QUEER — Luca Guadagnino & Justin Kuritzkes take William S. Burroughs on a whole new trip

For their first project together since last year's steamy hit CHALLENGERS, director Luca Guadagnino (CALL ME BY YOUR NAME) and writer Justin Kuritzkes tackle another story about a sensuous 1950s romance of desire and longing: an adaptation of William S. Burroughs' novel QUEER. The pair tell host Rico Gagliano about why they vibe, how they make audiences feel the heat, and how their films are like a MAD MAX movie.

QUEER is streaming exclusively on MUBI in the UK, Ireland, Latin America, Germany, Canada, India & more from January 31.

To stream some of the films we've covered on the podcast, check out the collection Featured on the MUBI Podcast. Availability of films varies depending on your country.

MUBI is a global streaming service, production company and film distributor dedicated to elevating great cinema. MUBI makes, acquires, curates, and champions extraordinary films, connecting them to audiences all over the world. A place to discover ambitious new films and singular voices, from iconic directors to emerging auteurs. Each carefully chosen by MUBI’s curators.

Transcript

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This episode includes adult language and spoilers. So this movie is, of course based on the book <i>Queer</i>. It's by William S. Burroughs. I understand you first read it as a teenager. Tell me about reading it that first time. What was the impact? Well, I read the-- I read the book. I don't know. I have this idea that I might have even read the book during a spring day in Palermo that resembled that springtime, with all the hazy blue flowers blowing in the wind of the first pages of the book. Palermo has a lot of tropicalism to it. So it was almost like mirroring myself in the city of Palermo by reading the Mexico City of the book roaming through the city. Yeah. I mean, it's an extraordinary novel. And for a 17 year old to be exposed to the complexity and beauty and daringness of Burroughs was a really shocking moment. And at the same time, this book was about this profound sense of longing for the other, that I don't know if everyone has in it in themselves, but I had it myself. So I found, I thought that the book found me. That is director Luca Guadagnino, and it's no surprise his new movie version of <i>Queer</i> is as sensual as it comes. Where you feel that sense of longing like a psychedelic trip. It's about a guy named William Lee, played by Daniel Craig, an aging American junkie who spends his days drinking, smoking and picking up men in the louche gay scene of Mexico City, circa 1955. It's a shallow kind of life. Until he starts dating a beautiful new guy in town named Allerton.<i>- How about the T-Bone steak for two?- That was fine.</i> Bill's not totally sure if Allerton's gay or just experimenting or if he even respects him.<i>Oh. They list Baked Alaska. Ever eat it?</i><i>No. Real good. It's hot on the outside and cold inside.</i><i>It's hot on the outside and cold inside.</i> But William's determined to make the guy love him by any means necessary, including taking him deep into the jungle in search of a drug that will let them read each other's minds. I'm Rico Galliano. Welcome back to the MUBI Podcast. MUBI's the streaming service that champions great cinema. On this show, we tell you the stories behind great cinema. We are brewing up season eight for you as we speak. Meanwhile, here's a special episode to tide you over. It is my interview with Luca Guadagnino and his screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes about <i>Queer</i>. It streams on MUBI in the UK, Canada, Mexico and many more starting January 31st. Luca and Justin were the duo behind <i>Challengers</i>, another movie about super passionate people that was one of my favorite films of 2024. You will hear us talk about how they make that kind of sexual heat practically radiate off the screen and also about <i>Queer</i>'s surprising influences, from body horror to a pair of classic British directors. But first, I asked Luca why he and Justin just seem to vibe together. I think it must be this brotherhood born in oppositions.- How so?- American? Italian? Yeah. Jewish, Arab. Young and older. And yet both of us are motivated by the sheer ambition of wanting to be very profound and the playfulness of doing it together. Of course, we're going to do it also separately, but together. There is some excitement that comes with it. Allow me to say that. Well, Justin, tell me about the first time you guys met. Was that connection clear from the very beginning? I had written a script for <i>Challengers</i> on spec and really had no expectations of what was going to happen with it, or who I was going to make it with. Luca had been a dream director for it and it got in his hands, and very quickly after that we met on the phone. I got on a plane to Milan and we spent a week together, basically just getting to know each other and seeing if we could throw ourselves into the trenches together very quickly. And it was clear to me immediately that we spoke the same language, And that the things that excited me about movies were a lot of the same things that excited him. And what are those? What is that language? That's harder to put into words. It was more just I felt immediately that Luca not only understood the world of my script and these characters so totally, but that, more importantly, he could see a way in for himself and see a way that he could find what he needed creatively inside of it. And so that became a process of me really trying to make space for