An outcast American becomes infatuated with a younger man in Director Luca Guadagnino’s historical romance, Queer.
Based on the novella by William S. Burroughs, Guadagnino’s film follows William Lee, who recounts his life in 1940s Mexico City among American expatriate college students and bar owners surviving on part-time jobs and GI Bill benefits. He becomes infatuated with Eugene Allerton, a drug using discharged American Navy serviceman.
On November 10, after the DGA membership screening in Los Angeles, Guadagnino discussed the making of Queer during a Q&A moderated by Director Daniel Scheinert (Everything Everywhere All at Once).
During the conversation, Guadagnino revealed how they created some of the film’s more surrealist elements.
“We had a lot of miniatures. When we didn’t have miniatures, we played with the imagery so that it looked like miniature. Then we animated the miniatures in CGI and expanded it. At the beginning of the process, we thought, ‘Let’s do the old fashion backdrop painted.’ So, we tested it and it was quite beautiful but it wanted a very precise and focused idea of shots for everything. But because I like the idea of performances leading my movies, I didn’t want to do that because that would have obliged everybody to stick to a place that the camera had to be. And so we deferred these to later. We had to do the postproduction, and we wanted the feeling of a matte painting or glass painting by using digital. So, a lot of these backdrops have been drawn by hand and then put digitally against the built.”
Guadagnino’s other directorial credits include the feature films Bones and All, Suspiria, Call Me by Your Name, A Bigger Splash, I Am Love and The Protagonists; the documentaries Salvatore: Shoemaker of Dreams and Bertolucci on Bertolucci; and episodes of the series We Are Who We Are. He has been a DGA member since 2021.