Not Wanting to See Cannibalism Portrayed Onscreen Is ‘Narrow-Minded,’ Says ‘Bones and All’ Director

Luca Guadagnino is disarming—sometimes overtly so. We met in October, downstairs at Manhattan’s Whitby Hotel, when he was in town for the New York Film Festival, in which his cannibal road movie Bones and All was featured. After saying hello, he beckoned me to sit down next to him on the couch instead of across from him, where a chair sat for a more standard interviewer-interviewee formation. We were close enough that, without much effort, either of us could have taken a bite out of the other.

We met to discuss Bones, a movie that I loved and that remains my favorite film of the year. Based on Camille DeAngelis’s YA novel of the same name, Bones follows Maren (Taylor Russell) on her journey to understand herself—specifically, her hunger for human flesh. She eventually meets her tribe of others who share her palate, including a twinky drifter named Lee (Timothée Chalamet), who shares with her the half-eaten body of a rude oaf he encountered in a supermarket. With very little by way of money or earthly possessions between them, they commence a road trip to find her long-lost mother, eating people along the way for sustenance. They are effectively serial killers—if they weren’t, they’d starve.

Bones and All is bleak and as uncomfortable as an apartment without heat on a winter’s day. Instead of a horror movie, though, the Italian director sees it as a romance. He told me that he strived to make a universal story out of this very specific predicament; rendering the universal, in fact, is what he’s always striving to do. Guadagnino, who previously dated fellow director Ferdinando Cito Filomarino, has in the past said that he didn’t include explicit gay sex in Call Me By Your Name for the specific purpose of keeping that movie universal. Because Bones and All includes potentially alienating scenes of human-flesh consumption, I wondered how (and even if) he squared that explicitness with CMBYN’s tameness. Guadagnino spoke on this issue with his reliable passion and insight. That and more is in the interview below, which has been edited for length and clarity.

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JEZEBEL: What attracted you to this particular movie?

LUCA GUADAGNINO: I think the quality of the writing of Dave Kajganich. His script was so beautiful and so precise and so evocative, and I could relate very strongly to the anguish and the torments of these characters. I found this idea of the inescapable nature of self and, at the same time, the aim for being recognized by the other, that really got me very into it. This kind of tragic youth was very interesting to me.

So much of the cannibal identity portrayed here reminds me of queerness, especially the nature of the culture. There’s a question as to the hereditary nature of the condition. It creates lone wolves who have to find each other, and culture comes from there. Did that analogy strike you at all? Did you think of this as a queer movie?

I think every great movie—and I’m not saying that this movie is a great movie, but I’m saying that we are all striving to make something meaningful—is in some way a queer movie. All of them. Cinema cannot go hand-in-hand with any kind of sense of norm. The transformative quality of movies comes with the idea that movies are not at the center of things, but they are in a way off frame. So in this regard, I think I always am necessarily looking for what the word “queer” means, in the idea of an individual sense of difference.

What’s the point of saying anything if it’s not new?

Or if it’s not going to be somehow transformative? That means that you can kind of find in what you see a way to change the paradigm upon which you have seen the things that you are shown. Good movies should change your mind, shouldn’t coddle you into your way of thinking, or should unearth a way of seeing things that you didn’t know you had in yourself.

Every great movie is in some way a queer movie.

Did you have any kind of experience with or feelings about past movies about cannibalism?

No. My real frame of comparison for this movie wasn’t the cannibalism. It was more the idea of the road movie, to be honest. They Live By Night by Nick Ray being one.

I thought The Living End maybe.

Oh, I didn’t think about The Living End. Now that you’ve mentioned The Living End, probably, as an unconscious reference. With cannibalism…of course, The Silence of the Lambs is a movie that I worship. As people say sometimes, it’s everything. And at the center of that movie, there was this incredible story of connection between Hannibal Lecter and Clarice Starling. Again, another movie about transformation. But I wasn’t thinking that from the perspective of the actual act of cannibalism, because I wasn’t thinking in terms of the codes of the genre. I wasn’t looking for a shock value.

It really struck me that you’re preoccupied with the humanity of it, even the victims. There’s that scene when they’re consuming a woman in her bedroom and you cut to the pictures of her life that are all around.

Thank you, that means a lot to me, because for me, it was important that we could spend time understanding, in that moment, what’s left of Mrs. Harmon. Is this act that they’re perpetrating on her corpse final to who she was? So let’s spend some time with the legacy of a simple woman and see who she remains in the memory of her dear ones.

In the climactic scene, you keep cutting away to still shots of the room that show what it looks like after the carnage—like crime scene photos. It’s an ingenious way of giving your viewers a chance to step back for some perspective.

