Director Luca Guadagnino is reportedly raising funding for a film adaptation of Queer, a novel written in the 1950s by William S. Burroughs but not published until 1985.

The proposed film would star Daniel Craig in the role of Lee, the protagonist, who pursues a young man named Allerton in a seedy Mexico City underground that is inhabited by drug dealers and expatriate Americans.

Allerton’s character is based on the real-life Adelbert Lewis Marker, an ex-sailor who had befriended Burroughs in the Mexican capital after his discharge from the Navy in the early Cold War era. The novel is a sequel to Junkie, another novel by Burroughs.

Guadagnino garnered much critical acclaim for his 2017 film Call Me By Your Name, based on the novel by André Aciman, which explored the relationship between an adolescent boy and his professor/mentor in northern Italy. Guadagnino’s most recent film, Bones and All, earned him a Best Director prize at the last Venice Film Festival though it has been performing poorly at the box office, having grossed only $11 million worldwide for MGM since its release in November.

The prolific Italian director is also in the early stages of developing a biopic for Apple about the late actress Audrey Hepburn, with Rooney Mara playing the Hollywood icon. A screenwriter has yet to be announced for that project.

Guadagnino is also known for his collaboration with actress Tilda Swinton in such films as The Protagonists (1999), I Am Love (2009), A Bigger Splash (2015), and Suspiria (2018).

Daniel Craig recently completed work reprising the role of Benoit Blanc in Rian Johnson’s Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, which will be available on Netflix on December 23. He also appeared as 007 agent James Bond in No Time to Die (2021), which earned Eon Productions more than $774 million worldwide.

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