Luca Guadagnino is one of the greatest filmmakers of our time. His complex filmography includes extremely accurate, biting portrayals of the global privileged class, from the worldwide success I am Love in 2009, to the more recent A Bigger Splash in 2016, as well as the upcoming Call Me By Your Name and the following remake of Dario Argento’s horror masterpiece Suspiria. He has also created thought-provoking theoretical and political documentaries such as Inconscio Italiano in 2011 and Bertolucci on Bertolucci in 2013. Guadagnino is a man possessing a multi-layered knowledge of deep aesthetics—a rare and impressive quality. Dapper Dan talked to him to find out more about the source of this exceptionality, which seems to be entirely natural and inherent in him.
CARLO ANTONELLI: Where were you born?
LUCA GUADAGNINO: I was born in Palermo.
CA: When? LG: On August 10th, 1971. CA: And did you grow up there?
LG: No, I was born at eight instead of nine months, even seven I think, and at the end of the first month of my extra-uterine life we moved to Ethiopia with my family.
CA: And how long were you there?
LG: Until ’76, five full years, that is until foreigners living in Ethiopia were no longer welcome because General Mengistu’s dictatorship forced everyone out after dethroning emperor Selassie.
CA: Do you remember any images of Haile Selassie?
LG: Honestly I must say I don’t. I know him because I’ve recently seen some…
CA: And Mengistu’s terror?
LG: I distinctly remember the curfew. In my mind I have very precise memories of what the atmosphere was like in those months of the curfew, of the coup, the resulting need to flee, to leave: that I remember perfectly well.
CA: Was it frightening?
LG: It was very exciting, at least to us, but that was also a strange time as a potentially, let’s say, universal event occurred: two of my parents’ closest friends died in a serious car accident, and somehow that anticipated the end of the idyllic time—at least to me—that was Ethiopia. I remember very clearly that the dark times of the curfew were heralded by this endless afternoon I spent locked in the car close to this little house in the middle of a plain with big trees, where my parents had gone to identify the bodies of their friends, the Denti family.
CA: What else do you really remember about Africa?
LG: I remember quite distinctly the house where we lived, I remember my toys…
CA: Did you have African servants?
LG: Absolutely.
CA: How many?
LG: I could be wrong, but I imagine three or four people.
CA: Because that’s the way it was: you were expatriates.
LG: We were expatriates, like in that Chris Menges film, A World Apart, but without the racist undertones, at least not from my point of view.
CA: So you played with the children around you…?
LG: I played with my classmates, who were of all ethnicities.
CA: Because it was an international school?
LG: Yes.
CA: And your father taught literature?
LG: He taught Italian and history at the Technical Institute of something, I think…
CA: Do you remember the architecture?
LG: I remember the cinemas: they had this otherworldly dimension, they were huge, they were magnificent. I think I started loving the architectural style of right-wing dictatorships from all of the fascist architecture that was left in Ethiopia, of which the cinemas were a brilliant example.
CA: But you’re not full Italian.
LG: No, my mother is Algerian.
CA: You’re mixed-race.
LG: Yes, proudly so.
CA: And do you feel Italian?
LG: I am naturally Italian, in the sense that my education is Italian. If you ask me if my imagery is based on the same elements as contemporary Italians’ imagery, I’d say no.
CA: And when you see the immigrant landings, which you used as a subtext in A Bigger Splash (2016), whose side are your feelings on?
LG: First of all, the landings in A Bigger Splash are not a subtext but a fundamental part of the film’s setting, which takes place on Pantelleria and could not ignore the existence of a phenomenon that is deeply ingrained in the season and the place. How do I feel when I see the landings? You know, this question is potentially extraordinary or…
CA: Foolish.
LG: …totally stupid, so between the two extremes I prefer silence.
CA: Oh, come on… Do you feel a general brotherhood with migrants or political refugees?
LG: Again, I must answer by not answering because these are topics that deserve a much broader discussion and examination. I can tell you that when I first set foot in Morocco, which is where my mother lived from the age of five to 20 (although she’s Algerian, she was educated in Morocco) and when I went to Lebanon I felt a profound, DNA-deep unity with the Moroccans and Libyans I met: there’s something that really runs in the blood.
CA: On colonialism and the residual racism that still remains in the Italian population, who has forgotten Mussolini’s brief but horrible colonial period, you wrote and directed a documentary…
LG: I made a documentary called Inconscio Italiano, presented at the Locarno International Film Festival in 2011.
CA: But you also want to make a film about Africa titled Bambino Africano, which is something you’ve been thinking about for a long time, right?
LG: The idea behind this African film is that somehow, in a rather stupid way, it may be based on my personal experience. I understood that only recently: if I stupidly think of myself in the third person, I sense that mine will be a filmography about returning to the places of my desire and my passion. All of these films I make somehow represent the mise-en-scène of my eureka moment as a cinephile when I was a child.
CA: So what was I Am Love (2009)?
LG: Well, it was Douglas Sirk, Fassbinder…
CA: So it’s also about returning to the places of cinema?
LG: To me, each film is an attempt to recreate, relive the main scene of a film I loved when I was the age at which, when you love a film, you love it in a total, absolute way. I love contemporary cinema less and less and I increasingly go back to the cinema of the past. Both to retrace and go over what was really love at first sight for me, and to go a little deeper. And Bambino Africano could be the doppelganger of the skipped heartbeat that to me was The River by Jean Renoir, which is about a family of expatriates in India.
CA: A Bigger Splash is the return to Pantelleria because you remember travelling there when you were a kid? Would you say that’s another kind of “return”?
LG: The return to places, to films… Yes.
CA: What about the upcoming Call Me by Your Name?
LG: That’s a film I’m still making, so I don’t want to say too much about it. But while I’m making it I’m also thinking that it’s a return to the desires I had when I was the same age as the characters in Call Me by Your Name, although at that age I was unable to fulfil them, express them and act them out the way the characters express them and act them out in the film.
CA: So it’s a re-enactment?
LG: Completely. After all, all films are also a hand-tohand fight with the actors you’re making them with.
CA: And what about the next one after that, Suspiria? A return to the original cunt? To the uterus?
LG: Suspiria is a return to me watching that film for the first time.
CA: But it’s going to be a very vaginal film, isn’t it? So it’s also a return to that particular hole…
LG: That’s an inevitable return.
CA: Are you going back in there? Are you inside a pussy and you can’t get out?
LG: I can’t untangle myself… But it’s also pleasant.
CA: Of course, it feels good inside the pussy.
LG: Yes, I’m quite disgusted by those homosexuals who feel revulsion for the pussy. It’s a revolting attitude; it’s late-capitalist, ignorant… Fascist.
CA: In other words, the dick is out?
LG: I’d say… I already got over it when, at 14, I read this learned essay on ancient Athens by a scholar named Eva Keuls, titled “The Reign of the Phallus”, where she explained how the patriarchal system worked and the origins of our own patriarchal system.
CA: So you like Reality with a capital R? You don’t censor the inferno of the real?
LG: No, why should I? But I did put in place some great forms of defence, including leapfrogging anything that might upset a vaguely peaceful dimension… Unfortunately by doing this you can put a damper on external agents, not necessarily on internal ones. I’m waiting for the moment when I will end up in a clinic, too…
CA: What kind of clinic?
LG: Psychiatric?
CA: Bah, I just got out, it’s not too bad.
LG: Inside or outside?
CA: Inside.
LG: Right. We’ll go back together.
CA: With great pleasure
Originally published in Dapper Dan magazine 14, 2016. Interview by Carlo Antonelli.