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Luca Guadagnino has been trying to make his latest movie for all of his adult life. The lauded director and producer of offbeat romantic films like Call Me by Your Name and Challengers sticks to this genre with Queer, an adaptation of legendary beat writer William S. Burroughs’ novella, which delves into loneliness and longing, and a wild ayahuasca journey, while following the writer as he pursues a cagey young American in 1950s Mexico City.
Guadagnino first came upon a copy of Queer when he was browsing a bookstore as a teenager in Palermo, Italy, and he was instantly intrigued, as he explained during a Q&A — with stars Daniel Craig and Drew Starkey and writer Justin Kuritzkes — after the movie’s New York Film Festival premiere.
“In the store, immediately, I was exposed to the unequal language of this amazing writer that I didn’t know,” he said of Burroughs’ semi-autobiographical book. “And at the same time, the book revealed something about myself, which was a feeling that I always felt and I kept feeling afterward: desire, connection — to a very profound degree.”
This was in 1988, and since, Guadagnino has been attempting to get a screen version of Queer off the ground, even writing a “terrible script” at one point, he said. But, for years, the rights to the book were never available, Guadagnino said, so any thought of mounting a production or a second stab at a script seemed to make the project feel pre-doomed. Luckily, producer Lorenzo Mieli discovered that all changed just as Guadagnino’s filmmaking career caught some steam. The director’s hot streak began with 2017’s Call Me by Your Name and was followed by an eclectic cinematic mix, frequently using the same actors, with his underrated Tilda Swinton-Dakota Johnson-led Suspiria remake, the romantic horror film Bones and All with Timothée Chalamet and Challengers, the Zendaya starrer that has grossed $96 million worldwide.
It was on the set of Challengers that Guadagnino handed a copy of Burroughs’ Queer to Kuritzkes, the screenwriter of the tennis movie, telling him to read the short book that night. Soon, the two were plotting their second collaboration, which began with the major challenge of adapting the Beat Generation writer for the screen — a feat only undertaken a few times.
Queer, steeped in longing and pain, functions as an abbreviated sequel to the semi-autobiographical Junkie, where the William Lee character, a Burroughs stand-in, struggles with heroin and morphine addiction. It ends with the character living in Mexico City to avoid legal repercussions of his drug habit and he and his wife separating, her taking their kids back to the U.S. The character then reads about a drug found in Ecuador called yage that may enable telepathy. Guadagnino’s film takes this as its jumping-off point, but not before Lee encounters Eugene Allerton, a younger, recently discharged Navy serviceman also bumming around Mexico City.
Daniel Craig and Drew Starkey in Queer.
Yannis Drakoulidis . Courtesy of A24
The two circle one another for the film’s first half, surrounded by a levity-providing supporting cast of drunk expats living south of the border that features Jason Schwartzman, Henry Zaga and, in an early, raw love scene, singer Omar Apollo. Queer truly takes off when Lee and Allerton finally break the smoldering tension and have sex, in a much-discussed raw and realistic scene that has Craig and Outer Banks’ heartthrob Starkey making up for Guadagnino’s infamous sex scene pan away in Call Me by Your Name. Andrew Garfield recently told The Hollywood Reporter that he found one of the film’s oral sex scenes, which Guadagnino showed him, to be “genuinely beautiful” and “so tender and full of longing.”
Soon, Lee asks Allerton to accompany him to Ecuador to find the yage, or as it’s more commonly known, ayahuasca.
“We were very in sync and very much speaking the same language in terms of how we wanted to honor the book and how we wanted to depart from it,” screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes said after the NYFF screening of the challenge of scripting Burroughs. “And one of the obvious main ways to depart from it is that in the book, they don’t get the ayahuasca. One of the first real decisions that we made together was that we wanted to know what would happen if they found it.”
As Kuritzkes puts it, Burroughs’s novella opens a door and then closes it. So wouldn’t it be in the tradition of the source material’s surrealist, unapologetic author that the script should ultimately go through that closed door to see what was on the other side? In Queer’s final act, the film’s romance concludes in a manner that avoids betraying the premise, taking the audience on an ayahuasca journey, and providing a fitting tribute to the novella’s complex author.
“We were looking for clues in the book and one was that we wanted to have the tone of Burroughs, to actually have the humor of this picaresque form,” said Guadagnino. “But at the same time, we knew this was a real, deep love story about two people who were not in sync more often than they were in sync.”
The script their collaborative effort produced reeled in Craig, who was immediately taken upon reading their blueprint and took it on as his first gig not portraying James Bond or Knives Out sleuth Benoit Blanc in seven years. His performance, inhabiting the sad, addicted, stricken, sick and hopeless romantic Lee is already being lauded as Oscar season begins.
“The reason I wanted to get into cinema was because of movies like this. … Scripts don’t come around like this very often,” Craig said after the screening in New York. “Directors don’t come around like this very often. I didn’t know what the end result would be, but I knew the journey was going to be something else. And that’s really what appealed to me, to be working with such a wonderful person, the most creative and exciting people. … I knew that we could create something. And we said to each other, ‘Whatever we do, we must create something memorable and beautiful and make it about love.’”
Queer had its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival, where it received a nine-minute standing ovation. And Starkey, playing the aloof and impenetrable Allerton, has also earned acclaim for his breakout feature role. His collaboration with Craig brings smoldering sexual tension to the screen.
“It was a process of osmosis, in a way,” Starkey said of delving into the world of Burroughs to find his character, as he waited for the shoot to begin. “It’s so rare that you get an opportunity to have four or five months of prep for something. And I think at times I felt like I was doing nothing. But I was just meditating on it.”
The actor added of his character. “He only reveals himself when he’s a counterpart to Lee, and that felt like his truest form and what he was afraid of. And so I think the real work started on day one [of filming with Craig].”
For Guadagnino, Queer represents what he’s been trying to convey in his films for years.
“This wasn’t a story about unrequited love. That wasn’t the story about someone trying to convince somebody else,” he said. “[It’s about] the possibility of the other way around, which I think is something that I explore many times in my work. But at the same time, I never [could] see this as the real, profound theme. We found it in the book, with so many beautiful leads that gave us the comfort to go there.”
Queer is now playing in select theaters.