Armie Hammer & Timothée Chalamet find love in Call Me By Your Name (2017)

[Aloysius J. Gleek]

http://www.anothermag.com/design-living/10319/a-closer-look-at-the-sets-of-new-film-call-me-by-your-name

http://laterpeaches.tumblr.com/post/167012705693/a-closer-look-at-the-sets-of-new-film-call-me-by

More Interior Images from the the Villa Albergoni by Photography by Giulio Ghirardi:

Rumpled sheets in one of the bedrooms.

http://www.anothermag.com/design-living/10319/a-closer-look-at-the-sets-of-new-film-call-me-by-your-name

Design & Living / In Pictures
A Closer Look at the Sets of New Film
Call Me By Your Name

— November 1, 2017 —

Luca Guadagnino’s newest endeavour is a tribute both to first love and to the Italian countryside.
Photographer Giulio Ghirardi investigates, Text by Tish Wrigley

Luca Guadagnino is doing sterling work for the Italian tourist board. After A Bigger Splash  turned Pantelleria into 2015’s ultimate summer destination, the director’s new film Call Me By Your Name  serves as both bittersweet paean to first love, and vividly coloured tribute to the sumptuous Lombardy countryside where it is set.

Based on the eponymous 2007 novel by André Aciman, Call Me By Your Name  portrays the exquisitely painful summer of love between Elio, a precociously musical teenager, and Oliver, the handsome American visitor who Elio’s archaeologist father has recruited to help with his work.

While the story has remained largely the same, Guadagnino has made some changes to the setting – moving the action back from 1988 to 1983, and the location from the Liguria seaside to a 17th century mansion near Crema in the Lombardy hills. This decision was inspired by Guadagnino’s knowledge of the area, living as he does between Milan and Crema. “I love the place and I knew the house,” he says. “In fact I wanted to buy the house, but I couldn’t afford it. But I knew that I could do something meaningful there, so I made a film instead.”

This made for effortless location scouting – “Three months before the shoot, I drove my team there and showed them the house and that was it”. His team included production designer Samuel Dehors and set designer Violante Visconti di Modrone – “she does not usually work in cinema but I completely love her taste”. Together the three worked to cultivate an atmosphere of languorous sensuality, iridescent with sunshine and sexual promise. “We created an interior that expressed how this family of intellectuals, of cosmopolitan people, lived in this way.”

The results can be seen both on screen and in a portfolio of images shot by Giulio Ghirardi, a photographer and architect who first worked with Guadagnino in 2015, on a shoot for AnOther Magazine. Since then they have become regular collaborators, in architecture and interior design as well as film. For this project, Ghirardi would visit the set on Sundays, taking advantage of the pauses in the film’s schedule to capture the spaces when they were cleared of actors, crew and cameras.

He enjoyed the two dynamics: “It’s unbelievable to watch the filming in the week, when everything is frantic, perfected in the shortest possible times, in which people come and go in swirls of convulsion and congestion, and then look at the same place where everything has stopped.”

Even shorn of characters, his photographs are primed with feeling, demonstrating the power of setting to manifest emotions. Gleaming gold candlesticks and velvet armchairs bask in the sun streaming in through the windows, peaches ripen on heavily laden trees. Eroticism hangs in the air, each shot seems filled with the energy of Elio and Oliver’s unfurling desire.

For Ghirardi, the process was one of creation as much as record: “Photography is therapeutic. It allows me to assimilate, understand and deepen architecture. The house has not undergone dramatic alterations but subtle changes, not just aesthetically, but in the characters’ motivations and feelings. Documenting this inspired me from other points of view, and helped me understand another world.”

As Call Me By Your Name  opens in cinemas and the press tour winds down, the director and photographer are joining forces to work together again, this time as interior designers. “We have a very tight relationship,” says Guadagnino, and Ghirardi agrees. “Luca is a very international but a very Italian person. His vision is decisive, his knowledge is encyclopedic and his curiosity is everywhere. We are in tune in our appreciation of the world.”




