter who you find as the person you want to be seen by, you are always going to be alone. We die alone. That is the tragedy. It’s not about unrequited love. That’s something I’ve never been interested in. If I do a story about unrequited love, I’d make a story about a stalker or a delusional person, and the people I am most scared by are stalkers and delusional people. I don’t want to tell that story. I don’t believe in it.
So maybe I’m just projecting my own shit here.
That is a magnificent way of [approaching the movie]. When I do a movie and I put it out, that movie belongs to whoever sees it. Every reading of the movie is valuable and profound to me except the superficial ones. I don’t want to impose my point of view. I respect directors who never talk about their movies because they somehow preserve the mystique of cinema.
“Queer” opens in select theaters from A24 on Wednesday, November 27 with expansions to follow.
