EC’s exclusive interview with Luca Guadagnino, writer/director of “I Am Love”
June 28th, 2010 by Scott Marks
Luca Guadagnino
In an era where cinematic style is defined by quick cuts, flashy pans and hand held camerawork, a film like “I Am Love” has the same effect on its viewer that insulin has on a diabetic.
At the age of 39 and with six features under his belt director Luca Guadagnino remains a bit of an anomaly in these parts. To the best of my knowledge this is the first of his six feature films to play San Diego and I can’t wait to hit Kensington Video to catch up on the rest. “I Am Love,” which opens Friday at Landmark’s Hillcrest Cinemas, is a sumptuously filmed vivisection of decay among Italian aristocracy and it’s clear that in addition to being an exceptional filmmaker in his own right, Guadagnino is a perpetual film student driven by the works of Italian heavyweights Luchino Visconti and Bernardo Bertolucci.
Guadagnino was in New York on the promotion trail when EC caught up with him.
Scott Marks: Do you remember the first film you saw when you were a kid?
Luca Guadagnino: A great question to begin the interview! There are two. I’m not sure of the title of one, but I think it was by Ray Harryhausen. I distinctly remember the image of a centaur, the half horse/half man creature, standing in a square next to a fountain. It must be something by Harryhausen. On the other hand, because I was raised in Ethiopia I remember seeing “Lawrence of Arabia” with my mother. A few years later – I was still very young - we moved to Palermo, Italy and I remember seeing “Apocalypse Now.” Those would be my, how do you say…
Scott: Big three?
Luca (Laughing): Exactly.
Scott: From the opening credits, with their fifties style cursive lettering backed up by John Adams’ lush score, one gets the sense that they are in for two hours of elegance and class.
Luca: Music in movies today is basically Mickey Mousing the emotions of the audience. Music has been degraded to the level of filling holes. I believe in music as a sort of character that stands with all the other characters in the movie.
Scott: Adams certainly has a strong personality and most directors would probably have chosen to tone that down a bit in fear that it might get in the way of their storytelling.
Luca: I was neither afraid nor shy of putting the great personality of John Adams in my movie.
Scott: Where did you get the idea for the story?
Luca: Everything started with a fusion of elements. One is a movie I did with Tilda called “Tilda Swinton: The Love Factory.” It was a conversation piece where Tilda addresses her point of view on love. The other one is a book that I love very much and that I’ve read since I was very young called “Buddenbrooks” by Thomas Mann. I also drew from life. I’m a cook myself and I love the idea of representing this great silent dialog that is cooking.
Scott: You coaxed Gabriele Ferzetti, the great Italian actor, out of semi-retirement to play the patriarch of the Recchi dynasty.
Luca: Not only are Gabriele and Marisa Berenson fantastic performers with great careers, but they represent a sort of legacy of a style of filmmaking that I really respect and love. That’s why we approached them. We wanted to have this blueblood pedigree from Luchino Visconti and Stanley Kubrick and Bob Fosse and Sergio Leone in the movie.
Scott: I can’t look at Ferzetti without being reminded of the scene in “Once Upon a Time in the West” where Henry Fonda kicks the crutches out from under him.
Luca: You are fantastically cineliterate. You know all these people?
Scott: Who do you think helped lead me to you? For all I know you could be the next Visconti or Leone.
Luca (Audibly blushing): I’d love that.
Scott: The two of them together bring an enormous sense of cinematic aristocracy to your film. “I Am Love” commences with a changing of the guard of sorts with the grandfather (Ferzetti) passing down the family business to his son and grandson. Talk to me about Tilda Swinton’s character Emma at the beginning of the film.
Luca: She is sort of a part of the environment in the house. She’s independently objectified. I like the idea that she’s a perfect housewife, mother and host. But also she’s perfect as an object that gives beauty to the house. Slowly the audience realizes that the point of view shifts to her so that you can understand how objectifying women has a subjectivity. That’s something I was really drawn to.
Scott: And so much of this is told through the camera. At the beginning of the film we see Emma’s husband helping her on with her jewelry and later we see her lover removing her rings and bracelets.
Luca: They are all objects. I wanted to use the jewelry as a status symbol to show how some people don’t need it.
Scott: It’s always nice to have the director to consult when it comes to clarifying certain matters.
Luca (Laughing): Yes, but I’m a director who likes not having to explain his movies.
Marisa Berenson, Pippo Delbono, Tilda Swinton, Alba Rohrwacher, Mattia Zaccaro, Flavio Parenti and Maria Paiato in “I Am Love.”