Also see:

And see:

[Aloysius J. Gleek]

http://blog.afi.com/afi-fest-2017-timothee-chalamet-on-call-me-by-your-name/


AMERICAN FILM INSTITUTE
AFI FEST 2017: Timothée Chalamet on
Call Me by Your Name
November 9, 2017





Rising star Timothée Chalamet spends a sun-dappled summer in Italy falling in love with Armie Hammer in director Luca Guadagnino’s exquisite CALL ME BY YOUR NAME. Adapted from the celebrated novel by André Aciman, the passionate romance — built on stolen glances, coded exchanges and erotic tension — is also a coming-of-age story, with its young protagonist Elio (Chalamet) in the throes of first love and of being 17. Chalamet brings remarkable maturity to the role, imbuing Elio with curiosity, intellect, and a depth and certainty of feeling that belie his years.

Ahead of the film’s Centerpiece Gala screening at AFI FEST on Friday, November 10, AFI spoke with Chalamet about CALL ME BY YOUR NAME.



American Film Institute: Years before there was even a script for CALL ME BY YOUR NAME, you met with director Luca Guadagnino. What was that conversation like?

Timothée Chalamet: It was more a conversation where we got to know each other as people and saw each other’s personalities, and how they meshed naturally outside of what is always a more rigid and pressure-oriented environment of a film set. We clicked, and stayed closely in touch between those four years between that first meeting and when the film went into production. We finally got to shoot two summers ago.


AFI: What was your reaction to the book?

TC: I was very moved by it, and I thought it was one of the really rare and authentic windows into what can be the obsessive-compulsive mind of a maturing human trying to figure themselves out and figure life out. It felt like a window into a young person’s psyche the way Stephen Chbosky’s [novel] “The Perks of Being a Wallflower” feels like that, too.


AFI: What was scary about playing the role of Elio, and what was exhilarating?

TC: The biggest thing was to do justice to this love story that holds such a place in so many people’s hearts, André Aciman’s novel. The other greatest worry would be what Mr. Aciman himself would think about it.


AFI: What did Aciman think of the film?

TC: He has spoken very positively about the film and, I don’t want to put words in his mouth, but it’s all things that have been said publicly. To the degree that film adaptations can be accurate and of course, especially in a first-person narrative as dense and complicated as this book, where two seconds of real-life action can play out in 10 pages, he really enjoyed it.


AFI: Luca Guadagnino has talked about doing sequels. Does that interest you, doing a kind of BEFORE SUNRISE-esque trilogy where we meet the lovers periodically throughout the years?

TC: I would do anything to work with Luca again. I’d be a boom operator on one of his films.


AFI: What was the rehearsal process, some of which took place in Guadagnino’s living room?

TC: There was a little bit of a rehearsal process. It was more of a tonal acclimation process to the vibe and tone of that town, and what it means to spend a summer in Italy. To get out there in advance, about a month and a half early, to learn the piano to the level that André Aciman describes in the book, and to learn the Italian because Elio’s Italian in the novel.


AFI: The audience is meant to follow the progression of your attraction to one another, and if you found that in rehearsal, the suspense would be lost.

TC: Luca has this belief that you want to be delicate with [the material]; you’re almost terrified of getting it in advance in rehearsal. We were more hanging out as human beings and getting to know each other as people.


AFI: What do you think makes this such a universal love story?

TC: Perhaps it’s the lack of an antagonist, or a villain, or of a familiar pattern. In the lack of an antagonizer in this love story, whether that would be disease or a malicious gang or something, the lack of that serves the boundless ode to love that is described in the novel.


AFI: One of the film’s centerpieces involves Elio and Oliver maneuvering around a statue, almost like a nervous dance, at once communicating and not communicating their feelings. Talk about blocking this scene.

TC: We got to set, and there was this great monument in the middle of the square, and Luca gave us the direction to play the scene going around the monument, and then we blocked it out and there wasn’t enough track there that day to do the whole take in one shot, going up and down the side of the street. Luca went to the line producer and said we need more track, and Luca said we have to get this track and we’ll worry about the money later. We had about an hour to do it; we had two or three takes. Luca was very specific as related to that scene about this confession of love — he didn’t want to play in the close-up and see actors’ emotion. It only served some sort of human truth that a confession of love is often the moment we choose to be the most coy.


AFI: What does the title — CALL ME BY YOUR NAME — and the act it describes in the film mean to you?

TC: To love someone is to become them, and that love is an act of empathy, and that to take on your [lover’s] name in an expression of love is to totally reveal yourself as a human being and to offer yourself as a compassionate lover and friend.

