Director Luca Guadagnino reveals he was hesitant about making Call Me By Your Name

On Sunday, Italian filmmaker Luca Guadagnino said that he was hesitant about directing Call Me By Your Name, the 2017 romantic film. He was unsure about making yet another film revolving around the life of the rich, having just made films like I Am Love (2009) and The Bigger Splash (2015), revolving around similar themes.

Call Me By Your Name stars Timothee Chalamet and Armie Hammer in lead roles, and is based on Andre Aciman's eponymous novel. The film is a love story set in the Summer of 1983 in Italy. 

During a session at the Jio MAMI Mumbai Film Festival 2023, Luca said, "I was in Milan back then, and a friend of mine called me and said, 'We have this book that we are going to turn into a movie. Can you read it for us? It's American, but it's set in Italy'. That book was Andre Aciman's 'Call Me By Your Name'. So, I read the book, and a few months later that version of the movie couldn't happen (then).

"The producers started to ask me, 'Would you do it?' I was, like, 'No, I don't want to do it'. I didn't want to do another movie about rich people. So, I felt like I didn't want to be narrow there. So, I said, no, many, many times." 

Eventually, Luca made Call Me By Your Name and Suspiria, another such film, back-to-back. "I said the first (yes), like, eight months after the first call happened to me. Later, I was asked to be a producer, I said sure. But when all the roads were trying to make this movie happen, and none of them was happening, I was already prepping Suspiria, which is another of these projects that I wanted to make forever," he said.

"I was like why not do two movies in the same year? And that's why I did it. I was like, I'm going to do it quickly. I couldn't really predict that the movie (Call Me By Your Name) which I was resisting so much was going to become a movie that was going to have such an impact on people. So, it was a very strong lesson to learn, which means, to not resist the process and to let the thing choose you," he added.