Luca Guadagnino plans to take a deeper look at HIV/AIDS in the sequel to his 2017 coming-of-age drama Call Me By Your Name (2017) by examining it at the height of the epidemic in the late 1980s, the director told The Hollywood Reporter.
Adapted from André Aciman’s novel, Call Me By Your Name chronicles the romantic relationship between 17-year-old American-Italian Jewish boy Elio Perlman (Timothee Chalamet) and 24-year-old American Jewish scholar Oliver (Armie Hammer) that unfolds in the Italian countryside. The movie has been nominated for Academy awards for Best Picture, Best Actor (Chalamet), Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Original Song.
“The novel has 40 pages at the end that goes through the next 20 years of the lives of Elio and Oliver, so there is some sort of indication through the intention of author Andre Aciman that the story can continue,” Guadagnino told The Hollywood Reporter. “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?”
Guadagnino said that the first scene of the sequel could feature Elio watching Paul Vecchiali’s 1988 film Once More, which was the first French movie to deal with AIDS. “I think it [AIDS] is going to be a very relevant part of the story,” Guadagnino said about the sequel.
The director said he envisages the films as a series that could resemble Richard Linklater’s The Before trilogy, comprising Before Sunrise (1995), Before Sunset (2004) and Before Midnight (2013), which traced the relationship between an American man (Ethan Hawke) and a French woman (Julie Delpy) over two decades.