him within the script. You mentioned films that you guys shared, either for that movie or in general, are there kind of like, you know, specific films that you kind of both reference? Well, Bertolucci came up really early. Yeah, the great Beat Generation movie that he did, <i>The Sheltering Sky</i>. That is a movie that we spoke about at length and that we watched together. Yeah, and then we didn't talk about this so much as I was starting to write <i>Queer</i>, but I've come to learn later on that Powell and Pressburger was a massive touchstone for Luca, and their work was certainly a massive touchstone for me. What about Powell and Pressburger? And I mean, I'm trying to think of the through line between Powell and Pressburger and Bertolucci. What do they have in common? First of all, you have to know that Bernardo Bertolucci used to live in Holland Park, and like a couple of blocks from him, there was the house of Michael Powell for many years. Also, Bernardo Bertolucci was very strongly connected with British cinema and being a huge cinephile. Bernardo certainly grew up thinking a lot about the movies of Powell and Pressburger. And if you think of the <i>Little Buddha</i>, you can see a lot of Powell and Pressburger there. In our case, the idea of artificiality was of great help from Powell and Pressburger because we really were thinking that this wasn't a period drama about William Burroughs days in Mexico City, but this was the attempt to render on screen, the imagery in <i>Queer</i>, the novel, about this emotional journey of William Lee. When we talk to the scholar Oliver Harris, who is the greatest expert on William Burroughs, about that, he's going to tell you that a lot of descriptions in the book are not actual descriptions of the places that he has been in Mexico City, but are places that are either from the total fantasy of Burroughs or from the memories that of Burroughs' experiences before having been in Mexico, for instance, the Rathskeller bar. It doesn't exist in exist in Mexico, never existed, but that come from memories of his days in Vienna back in the 20s. So Powell and Pressburger comes with great, great help because those were filmmakers that were describing twilight worlds, worlds at twilight, moments of passage in history where nothing was going to be the same. And they were doing that with this heightened hyper artificial reality that was the most truthful representation of the emotions that they were trying to put on screen.- Super expressionistic.- Yeah. Well let's go. We've moved on to <i>Queer</i>. Like we said. You were into the book as a teen. I mean, were you carrying this with you for decades? Basically, I want to make this into a movie. Yeah, but then the rights were always, unavailable. And so, everything collided beautifully when I met Justin. Because I met Justin, we became friends. I agreed on making his beautiful script into a movie.<i>Challengers.</i> We were in Boston working on it. I had this intuition about Burroughs book again, which recurringly came back to my mind, and every time I was asking again for the rights, they were not available. I did ask again, and they were available. So I said to Justin, read the book. They just magically became available at that moment. They just happened to like... Yeah, because I think there have been, Oren Moverman, the wonderful director who wanted to make it for a while, and I think the option rights expired around the same period of time. We still had to go through a little bit of an exam with James Grauerholz from the Burroughs' Estate. What was important, and maybe you can answer this, Justin, what was important to him that you not mess with about the book? That I can't remember exactly what was important to him, but yeah, I mean, what was important to us certainly was that we honor the book and depart from it in ways that felt like we were extrapolating from within the spirit of the book and not imposing something completely alien onto it. I confess I haven't read it, but am I right that it was originally published unfinished? Is that right? The book was never published during the time in which he was writing it. He published <i>Junkie</i>. He wrote <i>Queer</i>, and then he put it aside until the time in which he met James Grauerholz, and James convinced him to unearth the book, and that was published in 1985.- Right.- The book, I mean, I'm resisting the idea that this book is to be considered unfinished, that the quest of this drug that can make them connect is unfinished. But there is a sense of completeness to the book. Yeah. It wasn't so much that I felt like we were tasked with completing an unfinished work as much as it was that in translating it to film, we felt like we had to bring in some of these other elements in order to create a complete picture of what the book is. We tell people at the beginning of this episode that there are spoilers. So I'll just say spoiler alert again. But like, what did you add to the text that was not there? Well, the main structural departure, which came from a lot of conversations that Luca and I were able to have before I even started putting pen to paper is that in the book, they reach the jungle in Ecuador and they get to Doctor Cotter's hut. And for a moment it seems like they might get this drug, <i>yagé</i> which they hope will create a sort of telepathic communication between them. And then the book very quickly closes down that possibility, and they return back to civilization, not having gotten what they came for. And we were both excited by the idea of not closing that door, but opening it and stepping through and