Filmmaker Luca Guadagnino is now working a documentary about Bernardo Bertolucci and a cinematic adaptation of Thomas Mann’s novel Buddenbrooks. Also, his romance drama Queer is scheduled for release by A24 on November 27. Queer is based on the novel by William S. Burroughs, which, along with Buddenbrooks, influenced Guadagnino as a young man. The director is also known for Call Me By Your Name and Challengers.
The Oscar-nominated director told an interviewer for IndieWire that the Bertolucci project is a “very personal movie” for him. Guadagnino had long been an admirer of the iconic Italian auteur who has been acclaimed for The Conformist and The Last Emperor. Bertolucci, who died in 2018, was the first Italian director to win an Oscar for Best Director.
In his IndieWire interview, Guadgnino was quoted as saying “I’m editing it now. I have a few more conversations I want to have. Actually, Marty Scorsese, I want to talk to him about it. We’ve been shooting for a while now. They’re not interviews; it’s a conversation. It’s a very personal movie. I am the protagonist of the movie. It could be called, ‘Bertolucci and I,’ which it’s not going to be.”
With a working title of Joie de Vivre, the Bertolucci film includes some “beautiful conversations” he had in Edinburgh with film historian and director Mark Cousins. Describing his admiration for Bertolucci, Guadagnino said ‘A master is such because he, she, they, they let you understand you in a way that you might not have had the chance to understand yourself because they open up a sudden vision of yourself in a way that is unexpected. So, it’s mostly about taking out from you than hovering over you.”
Guadagnino also stated that Buddenbrooks and Queer “are kind of mirroring each other, or they are the flip coin of each other. He added that “One [Queer] is about the longing of the past and the unavoidability when you meet someone that is really pulling you in, and you want to see yourself reflected in the gaze of the other. And the other one [Buddenbrooks] is about the decadence of a Western society rooted in the most brutal form of repression, internal before being external. To understand the obscenity of repression being acted out upon people, I think you have to see and look into the repression that the people who are exerting repression over other people have within themselves, not to justify them, but to go to the root of this heart of darkness.”
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