Luca Guadagnino on Casting Hollywood A-Listers in Subversive Roles: ‘I Have Worked With Some of the Finest’

Luca Guadagnino discussed his warm rapport with Hollywood movie stars on Monday at the Venice Film Festival, one year after being on the Lido with his Julia Roberts-starrer “After the Hunt.”

During a wide-ranging master class the Italian director, who was born in Palermo, Sicily, to an Algerian mother and a Sicilian father – and whose career trajectory has been a long road full of twists and turns that have taken him to Hollywood – was asked about whether he likes casting top stars, such as Roberts, Daniel Craig, Tilda Swinton and Ralph Fiennes, in films that tend to subvert their conventional image with global audiences, as is the case with “Bond” star Craig in “Queer.”

“The truth, the banal truth, is that I am enamored with actors and definitely in love with my actors,” Guadagnino said. “So it’s a very tender emotion for me to work with them. We are like children playing on the beach, kind of creating these sandcastles. Finding ways to express what we want to express, and trying in a way to be truthful and not banal,” he explained.

“I’ve been lucky because, honestly, I have worked with some of the finest, most committed, bold performers I could have worked with. But I think they know that I love them,” Guadagnino added.

The feeling tends to be mutual.

That was clear when Julia Roberts arrived last year at the Venice Film Festival to promote “After the Hunt” wearing a cardigan emblazoned with Guadagnino’s face.

“Julia is fantastic,” Guadagnino told the packed room. “Every day of that shoot with her was quite inspiring.” Throughout the process of prepping and shooting “After The Hunt,” Roberts was knitting, he recounted. “And when I celebrated my birthday on the shoot of the movie, on Aug. 10 of that year, not only did Julia throw a party for me, but she gave me this present: It was the scarf she was knitting. It’s one of the most precious presents I have.”

Guadagnino kicked off his career thanks to his ability to charm movie stars.

In 1999, he made “The Protagonists,” a faux experimental doc in which Tilda Swinton and some pals try to reconstruct the motiveless murder of a London waiter. Guadagnino had become obsessed with Swinton after seeing her in Derek Jarman’s “Caravaggio” and cornered her at a Jarman retrospective in Rome, striking up a friendship that blossomed into a creative partnership.

Swinton eventually went on to play a restrained society dame who gradually bursts out of her loveless Milanese marriage in 2009’s “I Am Love.” “The idea of ‘I Am Love’ started with this image of a woman in a big, big mansion and feeling her feeling of displacement and loneliness,” Guadagnino said, adding: “I understand very well what it means to be estranged and strangled by being in a place where you don’t belong or you thought you belonged and you don’t. And in a way, it is fatal.”

One place where Guadagnino definitely doesn’t belong is swimming pools.

“I cannot swim,” he said, discussing “A Bigger Splash,” his 2015 sunshine, sex, food and rock-n-roll-filled remake of French thriller “La piscine,” starring Swinton and Ralph Fiennes.

“If you put me in the water where I can’t touch the ground, I will drown. So I’m quite terrified by water, by the sea. Totally terrified. And by pools, for sure,” he added.

In 2017, “Call Me By Your Name” bowed from Sundance, making a splash that reverberated with Italian critics and audiences after it scored Oscar nominations for best picture, actor – Timothée Chalamet’s role as Elio in the film launched his career – adapted screenplay and song. Guadagnino revealed that some of the shades of blue etched into that film “were just a big, big mistake made by the [processing] lab.”

“I have never been able to reshoot anything in my life because A: I’m very practical. And B: I never had the means to do that. So, I watched this thing, and I said: ‘This is miraculous, because those flashes of light, to me, are the butterflies in Elio’s stomach. And so we kept them in the movie.'”

Tomorrow Venice will unveil Guadagnino’s sprawling seven-hour Bernardo Bertolucci documentary “Joie de Vivre” in two parts, the first screening on Sept. 8, and the second on Sept. 9. Guadagnino will receive the festival’s Cartier Glory to the Filmmaker Award ahead of the first screening.