[Aloysius J. Gleek]

New Call Me By Your Name promotional stills from Sony Pictures Classics
NOV 10, 2017

https://chalametdaily.tumblr.com/post/167340102004/new-call-me-by-your-name-promotional-stills-from
http://monetsberm.tumblr.com/post/167342492176/chalametdaily-new-call-me-by-your-name
http://monetsberm.tumblr.com/

[Aloysius J. Gleek]

The remnants of a meal in the kitchen.

Mafalda, the Perlmans' cook and housekeeper, in the kitchen.

http://m.imdb.com/title/tt5726616/mediaviewer/rm3976289024

Mafalda, Marzia and Elio in the kitchen.
Vanda Capriolo, Esther Garrel and Timothée Chalamet

[Aloysius J. Gleek]

Armie Hammer’s performance as Oliver is so indelible that, at first, it’s difficult to imagine him inhabiting neurotic, love-struck Elio for the audiobook. However, the more you listen as Hammer wistfully describes his time on Call Me by Your Name — a transformative experience he will spend the rest of his life attempting to recapture — the more you realize it’s exactly how one might reminisce about a lover long gone. Hammer may play Oliver onscreen, but at heart, he is a secret Elio. “That’s exactly what it feels like!” he admitted. “And I’m still in love.”

http://www.vulture.com/2017/11/armie-hammer-call-me-by-your-name.html



A Complicated Affair
Armie Hammer was poised to be a major matinee idol.
But he wasn’t prepared for what happened to him on the set of
Call Me by Your Name.

By Kyle Buchanan
November 12, 2017 9:00 pm


Photograph by Amanda Demme

Armie Hammer is six-foot-five, a general advantage in life but one that doesn’t serve him well on the dance floor. “When I dance,” he told me recently over lunch in West Hollywood, “I think, You’re really shit at this, and everyone around you knows it because you’re the tallest guy on the dance floor and you stick out like a sore thumb.”

You can imagine Hammer’s embarrassment, then, when he had to shoot a dance scene for his new movie, the 1980s-set gay romance Call Me by Your Name. It’s a pivotal moment in the film that comes not long after his character, grad student Oliver, has arrived in a small Italian village to assist the professor father of our protagonist, 17-year-old Elio (Timothée Chalamet). The secret crush on this interloper that Elio nurses becomes full blown the night he watches Oliver boogie down to “Love My Way,” by the Psychedelic Furs: Oliver’s ecstatic, unabashed, and utterly indifferent to the world around him. “And that’s so not me, in any situation,” said Hammer. “I was like, ‘This is hell. Can we switch this for more nude scenes, please?’ ”

It wasn’t easy, but Hammer finally shed his inhibitions. His moves are just the slightest bit dorky, yet his character’s confidence is irresistible. Just don’t expect Hammer to echo Oliver’s carefree attitude: Ever since a clip of the scene went viral in October, the actor has gone dark on social media. “Anytime I would open up my Twitter, it was just a ton of that,” Hammer said with a laugh, referring to the clip, “and I was like, ‘Nope, I can’t have my nose rubbed in this anymore. I’m out!’ ”

In person, the 31-year-old Hammer is almost implausibly self-effacing. When I told him that I liked his 2015 caper movie The Man From U.N.C.L.E.  and how it was too bad it didn’t do better at the box office, Hammer seized the opportunity to quip at his own expense: “That might be the Armie Hammer effect.” It’s true that since Hammer had his breakthrough dual role as the Winklevoss twins in David Fincher’s The Social Network, his follow-up projects — he played the charming prince in Mirror Mirror and the title role in The Lone Ranger — haven’t quite panned out. The irony is that The Social Network  was supposed to launch him toward bigger movies, but none of his would-be franchise-starters managed to outgross that film domestically, and they left Hammer increasingly dissatisfied. “All of a sudden, I realized I was being shoehorned into something that was different than what I expected or wanted out of this business,” he said. “When you’re sitting in an acting class when you’re young, they tell you about the ideal experience on a project, where you work on a movie that challenges you and draws something out of you. But you don’t get that on big movies.”