seeing what was on the other side. In particular, what was exciting about that is that it wasn't obvious that that would resolve everything that they might not react the same way, or they might find the experience too intense, or they might come out of that experience feeling less connected than they did going into it, or more connected in a way that they couldn't sustain. All of that felt just really rich and complex to me. I also have to say, when that experience starts to unfold, there was a moment where I was like, there's the horror influence that I know Luca has. Suddenly, the film takes this kind of turn into more sort of surrealism. I can imagine that being exciting as well, getting to play with that. Yeah, well, I mean, that's an extension of something I was feeling the whole time I was writing the script was that I knew who I was writing it for, and so I was very selfishly writing scenes that I was excited to watch Luca direct, and that was definitely one of them. It's not a sequence I would ever write for another director. It doesn't feel like it's part of <i>Challengers</i>.- That's true.- Yeah, yeah. What scene? Especially for folks that haven't seen it yet, that maybe they should look out for when it unfolds that you put in there. It's like, this is the one that I want Luca to take care of for me. Well, that one certainly. Things like the ghost hand reaching out and caressing somebody's face. That's something that's described as happening inside of Lee's head in the book, which I knew that if I externalized that on the page, that Luca would find a way to make that look achingly, sort of full of longing. Guys, it is heartbreaking. My hair stood on end. I should say, for folks who haven't seen it, you're talking about a scene where Lee takes Allerton to the movies. And while they sit watching this French film, he's imagining himself caressing Allerton. And you visualize this with a double exposure. So it looks like this ghostly version of Lee is stroking Allerton's face and laying his head on Allerton's shoulder.- It's just a gorgeous moment.<i>- Avec les miroir de l'eau.</i> I want to ask you about that. Like, how did you think about how to visually pull that off? What was your thought process in making that? I think Burroughs used to go a lot to the movie theaters. I don't know if he was a movie buff, but certainly he must have seen a lot of movies, particularly the silent movies, when he was in Saint Louis. And there is something archetypical about the cinematic techniques of the superimposed. It has all that cinema. So I felt like to think of Burroughs' upbringing in Saint Louis, having seen some movies, probably I've seen Mélies and the simplicity of that, but at the same and the profoundly cinematic language that is in that, I felt it was too irresistible not to do that. This actually kind of points me to my next question in a way. This idea of longing. There's a through line running through a lot of Luca's work and your work together so far. And it's stories about people motivated by literal passion, like sexual passion. But it's also this kind of longing, sexual passion, something that's just out of reach. Why is that a theme that you keep returning to? I've seen a movie recently that I deeply loved called <i>The Shrouds</i> by David Cronenberg, in which the leading male character is grieving the loss of his wife, and he's installing these kind of shrouds that envelop the corpse of the wife and sees the decaying. And this movie is so beautiful because it's all about the importance of the physical relationship with the loved ones. I think there are very few themes that are really universal. And one of these themes is the human craving for the other, because I think that Mr. Cronenberg is one of the great explorers of human condition. I take my lesson from people like Cronenberg. But let me then also talk about, so you're exploring this theme of kind of sexual passion. The thing I love about your films together is that you can feel it. You kind of you leave the theater kind of fanning yourself like, "whew", what technically is the secret to that? Like, how do you make these flat images on the screen seem like you can feel the sweat of these characters? Well, I'm very touched by that reaction. I mean, I think for me, it's important on the page that any scene of intimacy be a scene where something is at stake or something is being worked out about the relationship between the characters. So it feels, in other words, like drama is happening there. And that's certainly true in <i>Challengers</i>. And it's it's true in <i>Queer</i> too. There's something being worked out with the with the sex. Yeah. That the movie is very much happening there. People are after something and a connection between the two movies that I didn't come to realize until after we had already made <i>Queer</i> is that they're both, in some sense, building toward a climax where characters are attempting to communicate without language, that they're trying to speak to each other on a deeper level and understand each other in a way that they can only understand through action. And I think that's something that Luca is certainly particularly well suited to as a filmmaker, for sure. But I do ask you, though, Luca, what technically is going on. Like, what is it? It's very difficult because you're asking me to rationalize a process that, for me is intuitive, and it's also coming off of the layers of my experience in life and the honestly, the candidness that I put in what I do that reflects what I feel when I feel it.- If I may, I have my theories though.