Call Me By Your Name director Luca Guadagnino still has interest in reuniting with Timothée Chalamet on a follow-up to the 2017 Oscar-winning romantic drama. However, the Italian filmmaker doesn’t believe in calling the potential second installment in the series a sequel, he revealed during a recent interview he gave to IndieWire at the Telluride Film Festival.
“A sequel is an American concept,” the producer said during the interview. “It’s more like the chronicles of [Chalamet’s character of] Elio, the chronicles of this young boy becoming a man. It is something I want to do.”
The news of Guadagnino’s desire to work with the actor on a follow-up to Call Me By Your Name, which is based on the 2007 novel of the same name by André Aciman, comes after they reunited to make another coming-of-age romantic drama, Bones and All.
The helmer collaborated with screenwriter David Kajganich to adapt Camille DeAngelis’ 2015 cannibal horror novel of the same name for the screen. The gothic, ’80s-era-set movie offers a sensitive look into marginalized characters who populate all of Guadagnino’s films.
In the upcoming horror film, Chalamet plays Lee, the romantic interest of fellow “eater” and runaway Maren (Taylor Russell). The pair meet after Maren’s father left her, and she has evaded the advances of a nomadic cannibal named Sully (Mark Rylance).
Guadagnino also shared during his interview that he had Chalamet in mind for a second collaboration even before he signed on to direct and produce Bones and All. “It’s not as if I left Timothée at the height of his booming success, and then I found him four years later,” the filmmaker revealed. “We kept close. I knew that there was not much time to wait until we worked together, but only for the right project.”
Chalamet has largely been unable to travel to promote the film on the festival circuit due to his production schedule for Dune: Part Two. So Russell joined Guadagnino in Telluride instead.
While promoting Bones & All in Telluride, Russell said that she and Chalamet had circled other projects before it ever came to fruition. “I think both of us had a feeling we were going to work together on the right thing,” she noted.
“From the beginning with Timothée, he made a point to make me feel like I deeply belonged with this group of people, that nothing I could do would be bad, and if I felt any sort of insecurity I could talk to him and he could comfort me. There’s a safety net we shared where there was no judgment,” the actress added.
Russell added that the movie’s ability to portray its cannibal protagonists in an empathetic immediately appealed to her when she read the script. “It felt very punk and authentic to just say, ‘F*ck everything, this is the reality of these people and it’s about love.
“At the end of the day, all of Luca’s movies are about that — love of people on the outside. This is an extreme version of that, but because it’s an extreme version, you really sink into it,” the actress added.
Guadagnino also spoke about how he shot several gory scenes and moments that he ultimately decided not to include in the final version of Bones and All. “We had way more. I shot so much more, but in the editing process, my editor and I were always clear that we should never be selfish about our capacity to portray horror,” he divulged.
“There was a lot of pain that was happening to the characters, a kind of sacred reverence. It was quite beautiful, humbling and reverential,” the filmmaker added.