At the beginning of his career, Luca Guadagnino was pestering the likes of Tilda Swinton and Bernardo Bertolucci to take notice. Now, with Swinton the lead in his latest lavish film, the director tells DONALD CLARKEhe got to where he is by playing to his strengths
I AM LOVE (Io Sono l'Amore) doesn't look like the work of a shy man. Although filmed on a reasonably modest budget, the film – a saga concerning the decline of a powerful Milanese family – swans fabulously across the screen like a Borgia on her way to an orgy. Every corner of the picture is lit exquisitely. Every costume appears to have just arrived from the couturier. Everything about it speaks of artistic confidence.
Sure enough, Luca Guadagnino, the film's Italian director, turns out to be an assertive sort of fellow. Rounding on an unsuspecting piece of smoked salmon with a threatening bagel, he explains how he managed to secure the fearsome Tilda Swinton as a collaborator. I had heard that the famously eccentric Scottish actor, who plays the patriarch's flawed wife in I Am Love, had been an obsession of his from an early age.
"You might say that, you might say that," he says between bites. "I have been a great lover of Tilda's since I saw her in Derek Jarman's Caravaggioback in 1988. I understood my queerness when I saw that. I was only young and I showed it to my friends. Some were shocked. Some thought it was fantastic. I immediately thought, I want to work with Tilda."
A less assured young man might have allowed that ambition to ferment into a fantasy, but Guadagnino meant to act on his determination. He sent her a script and (understandably enough) she never wrote back. Some months later, she turned up at a nearby arts festival and Guadagnino trundled along to extract an explanation. That season, he had also been pestering the great Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci.
“She was at this museum and here is this thin, young fellow stalking her,” he says. “I asked her why she hadn’t replied and she said she was just so busy. She said we will talk tomorrow and, after I called at her hotel, she phoned my house. I was living in a typical student house at that time and we got two important phone calls: one from Tilda Swinton and one from Bernardo Bertolucci. They were very surprised.”
There is, surely, a lesson here for young directors. “De-fin-ite-ly,” he says with exaggerated emphasis. “When you are young, approach people you respect. I am the living experience of that. Tilda and I have been friends ever since.”
An amateur psychologist might find the roots of Luca’s confident determination in his status as a lifelong outsider. Born in Ethiopia and largely raised in Sicily, he claims that, even now, he doesn’t quite feel part of the Italian mainstream. As a child, he watched the Ethiopian empire implode and feels the experience left him with a sure sense of life’s possibilities. Africa also imbued him with a hatred of confinement and narrow-mindedness.
Guadagnino studied film in Rome (where he wrote a thesis on Jonathan Demme) and went on to make his feature debut in 1999 with an experimental piece called The Protagonists. That film, featuring his new chum Tilda, didn't set the world alight, but it did, surely, secure its director a place in the cinema community.
"Oh no. Not at all," Guadagnino says with a theatrical sigh. "I am still an outsider in Italy. I will tell you how fragile and silly I am about this. The other day a friend called me to say Premieremagazine in Italy had given me four stars for I Am Love. Till then they had always given me bad reviews and I had dismissed them. I thought I was happy as an outsider."
Is he frightened of becoming part of the establishment? “I think so. I should be a distant outsider, but it seems I still want to be appreciated in my own country. That’s a bad thing. There are a lot of directors who, when they are 55, have become morons who just care about being appreciated in their own countries.” Take that, 55-year-old morons.
At any rate, I Am Lovehas, indeed, significantly altered Guadagnino's standing in the world. A recipient of rave reviews following its premiere at last year's Venice Film Festival, the picture is being promoted unusually vigorously for a foreign-language feature.
It's not hard to see why. I Am Loveoffers viewers a delicious fantasy of Italian life. Forget the grubby drug deals of Gomorrahor the middle-class introspection of Nanni Moretti. This is an environment where, between trips to Sanremo and London, the family squabble in mansions the size of islands while feasting on expensive animals stuffed with even more expensive vegetables.
Tilda Swinton remains the long, thin axle around which the action spins. In keeping with the film’s exotic mise-en-scène, the great actor plays a Russian emigre who launches into an inappropriate relationship with her son’s friend and business partner. Disaster looms.
So, a Scottish actor is playing a Russian in an Italian film. Might it not have been more practical to get somebody from one of those two countries?
“You see, she started out as an American,” Guadagnino says in his near-perfect English. “But we needed a character who is isolated from her past. Well, Americans go home every month. We met these Russians in Milan and 85 per cent of them never went back. Never.”
Still, teaching Swinton to speak Italian in a Russian accent must have been a challenge.
"I did not have to do it, but, yes, somebody did," he laughs. "This was our equivalent of a 3-D digital effect. Tilda speaking Italian was, for a film on this budget, the equivalent of those monsters in Avatar. But I was determined I would never dub the dialogue or have it in English. Then it would have seemed like this cheesy Europudding. We had this excellent Russian lady torturing Tilda on set. 'Nyet! Nyet! Not that way!' Fortunately Tilda has a very good ear. So, she got it."
Guadagnino remains a committed student of cinema. He peppers his conversation with references to favourite directors and, while disdaining post-modernism, allows some unmistakable visual quotes into his films.
Unsurprisingly, I Am Lovetips its hat vigorously towards Italian masters, aping the lushness of late works by Luchino Visconti and the intrigue of classic Bertolucci films. However, his most dominant influence was, surprisingly, a family drama set on the banks of the Liffey.
"We watched Visconti's Sensoa lot," he explains. "But more than anything we watched John Huston's The Dead.It is one of my top-three favourite films. We were trying to find the rhythm with the editor and we watched The Deadand we were astonished at how fast it cuts. That was a real surprise. The table scene goes bam, bam, bam. It is amazingly fast. But it works because Huston knows where to put the camera every fucking time."
Next up, this celluloid junky is producing a remake of Dario Argento's untouchably mad horror film Suspiria. The proposed director is, of all people, David Gordon Green, the man behind art-house films such as All the Real Girlsand the recent dope farce Pineapple Express."It's a remake. But when you do Hamlet, it's a remake. Some are good. Some are bad. But Dario is a master and David is a master."
As we discovered earlier on, Luca Guadagnino does not lack confidence. He shrugs and dispatches the last piece of smoked salmon.
“I get pissed off when I meet a young film-maker who plays all humble. ‘Oh, I don’t know what to do.’ Be aware of your strengths. Be aware of your strengths.” Take note, shrinking viol
- I Am Loveopens today