Scott: Uh-oh. Looks like I had better scratch some of my upcoming questions. This is the third film you’ve directed starring Tilda Swinton. What is it about the chemistry between the two of you that makes for such fertile collaborations?
Luca: It’s something I cannot really describe. It’s about being friends and knowing at a glance that you immediately understand what the other one wants. It’s also about the need to be doing the things we love instead of doing things out of a sense of duty or as a career move in order to help build a bridge.
Scott: Is it true that she learned how to speak Italian, with a Russian accent no less, or was her dialogue phonetically written out for her?
Luca: She learned the language. She’s great and you can see in the movie how good she is at speaking Italian.
Scott: Emma’s soon-to-be lover beat her son in a race earlier that day and the first time we see Antonio (Edoardo Gabbriellini) he’s standing at the door unannounced bearing a conciliatory cake of sorts for Edo (Flavio Parenti). There is a dinner party going on and Anthony declines an invitation to stay. Why?
Luca: Because he doesn’t belong. He’s an outsider.
Scott: But they did extend an invitation into their inner circle.
Luca: Maybe there is a part of him that can be rude, but I thinks he’s basically very shy and reserved and not one to accept the illusion of the invitation. He’s a very proud person.
Scott: And there is no room in his life for this type of lofty gathering?
Luca: I think so.
Scott: One of the characters is named Angharad. I’ve known only one Angharad in my day and that’s the Maureen O’Hara character in “How Green Was My Valley.”
Luca: There are a lot of references to “How Green was My Valley” and I also knew a person who had that beautiful name. In Gaelic it means beloved and “Beloved” is a movie by Jonathan Demme, so it was three homages in one.
Scott: So that’s why you use a clip from “Philadelphia” in the movie.
Luca: It’s this normal moment where they are watching TV and it sends out a secret message to Emma. Most important is because (Denzel Washington) says the title of my movie in his dialogue.
Scott: Demme is the closest contemporary America cinema gets to Frank Capra.
Luca: It’s like Preston Sturges meeting Frank Capra in the seventies.
Scott: You are one of the only people I have ever spoken to that has anything nice to say about “Beloved.” I think it’s one of Demmes’ most accomplished works.
Luca: It’s a masterpiece! It’s what Freud would call unheimlich, frightening, unfamiliar. It shows the unheimlich in American history. Toni Morrison uses the quote in her book “six Million and more” in reference to the Africans that were killed when being shipped to the U.S. I don’t think African-American history can be surpassed so easily. There is still a great deal of reflection to be made on that. Movies like this always fail (at the box office).
Scott: Even a film like “Beloved” that had Oprah’s personal backing.
Luca: Nobody wants to see that type of story because the subject is too painful.
Scott: They should have sold it as a ghost story. People would have gladly paid their ten bucks to see a ghost story and by the time they realized that it’s about slavery hopefully they would have been so engrossed as to not walk out and demand their money back.
Luca: The flavor of the story is like a ghost of America, a country that was built on two great ghosts. One was slavery and the other the Nazi Holocaust. I don’t want to be harsh on the Americans. America is a great country full of opportunities, but still those ghosts have to be investigated and Demme did exactly that.
Scott: I’ve always believed that the Holocaust is one incident in history that should never be treated in narrative form. It’s far too easy to sentimentalize as Spielberg showed us in “Schindler’s List.” Were it up to me Alain Resnais’ “Night and Fog” would be shown in every classroom throughout the world. But we digress. Let’s get back to “I Am Love.” Emma’s daughter Betta (Alba Rohrwacher) recently came out of the closet and I am assuming that she cuts her hair as an act of liberation. Soon after Emma begins her affair she also cuts her hair.
Tilda Swinton and Alba Rohrwacher in “I Am Love.”
Luca: The haircut is definitely there as a double. When you love somebody you want to see the way this other person feels you. So in that sense I can see it being referred to as liberation. What do you think?
Scott: Well, on the surface there is the cliché concerning gay women wearing their hair closely cropped as a means to express liberation and perhaps rebellion, but I don’t think that’s the direction that you were going in. It impressed me more as a visual bonding device between mother and daughter.
Luca: If anything the long hair is a cliché, a symbol of class that she has to get rid of.
Scott: You use a myriad of cinematic devices to tell your story, but instead of hammering home technique you exquisitely use the grammar of cinema to punctuate your story. There is a cut when Betta is showing Emma the pictures of her lover and she invites her mother to accompany her to Nice. It’s beautifully staged. They way in which Swinton’s reaction is intercut indicate that this is the moment where it suddenly dawns on her that she can be with Antonio.
