LOS ANGELES, California – Daniel Craig, James Bond to many, goes Queer in Luca Guadagnino’s newest film. Engaging in what IndieWire’s Ryan Lattanzio wrote are “the most explicit gay scenes in any mainstream movie,” Daniel goes all out in his portrayal of William Lee, an American expat in 1940s Mexico City who falls for a younger man, Eugene Allerton (Drew Starkey).
Queer, adapted by screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes (Luca’s collaborator in Challengers) from William S. Burroughs’ unfinished but published short novel, premiered in competition in the recent Venice Film Festival. Daniel’s cold, deadly stare as 007 gives way to a vulnerable look as he gets smitten with Drew’s discharged US Navy serviceman.
Luca, the filmmaker behind the recent Challengers, Call Me by Your Name and Bones and All, and Daniel, working effectively together, hauntingly paint longing and desire. There are scenes where Daniel’s William imagines putting an arm over Drew’s Eugene.
But when the two characters finally get it on, the resulting scenes are “notably more explicit” than Brokeback Mountain and Call Me by Your Name, noted Nate Jones of Vulture.
In the Venice press conference for Queer, Daniel and Drew were asked how they reached that level of intimacy in their sex scenes.
“There is some choreography in the movie which is a very important part of the movie,” Daniel began.
“Drew and I started rehearsals on the months before we started filming. Dancing with someone is a great icebreaker.”
“So, we approached the scenes — you know as well as I do that there is nothing intimate about filming a sex scene on a movie set. There’s a room full of people watching you.”
“So, we just wanted to make it as touching and as real and natural as we possibly could. Drew is a wonderful, fantastic, beautiful actor to work with. We kind of had a laugh. We tried to make it fun.”
Drew, who breaks through with Queer, said, “Yeah, we jumped into movement rehearsals pretty early on and not just in the intimate scenes but throughout the course of the movie.”
“That really freed us up, freed what was happening and it freed up our bodies and we felt open to try new things. Paul and Sol really opened doors for us.”
Luca clarified, “Paul and Sol are Paul Lightfoot and Sol León. They are the choreographers of the movie.”
Drew added, “Yeah, when you’re rolling around on the floor with someone on the second day of knowing each other, I think that’s a good way to get to know someone.”
In the film’s third act, when Lee and Eugene embark on a trip to the Ecuadorian rainforest, looking for a telepathy-inducing drug or “ayahuasca,” the result is a drug-fueled sequence that is both physical and mystical.
Drew answered when the two actors were asked how they prepared and acted out the “ayahuasca” state of mind.
The actor, who played supporting roles in such films as Love, Simon and The Hate U Give, said, “Again, that’s such a testament to Paul Lightfoot and Sol León. Daniel and I had months of experimenting with each other, moving to poetry and forgetting the language of it all.”
“We had a couple weeks of really just exploring and then we got on set and it was just about going for it. Luca also allows that space for that to happen. He invites it, he welcomes it which is such a singular experience as an actor.”
“I’ve never had an experience like this to really dive into one moment in a story and explore every avenue possible. I’m not a dancer, Daniel’s definitely not a dancer (laughter) but we learned. We got better together.”
Daniel quipped, “We found our limits.”
Drew agreed, “Yes, limits.”
Daniel pointed out, “The trip at the end, the third act, is so important to the film. It doesn’t happen in the book. It’s something that Luca decided to put in because we needed it. We needed to see them connect.”
Luca said, “Justin and I were talking at length on the Challengers set between tennis balls, on why he (Burroughs) ended the book there, why he didn’t complete it? We even spoke to Oliver Harris, the great scholar of Burroughs.”
“There was a very strong element of modesty in Burroughs that he couldn’t even deal with the book; it was too close to home. He had to put it aside.”
“And then James Grauerholz convinced him 35 years later to publish it. This is a love story; they have to try ayahuasca and maybe deal with that.”
On why he cast Daniel as William and if there could be a gay James Bond, Luca replied, “Guys, let’s be adults in the room for a second. There is no way around the fact that nobody would ever know James Bond’s desires, period. Having said that (applause), the important thing is that he does his missions properly (laughter).”
“I have been an admirer of this gentleman (turning to Daniel) for a long time, despite his looks and he is pristine. I had this intuition that I suppressed within me because I’m pragmatic. You have to make movies; you cannot daydream.”
“The gentleman that is in the room was the one that was not pragmatic and said to me, ‘What about Daniel Craig?’ and I said, ‘I thought about it but he’s never going to say yes.’ And he said to me, ‘Let’s ask.’ And he said yes, and the yes was a definitive yes.”
“He is one of the greatest actors and it’s a privilege to work with someone like him.”
“And for me, one of the great characteristics of the great actors that you love, that you want to see on screen and you are affected by the generosity of approach is the capacity of being very mortal on screen.”
“Very few iconic legendary actors allow that fragility to be seen and one of them is Daniel, for sure.”
For his part, Daniel explained why he accepted the role: “First off, the reason I did the movie is because of this great man here (turns to Luca). I’ve wanted to work with him for a long time. We met 20 years ago and said, maybe we should work together and we finally did, which is just a wonderful thing.”
“I look at this movie and I think, if I wasn’t in the movie and I saw this movie, I’d want to be in it, if that makes sense. It’s the kind of films I want to see, I want to make, I want to be out there.”
“They’re challenging but they’re hopefully incredibly accessible because they’re movies. I mean they’re movies as I understand them so the challenge of playing Lee was just talking.”