Photograph by Amanda Demme

So Hammer retrenched, working mainly in independent films like Nocturnal Animals  and Birth of a Nation. Then director Luca Guadagnino sent Hammer the script for Call Me by Your Name. The offer was to play Oliver, whom the other characters call “la muvi star,” a term that is meant both as praise and as a pejorative. In an attempt to dispel his crush, Elio initially dismisses Oliver as a shallow American hunk: He’s afraid to look closer, and isn’t it easier not to? Guadagnino, though, was determined to go deeper with Hammer than any of his directors had. “I think Armie’s a very complex person,” said the Italian director, who also made I Am Love and A Bigger Splash. “It’s not just that he’s beautiful-looking. It’s that, plus his inner turmoil, that is fascinating to me.”

“Inner turmoil” is not the primary thing people think of when presented with Armie Hammer, who spent his formative years living in the laid-back Cayman Islands and is the great-grandson of a famous oil tycoon. But the self-effacement I had been initially skeptical of is something that comes to Hammer naturally: He is used to being looked at but not really seen, which makes him nervous about revealing an unvarnished side. “There are a lot of things about Oliver that resonated with me, and primarily it was that projection of ease and casualness and comfort that you might not actually be feeling all the time,” said Hammer. “My whole life, I’m bluffing my way through it all. And Luca was just like, ‘Nope, that doesn’t work around here’ — which was terrifying.”

Hammer is married to TV host Elizabeth Chambers and has two young children, but when production on Call Me by Your Name  began in the summer of last year, he left his family behind to move to the Lombardy town of Crema in order to immerse himself in the film’s world. He and Chalamet were two of the few English-speakers for miles and grew to depend on each other as a result, but his bond was even more intense with Guadagnino, who continually challenged Hammer to drop his defenses in a way he never had onscreen.

“I’ve never had such an emotional journey with a director,” said Hammer. “I’ve never even considered directors to be emotional people! I don’t even know if I’ve worked with a director who even cared if I was mad at them before. It was more like, ‘Shut up and stand on your mark and do your job.’ ”

As Call Me by Your Name  goes on, Oliver is willing to reveal more parts of himself to Elio, who becomes his lover. But even before that moment, as with the dance scene, Guadagnino and Hammer searched for opportunities to dig deeper. The André Aciman book that Call Me by Your Name  is based on tells the story from the point of view of Elio, who is enchanted with Oliver’s seemingly effortless confidence. Hammer, though, thought much of his character’s personality was performative, a well-practiced routine of smoke and mirrors. Even Oliver’s insouciant habit of ducking out of every scene with a breezy “Later!” had emotional underpinnings: “It’s about getting spooked by this human you’re infatuated with,” explained Hammer.

Eventually, Hammer himself became spooked, having plunged into Guadagnino’s process so deeply. “The feeling of operating from that place of passion is really contagious and soul-satiating,” he said. “It’s the safest place I’ve ever been in my life — still to this day — when it comes to feeling complete empathy, complete understanding, and complete love, no matter what. But then … he knows if you’re lying. He knows if you’re not being honest, whether in real life or in the performance. And he will not back off.”

As the production neared its end, Hammer admits, he became peevish and started to withdraw. “For reasons that could be personal to Armie, I had the feeling that he was pulling away,” said Guadagnino. “The movie wasn’t finished, and I had to bring him back.” I asked Hammer what had made him behave like that. “Everybody was sort of lashing out because this thing was ending and nobody wanted it to,” he said. He hesitated, wary of what to reveal. “Honestly,” Hammer said, “I think I had fallen in love with Luca.”

Photograph by Amanda Demme

“For me to make a movie, it’s really creating a family,” said Guadagnino. “Having a very profound familial bond with the people I’m doing the movies with, where you literally and constantly fall in love with all of them. Sometimes, this emotional flow can be very intense. Very! As it was with Armie. And then it can be very complicated.”

Hammer had flourished as an actor and as a person under Guadagnino’s guidance and he couldn’t bear to let the project go. Eventually, he would have to, and so would Guadagnino, who was slated to begin his next film, a remake of the horror film Suspiria. Hammer said he became jealous once he felt Guadagnino mentally move on to that film. “I was like, ‘You fucking philanderer! You duplicitous bastard!’ And that made me pull away, and then he did, and it turned into this whole thing.”

