Denis Villeneuve and Luca Guadagnino Compare Notes on Timothée Chalamet and Zendaya, Intimacy on Set and Why They’re ‘Grumpy’ About Modern Cinema
variety.comDenis Villeneuve and Luca Guadagnino have been linked for years by their shared taste in actors. After Villeneuve, 57, saw Timothée Chalamet in Guadagnino’s 2017 romance “Call Me by Your Name,” he cast him as Paul Atreides, the callow princeling turned desert messiah, in his adaptation of Frank Herbert’s sci-fi novel “Dune.” And before Zendaya shot “Dune Part Two” she appeared in the 53-year-old Guadagnino’s erotically charged tennis drama “Challengers” as one side of a spiky love triangle with Josh O’Connor and Mike Faist.
That film opened last spring, followed this fall by Guadagnino’s adaptation of William S. Burroughs’ feverish period romance “Queer” with Daniel Craig and Drew Starkey — his most complex and ambitious film to date, much as “Dune: Part Two” has been for Villeneuve.
The directors, who know each other’s work intimately but have never really met, sit down in Los Angeles to discuss their appreciation for many of the same performers, as well as their different approaches to moviemaking. Luca Guadagnino: We don’t know each other, but I hope we will become friends in time. Denis Villeneuve: You’re sweet.
I would love to. Guadagnino: I feel there is something parallel between the two of us. We both are filmmakers who are working in English, but we’re foreign in the language.
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