Luca Guadagnino Would Like to Be Excluded From This Armie Hammer Narrative

Luca Guadagnino must be eternally grateful that of his two Call Me By Your Name leads, he chose Timothée Chalamet to reunite with for Bones & All. The upcoming film stars Chalamet as a drifter with cannibalistic tendencies—which is exactly what some of the recent allegations about his CMBYN costar Armie Hammer sound like IRL. The timing is so unfortunate that even though Hammer isn’t remotely involved with the project, Guadagnino has become embroiled in the discourse in the months ahead of the film’s November 23 release. And in a new interview with Deadline, he’s made it clear that he’s had enough.

First things first, Guadagnino insists that the connection never occurred to him until everyone else made it for him. “It didn’t dawn on me. I realized this afterward when I started to be told of some of these innuendos on social media,” he said. “This project—which was a popular book—had been in development for a number of years before Dave Kajganich brought it to me in 2020. Any link with anything else exists only in the realm of social media, with which I do not engage. The relationship between this kind of digital muckraking and our wish to make this movie is nonexistent and it should be met with a shrug. I would prefer to talk about what the film has to say, rather than things that have nothing to do with it.”

Besides, Guadagnino claims that Bones & All isn’t remotely about shock value; at the end of the day, it’s really just a love story. “I was interested in these people,” he told IndieWire earlier this year. “I understood their moral struggle very deeply. I understood what was happening to them. I am not there to judge anybody. You can make a movie about cannibals if you’re there in the struggle with them, and you’re not codifying cannibalism as a topic or a tool for horror.” Whether or not he’ll prove his critics right at next month’s Venice Film Festival, we’re guessing the hoopla has officially spelled the end for the once potential Call Me By Your Name 2.