The director at the helm of Tilda Swinton's foray into Italian cinema talks to Peter Calder.
Italian writer-director Luca Guadagnino is not really Italian at all. He was born in Sicily to a Sicilian father and Algerian mother and spent much of his childhood in Ethiopia. So in a sense he brings an outsider's eye to I Am Love, his intense and grandly operatic movie about the world of the Milan-based Recchi textile dynasty being upended by deeply illicit passion.
The film stars British actress Tilda Swinton as Emma, a Russian emigre who has married into the family but falls for a humble cook who is a friend of her stepson.
Essential to the film is the partnership between director and actress which began when he famously accosted her at a lecture to demand why she had not responded to a script he had sent her. She then took part in a project called The Love Factory in which she was filmed, unedited in extreme close-up, as she talked about her experience of love.
"She was saying that love for her is something subversive and uncompromising," recalls Guadagnino, "and, in contrast to the normal way that people see love, Tilda sees loneliness as the main thread in the fabric of love."
To say that the short film contained the DNA of the long one is too simplistic for the man who made them. "The process of creating something is so intuitive. It comes from places I don't know and goes in directions I can't predict. It's the same for I Am Love."
The overarching story is part of the cultural fabric of every European country - the challenge posed to the social order of the haute bourgeoisie by a woman who steps outside her allotted role. But Guadagnino resists the notion that there is an allegorical intention in which the Recchis stand in for Italy as a whole.
"I would love to talk to you about making the film, how we shot it, who made love to whom and so on," he says, "but I am resistant to talking about my reading of my work because it's very slippery and you can kill the beauty of the experience."
He is, however, happy to discuss the look of the film, whose soft focus recalls the sfumato technique of Italian Renaissance painting. He says that he and director of photography, Yorick Le Saux, approached the formal aspects of the film by looking at paintings - he mentions Russian avant-gardists Ivan Puni and Kazimir Malevich, and Giovanni Boldini, the Italian chronicler of the upper class in early 20th century Europe.
"We tried to keep a physicality to the look of the movie," he says, "to create something that was painterly in the sense that painting shapes form out of light. That is why we avoided digital effects in shooting and also in post-production.
"A lot of film-making from about 1980 on lacks [a] sense of space. It is reduced to being precisely calibrated so the audience doesn't get bored.
"Everything becomes extremely boring because it is predictable."
Guadagnino is gratified that the film, which opened our Film Festival in July, has succeeded abroad - and is unsurprised that it was a "complete disaster" in Italy.
"Italians have morphed from sophisticated consumers of Rossellini and Bertolucci - Last Tango in Paris was one of the greatest successes in the history of Italian cinema. But the texture of imagery has been destroyed, mainly by Silvio Berlusconi [the Italian Prime Minister, whose reign as a TV mogul has dragged the country's film culture downmarket]."
Did it make him sad that the film didn't work in Italy? "I was a bit sad," he says, "But I am Algerian, so I don't care."
LOWDOWN
Who: Luca Guadagnino, director of I Am Love
When and where: Advance screenings at cinemas this weekend, opens Thursday
- TimeOut
