His next film, After the Hunt, ought to continue demonstrating that passion. “It’s a very different movie from what I’ve done so far,” Guadagnino says. A colleague recently pointed out its place in his oeuvre: “Three movies in a short span of time—Challengers, Queer, and After the Hunt—and two female-driven stories bookend a love story between men in the center.” Reznor and Ross are already signed on to score the film, while Costa has been hard at work editing. “We were talking a lot about time—it’s a movie about the internal tension of time,” Guadagnino says of the cutting process. “What is the unity between one second and the other? Infinite.”
This year marked the 25th anniversary of Guadagnino’s debut feature, The Protagonists, a crime thriller starring one of his most frequent collaborators, Tilda Swinton. The director thinks back to that time with some anxiety. “I had my movie in my mind, and I was really adamant to make the movie I had in my mind,” he says. “[But] there were the limits of money. There was my inexperience. That was a very cold shower.” Helming his follow-up, the erotic drama Melissa P., was a “traumatic” experience—he felt “disempowered,” unable to navigate the whims of those around him.
You can draw a line from those early, frustrating experiences to where Guadagnino finds himself now, working fast and at his prime. What seem like risks keep paying off—bringing in a fashion house’s creative director to lead an ambitious costume department; finding new notes for a pair of music legends to play. Hell, on Queer, he hired an architect as the production designer, with the job of recreating ’50s Mexico City on a bunch of soundstages in Rome. That’s Stefano Baisi, and he too is coming back as production designer for After the Hunt. It’ll be his second movie.
“They’re my friends—all of these people are my friends,” Guadagnino says. “That’s what I love about it: friendship.”
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