Collaboration

The image onscreen appears just as it did in a 17-year-old Luca Guadagnino’s mind: as an infatuated man gazes at his object of desire, a translucent, almost ghostly version of his hand reaches out to stroke the face of his unwitting beloved. The words that inspired this image—ectoplasmic fingers and a phantom thumb—were written by William S. Burroughs in his 1985 semi-autobiographical novella Queer, which Guadagnino, now 53, read as a “solitary young man” in Palermo, Italy. He began work on an adaptation at 21, years before he’d release his first feature film in 1999. Making Burroughs’ description come to life was “simple,” something out of the “old days” of cinema, the director says. “It’s superimposed, but it’s very strong,” he adds.

With Queer, which opened in select theaters Nov. 27, Guadagnino has achieved not quite the impossible but the unlikely: he’s rendered Burroughs’ freewheeling prose into a coherent film. Set in early-’50s Mexico City, Queer follows Burroughs’ literary alter ego William Lee (played by a multivalent Daniel Craig) as he pursues a younger man, Eugene Allerton (Drew Starkey), who seems impenetrable until he’s not. The courtship takes them into the wilds of South America and finds Lee blazed on alcohol, heroin, and psychedelics. The book is a sequel to 1953’s Junkie and went unpublished for decades. Craig’s performance is big, sometimes explosively so, and requires not only affected charm, but also deep sadness, the physical turmoil of opiate withdrawal, and some bumbling in the jungle. “We all were exhausted by the end,” said Craig. “We were all just hanging in rags by the time we finished.”

Justin Kuritzkes, the writer of Guadagnino’s other 2024 release, Challengers, adapted Burroughs’ novel into Queer’s screenplay. “I was trying to be a medium between these two brilliant queer artists: William Burroughs on the one hand and Luca on the other,” he says. That involved heaps of artistic license—Kuritzkes fleshed out the sex scenes, inserted surreal sequences that allude to the shooting death of Burroughs’ wife Joan Vollmer, for which he was convicted in absentia; and teased out the third act beyond what Burroughs merely suggested. Dr. Cotter, for example, “a small, wiry man in his middle fifties” living in the Ecuadorean jungle, becomes a woman, played with relish by a greasy-haired, dirt-speckled Lesley Manville. Manville underwent about three hours in the hair and makeup chair every day she was on set. “It’s very liberating when you do something like that,” she says. “It’s much nicer than the pressure of having to try and look good on the screen.”

At the same time, much of the film is doggedly faithful to Burroughs’ book, transplanting chunks of dialogue and tracing its overall arc. Guadagnino’s Queer is at once a tribute and an extension, a queering of the very act of adaptation. “You adhere to the book because it’s important to adhere to the source material,” explains Craig. “But as artists, it’s our job to interpret and to expand.”

Read more: Daniel Craig Offers Himself Up Completely to the Shimmering Sensuality of Queer

“Queer” describes way more than the sexuality of its protagonist—it’s practically the film’s ethos. In many ways, this movie is queer as in askew, or deviating from a recognizable form. Almost all of it was shot at Cinecittà Studios in Rome, which lends an old Hollywood movie-set vibe to its gritty content that would never have gotten past the Production Code of the story’s own era. The film was scored by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, and features a number of anachronistic song choices including New Orders’ “Leave Me Alone,” Prince’s “17 Days,” Sinead O’Connor’s cover of “All Apologies,” and Nirvana’s own “Come As You Are.” Guadagnino said that including the Nirvana cuts was intended as a bridge between two emotionally broken artists, Kurt Cobain and Burroughs.

And then there’s Craig’s depiction of Lee, which doesn’t call for a strict impersonation of Burroughs as he was in the ‘50s (“Thank Christ!” says the actor), but was partly inspired by late-in-life candid footage of Burroughs “high and giggling and being mischievous.” Queer also queers the prototypical love story: Lee is smitten with Allerton, while Allerton stays mostly aloof, spurning Lee in public in favor of a young woman and sharing views on gay culture which sow doubt as to his own sexuality. Yet Guadagnino and his cast insist this is not a story of unrequited love but unsynchronized love.

In a joint Zoom interview in November, both Guadagnino and Craig downplayed the importance of Lee’s queerness, which came as a surprise given the film’s title, for one thing. “For me, this is not about gay or homosexuality, it’s more about: Are we ready for connection? What is preventing these characters from having a full-blown connection?” says Guadagnino. “In a way, the sexuality of the protagonist, it’s down the list of important things,” adds Craig. “It is the emotional journey of these people. And that’s what we concentrated on while making the film.” 