Luca: Thank you. I know the exact moment to which you refer.
Scott: There is a plot point that goes by quickly that I wanted to ask you about. How did the family exploit Jewish workers?
Luca: I wanted to convey it in the dialog almost in a light-handed manner. You have to know that business is business during that period of time when you could have made more business out being complicit with the regime. But I don’t want to go into that too much.
Scott: Okay. What’s the significance of the book she walks off with in Sanremo?
Luca: I like the idea that there is something unconscious that she does. The book becomes a sort of danger because someone can find out that it’s stolen or that somebody can find it and figure out that she’s having an affair. On the other hand I like the idea that out of that book comes the design of the sort of wedding dress that she wears at the dinner that shows her desire to secretly marry Antonio. You do things in movies that don’t necessarily need to be explicitly understood.
Scott: Then you’re gonna’ hate this question: Why does Emma wait till the last minute to reveal she’s pregnant.
Luca: It all goes back to the business of the family. The family now has a new agenda and Emma uses it like a weapon. She wanted to be part of the family forever. That’s my concept.
Scott: It is imperative that people stay through the end of the film because there is a very important shot that is inserted in the closing credits.
Luca: It’s a little epilogue. Here are the credits, here are the performers…it’s like theater. I like the idea of paying homage to this great ensemble cast and then there is something behind it all. Behind this cast is a living organism.
Scott: But aren’t you afraid that as soon as audiences see credits roll they tend to get up and head for the door?
Luca: In civilized countries like America they don’t leave the theater immediately after the credits begin to roll, do they?
Scott: No comment.
Luca: My experiences so far tell me that I was right because people usually stay.
Scott: You next project is a remake of Dario Argento’s classic seventies horror film “Suspiria.”
Luca: Correct.
Scott: You’re producing the film and David Gordon Green is directing. Why aren’t you assuming the director’s chair?
Luca: Because he’s a master and he’s better than me. Better he does it.
Scott: I’m not against remakes, but I always argue that if you’re going to remake films, remake bad ones. “Suspiria” is a terrific horror film.
Luca (Laughing): We are very ambitious and we like to take risks.
Tags: beloved, bernardo bertolucci, Centaur, Emulsion Compulsion, Gabriele Ferzetti, I Am Love, Interview, John Adams composer, Jonathan Demme, Luca Guadagnino, Luchino Visconti, Marisa Berenson, ray harryhausen, Scott Marks, Steven Spielberg, Suspirisa remake, Tilda Swinton, Trailer
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10 Responses to “EC’s exclusive interview with Luca Guadagnino, writer/director of “I Am Love””
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Wow. Thanks for the great interview, Scott.
I’ve never seen “Beloved” because Oprah was pushing it. Now, I have to see it. And, have to see Luca Guadagnino’s other works as well.
The haircut in the film reminds me of a saying that when a woman has a new lover, she gets a new hairstyle. Forgot where from I heard/read that.
I just turned 40 and haven’t made a single film. I just edit “quality” television. :(
The one thing I remember most about Beloved is Tak Fujimoto’s photography. That may have been his best work. I dislike Oprah so much, that she detracts from anything I might like about the film.
this…was a great read.
i wish more people talked film like this in interviews. bravo!
“In civilized countries like America”
What? We’re civilized?
Didn’t Luca ever see Russ Meyer’s ‘Up!’ or ‘E.T.’?
anyway, I could be wrong, but it looks like this film was shot digitally.
You are wrong. It’s film, William, and all the more sumptuous for it.
What was the comment that the son made to his father about jewish workers and making them think he was one of them.
I can’t find this reference anywhere and want to know what he meant by it.
Thanks.
There is a comment made in passing about two-thirds of the way through the film where they mention the family taking advantage of Jewish workers. If I go see the film again this week I’ll make note of the exact quote.
Thank you Scott. I saw this movie yesterday. Although I am curious about that line-and I did enjoy the movie(I liked it, didn’t love it)-I’m still thinking about it..I doubt I could watch it again…for any reason.
:)
My husband thought that perhaps they were Italian Jews and hid that over the decades to assimilate with the majority. I said..absolutely not.
It’s in the way you hear it, I suppose.
Scott,
Did you find the line from the movie?
Hold the eagerness. I said “if” I go to see the movie again. I have other screenings to attend. If I see it again (or can find a screener) I’ll do your homework for you. :P