Oscar-nominated filmmaker Luca Guadagnino (Call Me By Your Name, Challengers) opened up about the next two projects that he’s currently developing. This comes ahead of the impending theatrical release of the romance drama Queer, which will be led by Daniel Craig and Drew Starkey.
What did Luca Guadagnino say about the Buddenbrooks & Bernardo Bertolucci movies?
Guadagnino shared a new production update about the current status of his upcoming Bernardo Bertolucci documentary, which he described as a “very personal movie” for him. Bertolucci is a legendary Italian filmmaker best known for his work on films such as 1970’s The Conformist and 1987’s The Last Emperor. He was also the first Italian director to win an Oscar Award for Best Director. Bertolucci died on November 16, 2018, at the age of 77 due to lung cancer.
“I’m editing it now,” Guadagnino said (via IndieWire). “I have a few more conversations I want to have. Actually, Marty Scorsese, I want to talk to him about it. We’ve been shooting for a while now. They’re not interviews; it’s a conversation. It’s a very personal movie. I am the protagonist of the movie. It could be called, ‘Bertolucci and I,’ which it’s not going to be.”
In addition, Guadagnino has also revealed his plans to adapt Thomas Mann’s 1901 novel Buddenbrooks, which was one of the two books that made an impact on his life growing up. The novel centers around the story of a North German merchant family told through the course of four generations.
“There are two books that I grew up with, one I read before [Queer], which is ‘Buddenbrooks’ by Thomas Mann,” Guadagnino shared. “I think they are kind of mirroring each other, or they are the flip coin of each other. One [Queer] is about the longing of the past and the unavoidability when you meet someone that is really pulling you in, and you want to see yourself reflected in the gaze of the other. And the other one [Buddenbrooks] is about the decadence of a Western society rooted in the most brutal form of repression, internal before being external. To understand the obscenity of repression being acted out upon people, I think you have to see and look into the repression that the people who are exerting repression over other people have within themselves, not to justify them, but to go to the root of this heart of darkness.”
