Luca Guadagnino

Info

Full Name: Luca Guadagnino
Location: Palermo
Country: Italy

Luca Guadagnino has been active for 22 years, participating in 12 movies that average a 6.9/10 score.

Videos eCartelera

Tráiler oficial de 'Masters del Universo', con Nicholas Galitzine como He-Man

Biography

As a teenager Luca Guadagnino saw Tilda Swinton in a Derek Jarman film and decided he had to work with her. He sent a script to her agency and heard nothing back. When he found out she was in Rome, he walked up and asked her why she had never replied. They ended up talking in a bar the next morning, and the friendship that came out of it has now lasted more than twenty five years.

Their first film together, 'The Protagonists' (1999), was a mix of documentary and fiction about a murder in London, shot in Britain by a Sicilian who'd never been to film school.

He was born in Palermo on 10 August 1971, though his earliest memories are Ethiopian. His father taught history and Italian literature at a technical school in Addis Ababa, and the family stayed there until the civil war sent them back to Italy in 1977. His mother is Algerian. He studied literature in Palermo and finished his degree in Rome with a thesis on the American director Jonathan Demme.

Milan, money and the first international hit

After 'Melissa P.' (2005), an adaptation of a scandalous Italian bestseller, he and Swinton spent eleven years getting 'I Am Love' (2009) made. She co-produced it and plays a Russian woman married into a Milanese industrial dynasty, learning both Italian and Russian for the part.

It premiered at Venice and went on to an Oscar nomination for costume design, a BAFTA nomination for best film not in the English language and a Golden Globe nod. Raf Simons designed Swinton's wardrobe for Jil Sander.

The film set out his method: big houses, food shot in close up, desire pushing up through good manners, weather you can feel. He went back to all of it for 'A Bigger Splash' (2015), built on the bones of 'La Piscine' (1969) and shot on Pantelleria, with Swinton as a rock star who has lost her voice, Ralph Fiennes as a record producer who never stops talking, Dakota Johnson and Matthias Schoenaerts.

In 2012 he set up his production company, Frenesy Film, which has since financed other directors. One of the more recent is 'April' (2024), by the Georgian filmmaker Dea Kulumbegashvili.

The summer of 1983

'Call Me By Your Name' premiered at Sundance in January 2017 and changed his career. A seventeen year old played by Timothée Chalamet falls for the American student staying at his parents' house, Armie Hammer, across one Lombardy summer. The screenplay was by James Ivory, from the André Aciman novel.

It took four Oscar nominations, including best picture, which Guadagnino shares as a producer. Ivory won for adapted screenplay at 89, making him the oldest person ever to take a competitive Academy Award. The father's speech near the end, delivered by Michael Stuhlbarg, is still quoted almost a decade on.

Then he did the opposite of what everyone expected. 'Suspiria' (2018) is not a friendly remake of the Dario Argento film but a different beast: washed out colours, divided Berlin in 1977, terrorism on the radio, Swinton in three separate roles, Mia Goth and Dakota Johnson in the dance school, and Thom Yorke's first film score. It split audiences down the middle, which was more or less the plan.

Television came in 2020 with 'We Are Who We Are', eight episodes for HBO and Sky about teenagers on an American army base in the Veneto, with Chloë Sevigny and Jack Dylan Grazer. The same year he made a documentary about Salvatore Ferragamo.

Cannibals, tennis and Burroughs

The past few years have been his busiest. 'Bones and All' (2022) put Chalamet back in front of his camera as one of two cannibals in love across rural 1980s America, adapted by David Kajganich. Venice gave him the Silver Lion for best director and Taylor Russell the Mastroianni award. It didn't make much: barely 15 million dollars worldwide.

'Challengers' (2024) did rather better. Justin Kuritzkes wrote the tennis triangle for Zendaya, Josh O'Connor and Mike Faist. It was meant to open Venice in 2023 until Amazon pulled it over the actors' strike, so it finally arrived in April 2024, took 96 million dollars and won Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross a Golden Globe for the score.

Later that year he was back in the Venice competition with 'Queer', in which Daniel Craig plays the William S. Burroughs stand in drifting around Mexico City in 1950 and chasing the younger man of Drew Starkey. Rather than shoot in Mexico, Guadagnino built the whole city inside Cinecittà. Lesley Manville arrives in the last stretch as a botanist living in the Ecuadorian jungle, barely recognisable.

'After the Hunt' (2025) went badly. The campus drama with Julia Roberts, Ayo Edebiri and Andrew Garfield premiered at Venice in August and drew the worst reviews of his career, accused of striking poses about consent and cancellation without having much to say.

Chairs, houses and what comes next

He has run an interior design studio out of Milan since 2017. It has done Aesop shops in London and Rome, private houses and a furniture collection shown at Milan Design Week in 2022, and he talks about architecture as readily as he does about lenses.

For years he lived in a seventeenth century palazzo in Crema, the town where he shot 'Call Me by Your Name', until the attention that came with the film pushed him to move to Milan. He is openly gay, and between 2009 and 2020 his partner was the Italian director Ferdinando Cito Filomarino, who worked as second unit director on three of his films.

The road ahead is messy. 'Artificial' covers the sacking and rehiring of Sam Altman at OpenAI in 2023, with Garfield as Altman, Monica Barbaro and Yura Borisov. Amazon dropped it while closing a huge deal with OpenAI itself, leaving the film without a distributor until Neon bought it in June 2026.

After that come an adaptation of Pier Vittorio Tondelli's novel 'Separate Rooms' with Léa Seydoux and a new version of 'American Psycho' with Austin Butler as Patrick Bateman. Neither one has a firm date, which isn't unusual with him. He announces more than he shoots, shoots more than most, and every few years one of them lodges in people's heads for good.