Luca Guadagnino

“I'm a very eclectic person, and I enjoy multiple tastes; I'm like a bee who jumps from flower to flower. Before I die, I have to make a war movie, a Western, and a movie like Mike Nichols, because I love him.”

“I am more interested in revolutionary beauty than in the great beauty, to be honest. Italian cinema is now mostly a bureau for tourism. We have given up that revolution of the contemporary.”

“I'm interested in form, in the shape of things. And in commitment to the degree of never letting go the quest for the meaning of things. That can come off as beauty and style, but that's not where I start from.”

“My father is a teacher; my mother was a telecom employee. I come from Palermo; I was raised in Ethiopia. I am homosexual. I didn't go to film school.”

“I don't much like post-modernism, because post-modernist has become the basket in which every mediocre person can shuffle things and pretend to do something significant, and we could also mention who use post-modernism in this way - maybe we shouldn't.”

“The concept of muse is alien to me. To speak of a muse implies there is a couple in which one person is the objectified passive element - there to help the creative, active, often male part of the duo to create. A muse is very passive. Who wants a muse? I don't want a muse.”

“Moviemaking is a dirty, tiring affair. The joy comes from the possibility to be free on set and really let loose.”

“My secret desire is to be an interior designer. I'd love to make houses for rich clients who can afford to do things right.”

“I hate the concept of beauty for the sake of it. It is overrated.”

“As a director, what matters is how you penetrate the soul of the person in front of the camera and let the actor blur the boundaries between the character and the person themselves. In order to achieve that, I try to make people feel at ease, to be mindless of problems and be skinless and give everything to the camera.”

“You know when they say you need to put people who go well together? I much prefer to put people who fight at the table. Then you have some sort of sparkle at the dinner!”

“I am a Hitchcockian - I still believe that 'Psycho' sets the standard for mother/son relations.”

“I don't like post-modernism. It's cynical, and takes no discipline - you just copy. It doesn't allow a film to be open to reality.”

“I think a script is great when it starts with the structure and works with the structure without falling into the typical three-act system in which the audience is ahead of the movie. I hate that, but that is like 99% of what I read.”

“I come from a petit bourgeois family, and I've always been drawn to artists and people who choose their own way of life instead of being chosen by the lives that people want for them.”

“In 1993, my first documentary was about the civil war in Algeria. That was in French and in Arabic. Another short film I did was silent. What I'm trying to say is that, yes, I'm Italian, and yes, I make films with Italian money, but personally, I've always been invested in the broader world of film-making.”

“Spare functional furniture, in my opinion, is the genius of 20th-century design.”

“Everything that goes outside the rules of Italian cinema has always been cursed.”

“I have a number of projects that I've been dreaming of making ever since I was a child. But I am also very open to the chances of life and the chances of my profession.”

“When you have great performers and have set your movie in the right direction, it's a beautiful privilege to let the camera watch the action unfold without spoken words.”