“That was not my explanation for it,” said Guadagnino. “I never, never put Suspiria  in front of Call Me by Your Name ” Still, he understood Hammer’s passion and reciprocated it. “It’s beautiful when you fall in love with someone and you are restrained in your exploration of that feeling and you sublimate it in making a movie like that,” said Guadagnino, who eventually called Hammer to his apartment to hash out his feelings.

“He basically nailed me, nailed me, nailed me,” said Hammer. “And I was pretending: ‘No, man, that’s not it at all.’ Like, I couldn’t even be honest about that.”

Hammer recommitted himself to the role, and he remembers the mixed feelings he had on his final day of filming. “It was such a powerful experience that in a way, I was thinking, I’m relieved that it’s gonna get mellower,” said Hammer. “But also, I thought, I could do this forever.”

Though he has recently been shooting the Ruth Bader Ginsburg biopic On the Basis of Sex  in Montreal, Call Me by Your Name  has not been far from Hammer’s mind. For one thing, it changed how he approached his career. “Now they’ll be hard-pressed to make me do something I don’t feel passionate about,” Hammer said. “To be perfectly honest, for as much as people really seem to enjoy the movie, it pales so much in comparison to the actual process of making it. Other people didn’t get that experience. I did. Watching it feels like reading CliffsNotes of an amazing book. I was there every day, all day, living this thing, so now when I watch it for two hours, it’s just too quick. I wish I could go back to that place.”

He has, in some ways. He flew back to Italy recently “just to be in Luca’s apartment and have conversations again.” And he also taped the Call Me by Your Name  audiobook, an experience that “felt like I got to go back to Crema,” Hammer said. “We read it for 20-something hours, but it was just the best 20-something hours of the last couple months, apart from spending time with my family and kids.”

Hammer’s performance as Oliver is so indelible that, at first, it’s difficult to imagine him inhabiting neurotic, love-struck Elio for the audiobook. However, the more you listen as Hammer wistfully describes his time on Call Me by Your Name — a transformative experience he will spend the rest of his life attempting to recapture — the more you realize it’s exactly how one might reminisce about a lover long gone. Hammer may play Oliver onscreen, but at heart, he is a secret Elio. “That’s exactly what it feels like!” he admitted. “And I’m still in love.”

[Aloysius J. Gleek]

https://www.theyoungfolks.com/film/112710/live-from-the-afi-film-festivalcall-me-by-your-name-red-carpet/



AMERICAN FILM INSTITUTE
AFI FEST 2017 RED CARPET
(EXCERPT)
Luca Guadanigno on the possible
Call Me by Your Name
SEQUEL!
By KRISTEN LOPEZ, NOVEMBER 14, 2017



LUCA: "I really hope I don’t disappoint you--"

https://www.theyoungfolks.com/film/112710/live-from-the-afi-film-festivalcall-me-by-your-name-red-carpet/
https://laterpeaches.tumblr.com/post/167490647668/bowie28-luca-at-afi-fest-2017
http://bowie28.tumblr.com/post/167489240585

[Aloysius J. Gleek]

[youtube=999,600]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kRfoIKjwHvQ[/youtube]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kRfoIKjwHvQ

This clip has been
floating out there for weeks--
finally now on Youtube!

CALL ME BY YOUR NAME  (2017)
Clip: "Play that again--please!"

Armie Hammer & Timothée Chalamet

Movieclips Film Festivals & Indie Films
Published on Nov 14, 2017

[Front-Ranger]

Drinking this all in, in prep for seeing the movie, only a week or so away, now!

[Aloysius J. Gleek]

Drinking this all in, in prep for seeing the movie, only a week or so away, now!

Yes, a week from tomorrow (day after Thanksgiving!) and thought it would never come. I hope you like it, Lee!   

[Aloysius J. Gleek]

http://deadline.com/2017/11/call-me-by-your-name-armie-hammer-timothee-chalamet-oscars-interview-1202207499/

Luca Guadagnino And Cast On
Call Me By Your Name
And The Alchemy Of Conjuring
The Butterflies Of First Desire
by Joe Utichi November 15, 2017 8:27am


 

Luca Guadagnino doesn’t fall in love easily. “It was not about falling in love,” he says of the ultimate decision he made to direct his new film, Call Me by Your Name. “I fell in love once in my life, and I have been with the same person since. So I give a great level of importance to the concept of falling in love.”