To be clear, the movie’s sex is definitive and copious. Those who were frustrated by the camera’s pronounced panning away in Guadagnino’s previous May-December gay romance Call Me by Your Name should be satiated by Queer’s frankness. Both of Craig’s onscreen sex partners, Starkey and singer-songwriter Omar Apollo, who makes his film debut in Queer, appear fully nude—Starkey says he wore a prosthetic, though Apollo would not confirm or deny the veracity of his cinematic anatomy. (“They’re young. They’re young and beautiful,” says Craig when asked why he didn’t go full frontal as well.) Craig credits laughter between takes with easing the tension. Plus, Starkey says movement rehearsals for a kind of dance sequence toward the end of the film broke the ice. “We got to embarrass ourselves in front of one another—and have little accomplishments in the choreography with each other. That imbued its way into everything.”

There was a time when a straight actor playing a gay character was considered a career risk. There was a time when it was considered controversial. Now, though it doesn’t raise as many eyebrows, it’s still worth noting that Guadagnino tapped the actor most closely associated with the prototypical heterosexual male character of the last century, James Bond, to star in a movie called Queer.

“For a movie like this to come out right now with Daniel Craig, who’s James Bond, and this masculine symbol—I think is so important,” says Apollo. 

“I’m fascinated by the artifice of masculinity,” Craig says regarding the through line from 007 to Lee. “The way in is to think about the way men are perceived and how they can present themselves.”

Craig, who has been married to actor Rachel Weisz since 2011 and has played queer characters in several other pictures before, including 1998’s Love Is the Devil: Study for a Portrait of Francis Bacon and the Knives Out franchise, says the role was not just about Lee’s sexuality, but his flaws. His goal was simply “to get it right.” He adds, “The complexity of sexuality is way beyond my understanding—it’s more individual than a thumbprint.” 

Still, queer stories remain far less common than heterosexual ones, and the queer community has a long tradition of decrying negative depictions given this scarcity (see, for example, William Friedkin’s 1980 gay serial-killer thriller Cruising, as well as Basic Instinct and The Silence of the Lambs). Guadagnino doesn’t seem to care if presenting a flawed gay character will ruffle feathers. “I don’t want to be part of a club that would have me, like Groucho Marx said,” he observes, adding that he’s not interested in appealing to a community’s expectations or demands. “I don’t care about it. I think it’s crazy. It’s almost like a sort of inbreed concept.”

Guadagnino is uncommonly lucid and staunch when he discusses his artistic intentions—to the point of effectively interpreting his work for people. One recurring image in Queer is of a centipede. Those who haven’t read the book might wonder why it’s there, and even those who have might be confused—in the text, Burroughs makes only a fleeting reference to the bug. Well, Guadagnino has an answer, based in part on his reading of Burroughs’ journals. “The centipede is repression,” he says. “The centipede is the villain in the movie.” The moment when, while staying in a hotel with two double beds, a dope-sick, shivering Lee asks Allerton if he can get in bed with him, and Allerton relents and places his foot over Lee’s own? “There is the moment [when] you realize that this is a love story,” Guadagnino proclaims.

The meticulousness with which Guadagnino constructs his films involves pulling not just from his source material but his real life. When the effects of psychedelics that Lee and Allerton take kick in, they both blow giant scrotal bubbles of flesh from their mouths that burst and leave beating hearts on the ground. That image was inspired by watching his aunt hemorrhage when he was a child. “I was thinking, ‘Oh my god, old auntie, she’s blowing a bubble of cherry bubblegum, and this thing explodes,’” he recalls.

This dedication to showing life in all its hideous glory has been met with varied responses. After its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival in September, Queer was received with a nearly nine-minute standing ovation. Months later, the reception in Istanbul was decidedly frostier—it was banned for “threat to public peace” because of its “provocative content.” As a result, the streamer and distributor Mubi canceled its Mubi Fest Istanbul 2024, for which Queer was set as the opening film. Guadagnino was unfazed, suggesting that censoring things only makes people want to see them more. While screenwriter Kuritzkes believes that “you can’t make a movie called Queer, set in the ’50s in Mexico, release it in 2024, for it not to be political,” Guadagnino sees its politics more as a threat to the cinematic status quo. “If it is political, it’s political in the sense that it showcases that we don’t need to do movies that come from a mold, but that we can forge prototypes,” he says.

For Guadagnino, the queerest thing about his film is its capacity to be at once universal and precise. “It’s a queer movie because it can afford to be absolutely specific and bombastic in its own ways, and at the same time, it encompasses and communicates feelings that we have all gone through in our lives,” he says. Craig agrees. “Anything that gets too binary is not really interesting to me.”