Call Me By Your Name Sequel May Involve a Trip Around the World

Timothée Chalamet and Armie Hammer basically took a yearlong trip around the world together to promote Call Me By Your Name, and it seems that the proposed sequel to the film may find their characters doing something similar.

Though the first movie was based on a novel by André Aciman with a finite ending, director Luca Guadagnino left the movie version more open ended, and revealed last year he hoped to make at least two more films featuring the characters at different points in their lives. The project has been compared to Richard Linklater’s Before trilogy, for which stars Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy reprised their characters for three films over 18 years. Guadagnino has talked somewhat about his plans before, but seems to be dropping the specifics at random intervals. Perhaps because he’s still figuring out how he’s going to do it himself, as he told USA Today on the Oscars red carpet.

“I’m already conceiving the story with André Aciman, and it’s gonna happen five or six years afterwards,” Guadagnino explained to the paper, confirming that the novelist will be involved. “It’s gonna be a new movie, a different tone.”

“They’re gonna go around the world,” he added. Already, that film sounds more ambitious as a production than the first. The first movie’s setting was mostly contained to a small town in northern Italy.

Guadagnino has also spoken about how he hopes to shoot the film when Chalamet himself is about 25, the same age he expects the character to be in the sequel set in the late 80’s. In a previous interview, the director has also hinted that the followup will also touch on the reality of HIV/AIDS during the period.

“I think Elio will be a cinephile, and I’d like him to be in a movie theater watching Paul Vecchiali’s Once More,” Guadagnino told The Hollywood Reporter. “That could be the first scene [in the sequel].” That film, one of the first in France to deal with HIV, would have come out about five years after the events of the first movie. Notably, it also centers around a man who leaves his wife and discovers his same-sex attractions.

“In my opinion, Call Me can be the first chapter of the chronicles of the life of these people that we met in this movie, and if the first one is a story of coming of age and becoming a young man, maybe the next chapter will be, what is the position of the young man in the world, what does he want—and what is left a few years later of such an emotional punch that made him who he is?” the director continued.

Though, in another interview, Guadagnino said that he didn’t think Chalamet’s character Elio was “necessarily going to become a gay man,” and that he may pursue a relationship with the character Marzia. The ending of the original also ends on the note that Hammer’s character is about to be married to a woman.

So while Guadagnino and Aciman haven’t finished the story yet, it definitely seems like the idea of Elio and Oliver leaving their partners and sneaking off for a worldwide trip together is a plot possibility.

Related: Timothée Chalamet and Ansel Elgort Have a High School Reunion at the 2018 Oscars