Life is made of layers. Like Manhattan, where we are now, is a place of layers, where things have happened and they are on top of one another, literally with these skyscrapers, but figuratively in history. So I was thinking, once time is passed in that room, what remains of the carnage?

Did you think of this as a horror movie?

I thought this was a romantic movie about looking for possibility in the impossibility. I think it was about teenage love. Through that, we can experience a universal sense of wanting to be recognized by the other. I hope this comes across as a very universal story and a love story.

It’s quite specific for the universal.

We all felt like we wanted to change who we were, but we couldn’t. And at the same time, we met someone in our life that let us understand that we could be who we wanted to be without preoccupying ourselves about that. No?

You have used the word “universal” to describe Call Me By Your Name. Are you always striving for the universal?

I grew up watching films that were for me universal experiences. Now that I’m 51, I can take the mask off and say, yes, that’s what I do: I try to make universal movies.

Now that I’m 51, I can I can take the mask off and say, yes, that’s what I do: I try to make universal movies.

While at the same time being transformative—that seems like a difficult task.

The pleasure of making films is that you can create artifacts that are specific. One time, it’s an Italian summer idyll. Another time is a wintry Berlin dark fable. And this time is a road movie romance about someone who will have to face the severity of their nature.

In 2017, you talked to The Hollywood Reporter about Call Me By Your Name, specifically about the sex scenes. You said that you “didn’t want the audience to find any difference or discrimination toward these characters. It was important to me to create this powerful universality.” That’s why there wasn’t explicit sex in the movie.

When I was very young, I shot a short film called Qui here with an actor who’s called Claudio Gioè, who is now a very celebrated Italian actor. He was very young, and I was very young. We shot this short film, and I presented a very explicit sexual act on screen. I was like 22 when I shot that, and I presented it to an important festival. It was shot in 35 [mm]. So I am a veteran of portraying the body that clashes into sex. I just don’t think that to show the idyll of Eli and Oliver, we had to go through the explicit sex. I’ve said it many times.

Yes, but do you think it’s easier to make something universal that depicts people eating each other versus two men having sex?

No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. No.

So you’re taking a risk here then.

Always. If you do not take risks, why do we do this?

I guess the question is: What about this material made you comfortable to portray that which might be alienating, versus how you approached Call Me By Your Name?

I don’t think about that. If I love the script, if I have the actors I love, I do the movie. But I’m still puzzled. When people say, “Oh, cannibalism, I don’t want to see that,” it’s a little bit narrow-minded. You have such charismatic actors, and cinema brings you to places where maybe you don’t go in life, luckily. It’s show business. It’s about entertaining you with alterity, with a new way of seeing things—things that you can escape into from your everyday life.

Sometimes people call you a provocateur. Do you agree with that description?

Depends. I like to be provoked, so I think I do like to provoke, probably. But only if that doesn’t come across as a preposterous desire to shock, which I don’t think I want to do. I’m not interested in that.

I thought it was maybe provocative or at least daring…

“Daring” I love!

Fantasy, of all the genres that I can think of making, is the least interesting to me,

…given the way people have talked about Call Me By Your Name, given the way people have talked about gay sex and all of the talking you’ve done about that, to then have this movie in which you have a relatively explicit gay sex scene that ends in such carnage. That’s probably the most explicit death in Bones and All. Is that a way to say, “Fuck you, I’m going to do what I want in my movies?”

No, no, no, no, no, no, no. It was about: She says to him, “I’m hungry,” and he has to find some way to feed her. And that’s in the opportunistic nature of his way of preying. He sees that opportunity in the ambiguity of someone, who he, almost like God, decides is going to be the right victim. They will not feel guilty, because they are killing someone to feed. Of course they are so wrong about that, nd they pay the price for that. But no, I didn’t do it as a sort of like, fuck you to whoever was claiming that I was coy about the gay sex.

I admired the way that you portrayed poverty. Very matter of fact, I thought.

Again, thank you. It’s a great compliment. When I did I Am Love and then A Bigger Splash, people were thinking, “Oh, this is like a rich guy making movies about his milieu.” Not at all. I’m from a normal family, but I hope that was sort of an insult that was [also] a compliment, because probably the precision of what we did was such that people thought that we were that kind of people. So I hope that with the range of things I did in the past few years, you can see that I am really detail-driven. And as you said, I am trying to be matter-of-fact of the world I describe. That’s why fantasy, of all the genres that I can think of making, is the least interesting to me, because it’s about the creation of worlds that do not exist. I need the actual infrastructure and to learn from the infrastructure to then put it on the screen.