Despite travels through Mexico City, South America, and the heart of the Amazon rainforest in Ecuador, Luca Guadagnino’s movie adaptation of “Queer,” William S. Burroughs’ semi-autobiographical novel, was surprisingly shot almost entirely on the famed Cinecittà soundstages in Rome, Italy.
Speaking on the Filmmaker Toolkit podcast, Guadagnino said that was necessary to allow the film’s production design to capture the complex and unspoken emotions between William Lee (Daniel Craig) and Eugene Allerton (Drew Starkey), an expat former soldier who makes the heroin-addicted Lee believe he might be finally able to establish an intimate connection with someone.
“We conceived the movie not as a period drama, but as a visualization of the imagination of William S. Burroughs, and the possibility that cinema could let us to play with space as a mirror, as a box, as a canvas that could make us feel the power of the connection more,” Guadagnino said in what was his fifth appearance on Toolkit.
The connection required the power of cinema, because on the surface, the younger Allerton often acts indifferent to the older Lee. While not quite an unrequited love story, Lee struggles to read Allerton’s emotions and at times wonders if he is even gay. It’s a connection (and misconnection) expressed in movement. Choreographers Sol Léon and Paul Lightfoot (Nederlands Dance Theater) worked with Craig and Starkey for two month, creating a heightened sense of emotionally-charged reality within the artifice of the film’s sets. Guadagnino drew direct inspiration from Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s “The Red Shoes,” “Tales of Hoffman,” and particularly “Black Narcissus,” a colorful fever dream set inside a convent of nuns atop the Himalayas.
“The movie is entirely shot on stage like a Powell and Pressburger fantasy, like a ‘Black Narcissus’ fantasy,” Guadagnino said. “The fate, and the contrast of culture, here is the desire, longing, and love.”
Guadagnino even wanted to adopt those film’s use of old-school matte painting as a backdrop. But early on, he realized this would be at odds with how he worked with actors to stage a scene.
“The way I like to shoot is that I like to have the actors own the scene before anything else. I give them the place, the space, and I look at them moving in the space. Once they do that, I then know where to put the camera,” said Guadagnino. “But in order to use a painted backdrop, you have to make sure that the camera is only in one place, which would have forced the actor to be in that place, and I didn’t like that. And that’s where 21st century technology comes to help.”
While on the podcast, Guadagnino admitted his opinions of the latest digital technology had evolved considerably in recent years, having realized what he initially disliked about it was the “lazy” ways in which he believed many filmmakers had used it. On “Queer,” Guadagnino was liberated by CGI. The film went through hundreds of iterations in the concept phase, giving him the ability to find the exact amount of visible brush strokes and precise color to evoke the emotion of a scene.
“The cold sameness of CGI can become uniqueness and warmth,” he said.
It’s a surprise then that Guadagnino hired a first-time production designer, Stefano Baisi, to help him execute such a complicated concept and process. Baisi, a trained architect, had collaborated with Guadagnino in his interior design studio, working on projects like a home for Yoox founder Francesco Marchetti, prior to becoming the production designer on “Queer.” Baisi told IndieWire he initially met Guadagnino in 2017 when a colleague needed some help on a project they were doing.
“I met Luca and passed an entire day discussing, designing a staircase railway, and then after a few months I joined the team,” said Baisi, who would go on to regularly work with Guadagnino for six years prior to “Queer.” “When he asked me [to design ‘Queer’] I was very surprised, I [couldn’t’] believe it, because for me something like working on a movie was impossible.”
Baisi found the transition easier than he imagined because movies, unlike architecture, had a script and a longer concept phase that supplied far more direction about the overall vision. For his part, Guadagnino watched Baisi manage enormous architectural projects with ease and had a gut instinct he would have a strong cinematic sensibility. Any concerns about Baisi making the jump were outweighed by knowing Baisi wouldn’t be confined by preconceived notions about how movies are normally made.
“With Stefano we drew all of these backdrops, the color palette was drawn, the clouds, the skies, the buildings, everything was really designed on paper in the months before shooting,” Guadagnino said of the months-long post-production process during which Baisi stayed on as a supervisor. “Stefano’s work ended basically a few weeks before presenting the movie at the [Venice Film] festival because this CGI work was not just CGI people putting up some backdrop or plates, it was taking these drawings and making them digital matte paintings of it.”
While Baisi said Guadagnino had a very clear concept of how the backdrop related to the emotion of the scene, which was fine-tuned with concept artists in creating dozens of variations for each scene, it was necessary to find the film’s balance between artifice and the real world environments it was recreating. As part of the pre-production process, Baisi went on a research trip that mirrored (but in reverse order) Burroughs’ real-life journey from Mexico City to Ecuador, seeing many of the real locations that inspired the author’s imagination.
“The work of Burroughs is filled with this imaginary world he created; this is the first reason why Luca decided to create everything from scratch,” Baisi said. “We wanted to give the movie that kind of texture that comes from lighting [a movie shot in] technicolor.”
The film’s painted backdrops of Mexico City, in particular the skies, use predominantly “acidic colors” that speak to the drug-fueled, dream-like haze Lee lives in. One notable exception: the quiet scene between Lee and Allerton after they make love in Lee’s ramshackle apartment. The set was complete with a red carpet directly inspired by Dorothy Vallens’ (Isabella Rossellini) look in “Blue Velvet.”
“They are sitting in the couch, they’re reading their books, but they clearly are distracted by the desire within each other for each other,” said Guadagnino. “And they start to kiss and behind them there is this beautiful window that is like a big eye opening on them. There you have these incredible glowing, candied-colored, gold gilded sunset over Mexico City… that hugs and embraces the lovers in that moment. I’m very proud of the way the production design really became a protagonist of the story without being decorative.”
Shooting against green and blue screens, part of what sells the scene and makes it soar is how cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom painted the sets with an additional expression layer of light that both aligns with the emotions and supplies a real light to match the backdrop’s artifice.
“Sayombhu is a master,” said Baisi. “Luca gave him a lot of references for the lighting, one of the main references was Michaël Borremans, the Flemish painter, and we wanted to replicate that kind of light in his work.”
Even Lee and Allerton’s journey to heart of the Amazon to find the Ayahuasca plant was shot at Cinecittà. The original concept was to shoot inside on a soundstage, but that proved to be a technical impossibility. Instead, Baisi found a hill of dirt from previous site work on the Cinecittà grounds and had a path dug through it to create the jungle pass. Then, with guidance from a botanical professor in Ecuador, Baisi’s team would surround it with plants that looked similar to what would be found in the Amazon, while blocking the Mediterranean pine trees of Rome and using visual effects set extensions for what could be seen beyond their make shift jungle-dirt pile.
Besides the brief shots on the ocean beach late in the film, the only scene not shot at Cinecittà was when Lee visits the botanist to beg for information about where to locate the Ayahuasca plant. That scene was shot at a botanical garden in Palermo, Sicily.
“I was born there and I grew up in Palermo, and then I left at the age of 22 just a few years after I bumped into this book,” said Guadagnino. “When we started to conceive this place where he meets the botanist… I brought to the table the memory of these gardens and I said, ‘I think those botanical gardens are really perfect and ready. We don’t need anything.’”
For a movie in which so much is digitally drawn, Guadagnino takes pride in how little they altered this location rooted in his memory.
“Behind Lee, when he sits outside and the guy tells him, ‘Okay, I’ll give you the map,’ there is a writing on the dust of the window, ‘Fox and Badger.’ This was written there by somebody and we kept it,” said Guadagnino with a grin.
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