“We just talked. One of Luca’s incredible talents is he just wants to hear everybody’s opinion. He has a very strong opinion, don’t get me wrong, but he wants to hear everybody’s opinion because it’s really important to him to hear other people’s voices about what it is.”
“It’s so freeing because you’re not on track. You’re just like, okay, maybe this, maybe this, maybe this. So, I don’t look back as a challenge, just as a joy. “
Luca pointed out why he wanted to bring Queer, one of the novels of Burroughs, a leading Beat Generation author, to the screen. “The joy was the starting point for me,” said the Italian filmmaker. “When I read the book, I was 17 and I was a lonely boy in Palermo, a megalomaniac and dreaming of building worlds through cinema.”
“I read this slim book and this very evocative name, Burroughs. I fell into the vivid imagination of this writer that I didn’t know at the time.”
“The profound connection that he was achingly describing on the page between these two characters, the complete lack of judgmentalism in the way in which these characters were behaving, particularly Lee. The romanticism of the idea of the adventure and with someone you want and love.”
“All of these transformed me and changed me forever. And because I wanted to be loyal to that young boy, I kept thinking I have to bring this to the screen.”
“Particularly because I wanted, hopefully, to let the audience, at the end of it, with an idea of self. Who are we when we are alone and who are we looking for, who do we want beside us?”
“No matter who you are — are you a heroin addict living in Mexico City, which by the way, is a Mexico City that exists in the mind of the character.”
“Or you love a man, you love a woman, whoever you love, who are you when you are alone in that bed and you are left with the feeling of how you have felt for someone.”
Daniel explained why the role of Lee, who is author Burroughs’ alter ego, appealed to him: “There’s the research that I did. I watched a lot of William Burroughs being interviewed. He had this persona — I can only describe it as a persona, very deep and measured.”
“And I thought, that can’t be him or if it is, it’s a part of him. It’s something, maybe a defense and when I thought about that and I read Queer… and we talked, I thought we’ve got to try and find the other person.”
“There’s very little knowledge of that. There’s very little talk of it and that was the thing that I wanted to try and key into because having read Junkie, which is very dry and like a kind of this is, this is and this is this, Queer is this emotional just thump.”
“It’s a tiny book but it’s emotional and it is about love but it’s also about loss, loneliness, yearning. It’s about all of these things and I mean God, if I was writing myself a part and trying to tick off things that I wanted to do, this would fulfill all of them.”
As to why he decided to shoot Queer in Rome’s famed Cinecittà Studios, except for some scenes which were filmed in Quito, Ecuador (subbing for Mexico City), Luca answered, “Well again, this is an adaptation of a novel by William Burroughs who is a very specific author and who has created worlds throughout all his beautiful canon that can be summarized with the adjective ‘Burroughsian.’ ”
“So, to create a movie from Burroughs as just a period drama would have been a complete betrayal of the book in the first place, and of course, we were not going in that direction at all.”
“Plus, a period drama — how boring is that? We wanted to make a Burroughs movie and so we tried our best to comprehend the imagery of William Burroughs, his world, the world that was crossing over to many books.”
“So, in this movie, you’ll see there are a lot of references to other books, not just queer in the visual language and we talked a lot about what he writes with words and he creates worlds with words.”
“Justin continues this process with his words but then we have to bring it to life through visuals that come from artisanal craft.”
“And that is when I started to think very deeply about one canon in the history of cinema that resonates deeply with me which is the canon of (Michael) Powell and (Emeric) Pressburger, the glorious couple of filmmakers who made some of the greatest films ever, like The Red Shoes, Black Narcissus, and The Tales of Hoffmann.”
“They are British filmmakers who made movies creating worlds, imagining worlds. Their canon was about this idea of heroism and ethics in the British way.”
“It was a world of fantasy that was so beautiful and so chiseled and I thought, how would Powell and Pressburger think if they had to think about adapting the novel? And so the production designer Jonathan, everyone, and I, we really focused on that texture and that intellectual position.”
On the theme of addiction, reflected in the Lee character, and whether he is obsessed with addiction in all forms, Luca said, “I am a gentleman who goes to sleep very early, never takes drugs in my life, never smokes a cigarette and I have gone into a diet and lost 15 kilos so I’m quite rigorous about my addictions.”
“I can also count on two hands the lovers I had in my life. We’ve been candid today.”
“I love the idea of seeing people and not judging them, of making sure that even the worst person is the person that you can identify with.”
“When Lee is drowning in this obsession, he cannot grasp connecting with Allerton. And even Allerton is drowning in this impossibility of connection with Lee.”
“The way they work with this is, one, by being detached; the other one is by going hard on Lee’s own addictions. It’s so purely profoundly human and I think that’s what the task of a filmmaker should be — to find humanity in the darkest recesses and the brightest ones.”
Luca shared why the film closes with a specific song: “At the end of the movie, there is a song composed by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross (applause) in which the lyrics are taken from the last entry in the journal of William Burroughs three days before he died.”
“The song is sung by Caetano Veloso and the lyrics start with this phrase, ‘Our love will grow vaster than empires.’ That is Burroughs. Daniel, in our first Zoom, was adamant that this was going to be a love story vaster than empires.”
“We really stuck to it and we went for it and we dealt with how we could portray, what does it mean to love and to be loved, and to be connected and disconnected.”
“And, for me, to have an artist like him and like Drew, Lesley (Manville), Jason (Schwartzman), Omar (Apollo), and everybody else in the cast who commits to that task of the portrayal of a very universal characteristic of our being, it is fantastic and it’s in a way a very queer thing to do.” – Rappler.com