- Please. I was looking at this, I was looking at... I watched<i>Call Me By Your Name</i> a lot, and it's like, long takes is one thing. Staying with the people on screen, not chopping it up like you're experiencing what they're experiencing, sort of in real time. There is a very tragic disconnection in contemporary cinema when it comes to editing. I think contemporary cinema in the past 15 to 18 years of cinema, particularly Western cinema, is catastrophic when it comes to the editing. Because of that, because it distances you in some way. Trimmings. They, they, they cover their asses and they then trim sequences by using bits and pieces so that they have speaking, talking heads instead of having behavior. And then I would say, and you add to that, there's a heightened sound, like there's a moment in this movie that-- So I don't know why I focused on it at the moment, but it's right after the two characters have had a sexual encounter. They light up cigarettes and Daniel Craig takes the match and tosses it away. And you can hear off screen the faint tink of the match stick hitting the floor. That is something that... I like to hear all the sounds, and then it's up to the wonderful work of Craig Berkey, the sound mixer, the re-recording mixer who is legendary, who makes sure that everything is meaningful and it doesn't sound like an effect.- It's great. Yeah, Craig is great.- It's amazing. But because it's so heightened, I think that that also like heightens the feeling that you're like in it. Like every little thing is sort of like, taken to a higher level somehow. I mean, is this something that you're considering while you're making your films? Yeah, I mean, I like it. You know, when you make a movie, you have to be patient. Shooting a movie is not the finished product that it will be afterwards, a lot, which will include also Justin, because you will ask him to consider adding lines to the characters or taking care of all the lines that you need to have around the characters from people passing by, or crowds in the room. But all of that will add sense and consciousness of the movie. So you have to be patient. It takes time. Speaking of which, our time is wrapping up and I kind of want to go back to something Justin said a minute ago.- So you're giving Justin the last word?- Listen. Look, I used to be a screenwriter, so, you know. They always say age before beauty. But my understanding is that your next film together is going to be a film version of the World War II action comic book, <i>Sergeant Rock.</i> Yeah. And I was trying to imagine how that made any sense. But, Justin, you mentioned before how you want sex scenes to have sort of drama and story. And I was just thinking about it, and George Miller said something similar to me when I interviewed him about the action in <i>Mad Max: Fury Road</i>, that he didn't want to pause the story for a car chase. He wanted the story to be happening during the chase. And I wonder if maybe that's the allure of doing an action film, and maybe what keeps either of these kind of movies from being just exploitation movies? Well, I think, listen, George Miller is like one of the greats, and I think what he's saying is very true. I mean, I think the difference of what happens in a good movie and a movie that doesn't work quite as well. It's not as if the stories are different or the things that are being explored are different. It's the seriousness with which the subject is treated, and the pursuit of the truth within anything that you're depicting. I think a great action sequence is one where it's very clear, not just what's at stake, but what the philosophy about human behavior is within that action sequence. And George Miller's movies are certainly a great example of movies where you're seeing a whole philosophy be revealed, a whole way of looking at the world based on how someone chooses to outrun someone, or how someone chooses to kill someone. I mean, <i>Furiosa</i> is a great example. That ending sequence with her really trying to figure out what would be the appropriate punishment for this guy.- Yeah.- And you get this profound view into how this character views the entire world, which in the hands of a lesser filmmaker, would probably be quite a bit simpler. Sure. Ditto a sex scene in a Luca Guadagnino/Justin Kuritzkes film. There you go. See, I bet you didn't expect to get compared to <i>Mad Max.</i>- I'm honored to be compared to <i>Mad Max.</i>- Anytime. Justin Kuritzkes and Luca Guadagnino. Daniel Craig got a Golden Globe nomination for his starring role in <i>Queer</i>, by the way. You can see it for yourself when it lands on MUBI January 31st in the UK, Canada, Latin America, Germany and lots of other places. Check the show notes of this episode for details on where to watch. And that is the MUBI Podcast for this week. Follow us so you don't miss an episode. And while you're at it, leave a five star review, won't you?

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podcast@mubi.com And meanwhile, let's roll credits. The show is written and hosted and edited by me, Rico Gagliano. Ciara McEniff is our producer. Steven Colon mastered this episode. Our theme music was composed by Yuri Suzuki. Thanks this week to Ed Frost, to David Harper for recording Luke and Justin. To everyone who has helped battle the fires here in LA and to the late David Lynch for having ever existed. R.I.P. The show is executive produced by me, along with Efe Çakarel, Daniel Kasman and Michael Tacca. And finally, to stream the best in cinema, head to MUBI.com to subscribe and start watching. Thanks for listening, now go watch some movies.