Instead, perhaps, it was resignation that made him take the helm. Guadagnino had been attached to the adaptation of André Aciman’s delirious summer romance for nearly a decade—first as a consultant, then an executive producer, then a writer—when he finally took the plunge into directing it. Producers Peter Spears and Howard Rosenman had optioned the book before it was published in 2007, and were working with another director to mount the project. They had reached out to Guadagnino because the book is set in Italy and he knew the filmmaking landscape of his home country.

Over the years, he took his producers on scouts all over Italy. “The book is about this specific place called Bordighera,” Guadagnino explains. “We went all through Liguria. We showed them the Bordighera village and a possible house that could meet the storyline.” Later on, he says, “we imagined a different setting; Sicily.”

When the original director dropped out, they went to another and another, and the dance of seduction lasted varying lengths of time with each, until all of those suitors fell away. It was Spears who suggested perhaps his friend James Ivory should direct, with a script that Ivory and Guadagnino could work on together.

Guadagnino couldn’t deny the pleasure of elevating his level of involvement with each new turn in the road, and working with Ivory on the script was a joy. “He showed up at my place in Crema, and we started working together. It took us a year of back-and-forth between Crema and New York, and we started from scratch. It was a very interesting script, because it was filled with the typical imagery of Ivory.”

But still, there was no luck for the production. Guadagnino put together a budget, but financiers wouldn’t bite with a director nearing his 90th birthday. Ivory finally suggested Guadagnino join him as a co-director. “But nobody believed in this concept,” Guadagnino sighs. “It was important to me to make this happen for James. I would have loved to see his version of the film. We worked a lot. But nobody believed two filmmakers could make a movie together—unless they were brothers, or a pair to begin with.”

Guadagnino could be fast and nimble in a way Ivory wasn’t practiced in. He was used to tight shoots and compressed schedules, and that would be attractive to financiers. It soon became undeniable: if this movie was going to go ahead, Luca Guadagnino would have to step up. “I believed in this project and I didn’t want to see it go,” he says. “That was the reason I did it. Everybody got paid nothing. We did it because we wanted to do it.”

So what was it about this story that inspired such fevered devotion, and yet such hesitation to take the reins? Call Me by Your Name  is a love story, in its most unadulterated form. Elio is the 17-year-old boy whose narration guides us in Aciman’s novel, as he meets Oliver, a 24-year-old graduate student come to stay for the summer at Elio’s father’s Italian villa.

Certainly, there is a cross-generational controversy ready to ruffle some feathers, but that feels almost incidental. As Elio and Oliver’s attraction deepens, moralistic arguments seem weightless. And, by his own admission, Guadagnino felt “comfortable” with this story. “Because maybe I knew the people that I was talking about,” he says. “I knew the emotional journey they were going through. Butterflies in the stomach is the most beautiful feeling you can feel, no?”

But he is not alone in finding this kind of connection with the story. The book’s fans are diehard, and you don’t have to be gay, or Jewish, or to have summered in Italy, to remember the stomach-churning joys of first desire. For those who fall for it, Call Me by Your Name  makes them fall hard. So much so that when their friends share those feelings, their reactions make it feel like the novel is somehow being adulterous. Guadagnino’s film had to hit that same balance of the personal and the universal.

He made it his own when he became its director. “For me to believe in something means to be completely invested in it,” he says. “To be absolutely honest in my approach, for better and for worse.” It’s a necessary step for any project, but especially so when the subject is this achingly emotional.

He started where he usually does; he leaned into his cinephilia. The films that sprang to mind: Jean Renoir’s A Day in the Country, Bertolucci’s La Luna, Rohmer’s 80s films like The Green Ray  and Pauline à la Plage  (Call Me  is set in 1982). Also Pialat’s À Nos Amours, and Téchiné’s Wild Reeds. “There was something about the countryside in all these films,” he enthuses. “I try to make sure that I have the pores of my imagination very open to soak in reality, but on the other hand, I rely very much on the imagery of my cinephile upbringing, so it’s a battle between those two—or it’s making love between those two elements.”

Guadagnino is heavily versed in movies—he rivals Tarantino for the ease with which he can relate subjects to cinema. And he’s no snob, either. When he says he sought Armie Hammer for the part of Oliver, he waxes lyrical about how good he is in Gore Verbinski’s The Lone Ranger, in spite of its challenging critical reception. “It’s a beautiful movie,” he insists, and he means it. Hammer had the movie star quality that he knew the Oliver of Elio’s wistful glance needed to encapsulate. “But also, there is a sensitivity to him that is so deep.”

