FEELING THE HEAT
In sprawling sexual odyssey QUEER , Daniel Craig and Drew Starkey embark on an intensely passionate relationship in 1950s Mexico City. And for director Luca Guadagnino, everything ’s been leading to this
WORDS OLLY RICHARDS
Eugene Allerton (Drew Starkey) gets to know William Lee (Daniel Craig);
Somewhere in Luca Guadagnino’s mother’s house, in Sicily, there’s a box containing a very important script.
The script probably isn’t very good — Guadagnino wrote it when he was about 22, possessed of more enthusiasm than skill —but he’ll never allow it to be thrown away. It represents his first steps with a story that has fascinated him for over 30 years and which, though he didn’t know it at the time, would shape much of his career.
The script is an adaptation of William S. Burroughs’ Queer, which Guadagnino had read around five years before his first attempt to translate it, when he was 17. Written in the 1950s, but not published until the relatively enlightened 1985, Queer is a loose, broadly autobiographical story about William Lee —essentially an avatar for Burroughs —a middle-aged, drug-addicted expat living in Mexico City, who develops a fixation on a young, beautiful man named Eugene Allerton. Socially gregarious as he is, Lee has no idea how to simply tell Allerton he likes him. He drives himself close to madness trying to deduce whether his feelings are reciprocated.
Guadagnino knew none of that when browsing the shelves of his favourite little bookstore —he loved it because they’d say nothing as he spent hours reading without making a single purchase —and his gaze stopped at the title, in Italian Diverso. “Different”. That called out to him, but what was inside shaped his life.
“I knew where my desires lay, but what was probably unformed was how to express my desires,” says Guadagnino, who is gay, and at 17 felt molto diverso. “In a way, Lee in the novel is kind of childish in his incapability to express his desire. Probably unconsciously, it must have been feeling very close to home for me, this sense of incapacity… How do I reach out to the person that I want?”
From Melissa P. to Call Me By Your Name to Bones And All, many of Guadagnino’s films started as books. “I have had a few epiphanies in my life with novels that I’ve read, and they stay with me to the degree that I want to make a movie out of them,” he says. “I immediately thought that I wanted to [make a movie of ] this.”