The musician that “completely kidnapped” Luca Guadagnino: “Changed my life forever”
One of the more stylish directors of modern times has undoubtedly been the Italian filmmaker Luca Guadagnino, the man behind such erotically charged art as 2017’s Call Me by Your Name and last year’s saucy tennis romp Challengers.
A film fanatic from a young age, Guadagnino was obsessed with the work of the likes of Ingmar Bergman and studied the history of cinema before making his first film at the age of 28 in the late 1990s, a thriller called The Protagonists that starred Tilda Swinton.
Swinton would become a long-term collaborator with the Italian and, indeed, their next project, known as the ‘Desire trilogy’, took shape over a seven-year period, starting with the 2009 film I am Love. Over the next five years or so, Guadagnino directed documentaries and acted as producer on several films, before the second instalment in the Desire trilogy, again starring Swinton, arrived in 2015 with A Bigger Splash.
It was two years later that Guadagnino really started to get global attention with his Timothée Chalamet-starring bilingual romantic drama Call Me by Your Name, a film that was universally adored by critics, picking up four Oscar nominations and winning for Best Adapted Screenplay. It made a star of Chalamet, who was nominated for his performance as 17-year-old Elio Perlman and also found thousands of fans due to its soundtrack album, which mixed classical music with modern songs, pitting the likes of Sufjan Stevens with Giorgio Moroder, Bach and Revel.
Music is evidently incredibly important to Guadagnino who uses it not just as a backdrop to scenes but as a fully formed part of his movies narratives. One composer he has often spoken about his affinity for is John Adams, an American who has been active since the 1980s and caused some controversy with his opera The Death of Klinghoffer, which was based around the real-life hijacking of an ocean liner by the Palestinian Liberation Front.
Once Guadagnino found Adams’ work he made it integral to his own movie making, writing and editing I am Love with Adams’ music in mind. He told Pitchfork: “I discovered John Adams’ music in 2005, when I was editing a movie in Spain. It was my birthday, and the legendary Gareth Whigham, an executive from Sony with whom I was working, gave me, as a present, Naive and Sentimental Music, by John Adams. I put the disc in the CD player, and suddenly, when those first notes, dun dun dun started, I immediately got completely kidnapped by the musical world of John Adams.”
Call Me by Your Name similarly features Adams’ music throughout, and Guadagnino again used his pieces on his eight-episode series for HBO in 2020 called We Are Who We Are, a coming-of-age drama that starred Chloë Sevigny and Jack Dylan Grazer, which attracted acclaim.
Guadagnino is also apparently in development on a stage adaptation of The Death of Klinghoffer for the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, an opera house in Florence. He added, “John Adams comes to me constantly. I can say to you that really that moment in 2005 was transformative and changed my life as a director forever. The ambition I have, that I blush in speaking it out with someone, is that maybe, one day, John Adams will compose a soundtrack for me.”