For Hammer, “there was no way I couldn’t do this movie,” the actor says. “I read the script, and then immediately went and read the book, and came to the conclusion that these were two of the most beautiful and amazing pieces of source material I’d ever seen for something that could hopefully become a movie.”

There were fewer references for Guadagnino to tap when it came to casting Timothée Chalamet as Elio. At 21, Chalamet had already made a mark with a run on Homeland  and in Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar. But Guadagnino found him through Peter Spears’ husband, agent Brian Swardstrom, who had just signed the young actor. “We met and it was instant recognition,” Guadagnino recalls. “The guy I was talking with had this brooding, unbiased determination and ambition to be a great actor, and yet he had this kind of soft, ingénue naiveté of a young boy. Those two things together were incredible.”

The film rests on Chalamet’s shoulders. We rarely break his perspective, and yet Guadagnino’s version of the story omits the internal monologue of the book. Everything relies on Chalamet selling the this-way-and-that confusion of first love in glances and private moments. It was the biggest change the director made. “I personally don’t like the first person account of a story in a movie,” Guadagnino says, keen to stress that it suits the novelistic form better. “Sometimes I like the omniscient narrator, as in Barry Lyndon  or The Age of Innocence. I tried to think about what would happen if we had an omniscient narrator, and I discarded that, too.”

Instead, he turned to indie musician Sufjan Stevens to ask for a song that could channel Elio’s thoughts for the audience. Stevens surprised him by contributing two, “Mystery of Love” and “Visions of Gideon”, which chart the extremes of Elio’s experiences with Oliver. And he remixed a third of his own, “Futile Devices”, for the film, with lyrics that couldn’t have been more apt if they’d also been written for Call Me by Your Name. “And I would say I love you/but saying it out loud is hard/so I won’t say it at all,” he sings. “But you are the life I needed all along.”

“We envelop the movie in the voice of Sufjan Stevens,” Guadagnino says. “I asked him to create songs that were, in a way, some sort of narrative for the film.” Guadagino doesn’t fall in love easy, but “it’s not hard to imagine being in love with Sufjan, because he’s such a pure artist with such an incredible imagination, and an emotional world that is so deep.”

A film script is not a play, the director insists. There is no need to burden it with unnecessary dialogue. Film, after all, has the close-up, and the camera’s eye can draw the perspective of its audience. If theater shouts to the gods, film whispers to the front row. So there’s a quiet to Call Me by Your Name; it says just what it needs to and no more. “I want to empower the moment of uncertainty,” he says. “There’s a Tim Burton movie, Batman Returns, which, for being a movie about comic book hero, has that same kind of attitude; it makes that movie a masterpiece. And you have the greatest of all, Mr. Spielberg, who from his height of communicating with every person in the world still devotes himself to a very, very precise behavioral presentation of people.”

As Chalamet navigated bringing the audience into Elio’s inner world—aided by the sumptuous cinematography of Sayombhu Mukdeeprom, who paints the frame like a gilded memory of times past—the book became his bible. “It was a tremendous gift,” Chalamet explains. “There’s this certain freedom you want to give yourself when you act, and the ability to jump off a cliff, but the greatest responsibility in making this movie felt primarily to the people that had been fans of the book. And André Aciman even more so, because this was his child. But I found myself going to the book in scenes that were harder to play, and moments that didn’t make as much sense to me.”

Hammer had less help from Aciman’s text than his co-star. “The perspective of the book is almost entirely Elio’s interlocution,” he says. “His feelings towards Oliver are very subjective and capricious. It’s the confusion of his infatuation. So for me, going off the book, I had to filter everything through that understanding.”

“It was almost like he was reading the enemy’s manifesto,” Chalamet jokes. Elio, after all, is us. He’s why we connect Call Me by Your Name  to our own comings-of-age. And we empathize all too easily with the crazy degrees to which his emotional perspective shunts him. We’ve all known the pleasure and the pain of an Oliver.

“There is a universally human quality to Elio,” Chalamet says. “There’s a tension on the surface of his existence, and he’s in a transitionary period in his life, becoming a man and dealing with feelings of sexual impulse for the first time. It felt rare to read a story about a young person who’s this complex. It’s no surface representation of what young people are. And as an actor, you seize that kind of opportunity.”

