spotlight call me by your name
I really more than anything wanted to represent a relationship that just flowered by way of experience and time spent with him [Oliver/Armie]. We had the random luck of the universe in that he and I got along very naturally, just as two human beings would who strike up a friendship. It was like that on set and has flowered and stayed that way in the year and a half since. When it came time to shooting it, you just kind of have to let it all go and hope, and this is the cardinal rule for me, that you’ve not let it be boring. (Laughs) A.H:There’s a lot that I learned and there is a
lot to learn from a character like Oliver. Both in the things that he does well and the things that you can look at objectively and say, “Maybe he didn’t handle that as well as he could have.” Maybe there was a different way he would have taken if he were bolder or braver.” I think he represents that thing in all of us, the duality of being human. What you want and what you choose to go for, aren’t necessarily the same thing and that can cause issues. I think he is a beautifully complicated character, who struggles with a lot of the turmoil and self-doubt that we all do, but, he’s very good at covering it. Elio’s father in this film was remarkable: His absolute acceptance, total compassion and love for his son was so touching. What was the experi- ence of portraying him like and was it something you pulled from your own world? Michael Stuhlbarg [Elio’s father, Mr. Perlman]: Having any inkling of that kind of compassion and love comes from my mom and dad, so tapping into that was as easy as speaking for me. On top of that, I was given some delightful, touching and fun things to say, so it really was a combination of the two. That along with Luca’s guidance and the inspiration of working with Tim and Armie made it easy: I was dazzled by their honesty and fearlessness in diving into this material. I’d like to touch on the film’s ending and try to understand how you prepared yourself for such an intense, long shot. What was going through your mind, your inner monologue and how you moved into and stayed in that space. T.C: There was the gift of being able to have an earpiece and actually playing Sufjan Stevens’ song “Visions of Gideon” throughout that take. There is a certain structure that song takes narratively and it was so perfect for the film because it’s sort of analogous to the way the relationship is played out.
34 RAGE monthly | DECEMBER 2017
armie hammer as oliver and timothée chalamet as elio photography by sayombhu mukdeeprom, courtesy of sony pictures classics
The feeling of love lost, yet also sort of a “Don’t cry because it’s over, but smile because it happened,” kind of thing. There was also the added benefit of the camera being in the fire, so there was nobody behind it, so I was just staring into the fire. As far as the inner monologue goes, I had a great warning from a drama teacher when I was 13-years-old about being careful about drawing from personal experiences, because you just don’t want to blur those lines too much. You want to protect yourself, emotionally in real life and yet, for a close up that long, things that read inauthentic will ruin the whole thing. The music in this film is so vital. How did you go about selecting the composer and all the other works? L.G: The book by André Aciman is told in the
third person singular of the character Elio, from the point of reference of the haze of summer. I admire the idea of a sort of narrator, who is sort of omniscient. I am enamored by collaboration and companionship and I thought about Sufjan Stevens, how poised and poetic and how musical his voice was. It, as is his personality, is so strong and in a way that was parallel to Aciman’s books and reflected the kind of movie we wanted to make. Almost a year before we shot, I thought to get in
touch with him and we started conversations over the phone, that led him to send us three songs, two new
[“Visions of Gideon,” “Mystery of Love”] and one remix of “Futile Devices.” We were together at my house the afternoon in which we received the songs and I played them for everyone. It literally made me experience the feeling of having received some kind of masterpiece. To know that it was something I was going to get to use in our movie, it was incredible. I owe a lot to Sufjan and love him so much. The ending had been there since I took over as the director of the movie. It says, “Elio stares at the fire.” That was the script and that was it. It was something I was savoring in my mind, like when you have a little bit of cognac or whiskey and you savor the flavors. I was really looking forward to creating that because there were two films that I love that possess that same quality, one I don’t know the English title, but is a movie by Robert Bresson,Un condamné à mort s’est échappé ou Le vent souffle où il veut (A Man Escaped, 1956) and the other is Paul Schrader’s film, Light Sleeper (1992) and they both end with an extreme closeup of the main character. Holding the camera there for three to four minutes. I promised myself one day that I was going to find the intensity in the performance of someone and do that… and I did with Call Me By Your Name.
Call Me By Your Name is in theaters now and receiving a great deal of awards buzz. Check your local listings and go see this film, you will absolutely understand why if you do.
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