“With a capital C”: the actor Luca Guadagnino called the embodiment of cinema
Luca Guadagnino has worked with some of the greatest actors in the film industry, including the likes of Tilda Swinton, Mark Rylance, Ralph Fiennes, and Daniel Craig. The Italian director, who spent the first part of his career making films in Europe before transitioning to Hollywood with 2015’s A Bigger Splash, scored his first major English-language success was 2017’s romantic drama Call Me By Your Name, which earned four Oscar nominations.
Since then, every Guadagnino film has been a hot ticket at film festivals and eagerly awaited by cinema-goers. Though he doesn’t make the kind of big-budget franchise blockbusters that reliably pack cinemas, he is an example of a director who sticks with their mid-budget, artistic vision and garners critical and box office success. In 2024, for example, his romantic drama Challengers defied expectations to hold steady at the box office for weeks even after dropping on streaming services.
Guadagnino has earned a reputation as an auteur whose erotic, visually sumptuous, romantically complicated dramas are immediately recognisable. He understands the essence of cinema, as his films consistently prove, so it should not be taken lightly when he identifies an actor as the definition of the medium.
Speaking in 2015 around the release of A Bigger Splash, he identified one of the film’s actors as just that. The film stars Tilda Swinton as a rock star vacationing in Italy with her troubled young partner (Matthias Schoenaerts) after she has lost her voice. Things reach Guadagnino-levels of complexity when her former lover (Ralph Fiennes) shows up with his own young lover, a mysterious woman played by Dakota Johnson.
Although the film failed to make waves at the box office, Guadagnino had nothing but praise for one member of the cast in particular. “Dakota embodies cinema with a capital C,” he told Screen Daily. “Not only because of her background, but she herself has such a sharp focus, such an intelligence, irony, and total confidence that to work with her has been phenomenal. And I am proud that something has started with her that is going to be a long, beautiful relationship.”
The background that the director was referring to was Johnson’s starry Hollywood lineage. Her parents are actors Don Johnson and Melanie Griffith, while Antonio Banderas is stepfather and Tippi Hedron, an actor famed for her collaborations with Alfred Hitchcock, is her maternal grandmother. This glitzy family tree puts Johnson decisively in the dreaded “nepo baby” corner, but she is one of the few who has transcended the label.
Johnson started out playing small roles in movies and TV shows throughout the early 2000s, but finally made her breakthrough in 2015 when she landed the lead role in the polarising inevitability that was the Fifty Shades of Grey franchise. None of the films were particularly well received by critics, but they made Johnson a movie star, and her career took off from there.
Despite being relatively new to stardom at the time she appeared in A Bigger Splash in 2015, Johnson struck Guadagnino as being remarkably self-assured. Speaking of their first conversation, he remembered, “Immediately when I spoke on the phone with this very snappy, very clever, very direct girl, I felt ‘oh my god! This woman has a very strong personality.’” When they finally met in person to begin the film, he recognized that she was a star even before the world had a chance to see her in 50 Shades.
Three years later, Johnson and Guadagnino worked together again in his remake of Dario Argento’s cult classic, Suspiria, sign-posting the potential for the long-term collaborative relationship that the director alluded to back in 2015.