There’s also a life to Elio’s relationship with Oliver in the film that relies on these two leads bringing every tool in their arsenal. It depended on their ability to find one another as friends, not just colleagues, before cameras rolled. Guadagnino got them out to the location weeks before shooting. He had finally settled on making the film in Crema, his adopted hometown, in a house he had once fallen for and wanted to buy. “But I couldn’t afford it. I sublimated by putting it into the movie. Now I have that house forever in me.”

When the actors arrived they found “paradise”, Hammer says. “I was sucked into this idyllic, perfect world there. It seems as close to perfect as anywhere I’ve been. It’s just that much more relaxed and laid back. Waking up in the morning and squeezing apricot juice to drink. It was about slowing down and enjoying all of those little things.”

Uniting the two actors in advance was essential to making them feel comfortable. “It was a genuine proximity our souls felt to one another in those early weeks,” Chalamet recalls. “The friendship sprouted very easily, very naturally, very organically. It was really the random luck of the universe.”

Of course actors say this kind of thing to journalists all the time. And they’re actors—it’s their job to make it sound convincing. But as they reunite for the film’s promotional trail, there isn’t much effort or artifice between them. “Actually I was video Skyping with Timmy last night,” Hammer says. “It feels like I got a new best friend and brother out of the process. There was a huge amount of trust we put in one another to do this. It required a level of vulnerability in both of us that would only have been possible if we felt safe around each other, and we did.”

“Any actor who plays a role should give him or herself the benefit of a window of time before shooting in which they can soak into the character,” Guadagnino says. “For these specific characters, and this story, one part was the environment, and they had to become part of that environment.”

Guadagnino is no dictator. He describes filmmaking as a “symbiotic work”. “It’s all about the point of view. How do you coordinate the efforts of all the people to create this point of view? You can listen to a great symphony of Mahler and have a bad experience, because the conductor and the orchestra are not aligned to make that symphony resonate in the ears of the listener. Or, you can be lifted to the heavens.”

Filmmakers, he insists, are “charlatans. We’re imposters. So we all have to put on the best dress and make people pretend we’re not imposters. It’s alchemy. We make smoke and mirrors out of elements of identification for an audience to a story and characters.” He treats every movie as his first. “And what I learn about the experience as I grow up is not to panic if something is half good if not fully good. Cinema has the power to use only the very best possible of takes. Sometimes you find a glance and you know that’ll be the take and you won’t need the rest.”

His laidback approach worked on his cast, who talk of their time in Crema like they, too, had a whirlwind summer romance. “The process of shooting this film felt as languorous and relaxed and laissez-faire as the movie itself,” Hammer says. “Effort does not necessarily equal talent, right? I’ve been on movies where it feels like everyone is working really hard, but it doesn’t necessarily make anything better.”

“On American sets you work 12-, 14-, 16-hour days sometimes,” says Chalamet. “All that volume over a short course of time can actually be less conducive to telling a story accurately. Luca’s films are as sensual as they are intellectually stimulating. And he has a confidence as a director that meant I never felt any anxiety or pressure that we were running out of time.”

“This is just a movie that deals with pure, almost archetypal human emotions,” continues Hammer. “There are no special effects and no big set pieces. To get to experience that, and live in that, and breathe that for two months, was one of the greatest gifts I’ve been given in my entire life.”

The film made its debut at the Sundance Film Festival in January. Guadagnino, meanwhile, has been finishing Suspiria, his reimagining of Dario Argento’s legendary horror. He liked the idea of shooting two movies in close proximity, because he’d lingered for six years between his previous two works, I Am Love  and A Bigger Splash. Still, he admits, “The downside of these kinds of ambitions for film is that you don’t have time for yourself.”

Call Me by Your Name  belongs to audiences now. “It’s like having a child, and then the child grows up,” Guadangino says. “This movie is a child out in the world now.”

© Vittorio Zunino Celotto

These photos were taken by Vittorio Zunino Celotto at the the Mayor Of London Gala & UK Premiere of 'Call Me By Your Name' during the 61st BFI London Film Festival on October 9, 2017 in London, England, and have been added to the text above on November 16 2017.