To chat with Luca Guadagnino is to hopscotch the timeline of cinema. Each question posed to the Italian director regarding his craft is greeted with an explanation-as-push-pin to the filmmaker, the movie, the exact shot that best articulates his point and his wonder. It’s a recent Saturday morning and we are talking his latest, “A Bigger Splash,” a sumptuous mouthful of desire, jealousy and rock-and-roll longing. Loosely inspired by Jacques Deray’s 1969 classic, “La Piscine,” Guadagnino transfers the tale to the crossways of the Mediterranean: the volcanic island of Pantelleria. Long-time collaborator Tilda Swinton is at center stage as the sequined, Bowie-esque rock star, Marianne Lane. The film opens on Marianne post-throat surgery — and now shed of her voice — as she convalesces under the sun with her lover, Paul (Matthias Schoenaerts). But, the couple’s literal and figurative quietude is soon bulldozed by the verbosity and sun-tanned mania of record producer and former flame Harry (Ralph Fiennes) and his daughter, Penelope (Dakota Johnson).
Our conversation, flecked with humor and Guadagnino’s clear-eyed intensity, ventured from what initially repelled him from wanting to make “A Bigger Splash,” to finding creative oxygen in the detours of process, to always letting the audience do the math.
When StudioCanal came to you with the idea to reimagine “La Piscine,” was there an immediate image that sprang to mind?
Absolutely. I had an immediate image that was making me resist the idea of making the movie. It was the idea of rich people lounging under the sun. Ah, please. I don’t want to do that. Most people don’t know very well the body of my work. The notable movie I did is “I Am Love.” So, there’s a strange assumption that I am the director of lounging rich people. I don’t think that “I Am Love” is about that or I am about that either. If you see the documentaries that I have made, like “Inconscio Italiano“or “Cuoco Contadino” or “Bertolucci on Bertolucci” that I co-directed with Walter Fasano, you will see that I have another range of topics that I’m into. But, after this image that was pulling me off doing the movie, I had another image — what we call in Italian gioco al massacro, which is a sort of mouse trap game between people. That I was really interested in. The image I had was [Richard] Burton and Elizabeth Taylor in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” Then I thought: of course! Performance. Investigation of human relationships. That’s what conquered me. I’m not sure this movie is exactly in the same stream as Mike Nichols’ masterpiece, but it helped me to go into this movie.
How did the David Hockney painting from which the movie derives its name factor in?
I did not want to make a movie that was symbolic. I wanted to make a movie that could be pulled off as a sort of pragmatic, entertaining metaphor for an audience. The painting, “A Bigger Splash,” can be a metaphor, but can also be literal. In the apparent literal aspect of it, there is so much depth. In that series of paintings of California pools and interiors, there is a formal aspect that is very striking. The use of light, color, the use of surfaces. But, also there is a philosophical thing that is interesting to me. Who has made that splash? What happened before? What happened afterwards? Who is underneath the water?
The painting, in similar ways that your filmmaking does, leaves room for the viewer.
That for me is something that is absolutely necessary. In Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining,” when Shelley Duvall finally sees the ghosts, she is running away from the bathroom with a big knife. She’s terrified, and yet, she has to find a logical way to escape and get the child back. Mr. Kubrick puts her in a corridor. There, she sees two men: one masked as a bear, the other in a tux. The bear-man is [giving] a blowjob to the other man. The image alone unfolds a number of questions that forces you to investigate your self, your position. This let me understand that cinema, at its height, can be a powerful instrument of interpretation for an audience. That’s why I am kind of annoyed by literal cinema. The cinema that works only as a drama and exposes everything and doesn’t let an audience do the math. I want an audience to do the math.
And as such, we, as an audience, never once get ahead of this film’s narrative.
I love that. That’s why I’ve been so frustrated for so many years reading all these scripts that I got. I was reading material that I was completely ahead of the narrative. I was like, “What the fuck? Surprise me!” The audience wants to be surprised.
“A Bigger Splash” was also an opportunity to continue your decades-long collaboration with Tilda Swinton. People often want to reduce that working relationship to that of muse and artist.
The idea and concept of muse I find so unacceptable. It’s horrible. It immediately puts a dynamic of passive and active. And usually, the active one is not the muse. It’s the person who gets the inspiration.
Is it in that push-and-pull with Swinton, through the sort of displacement a true collaborator can summon, where you find creative oxygen?
Yes. I would use another word too: detour. It makes me very alive. Change makes me very alive. Transformation. What I don’t like is deafness. Incapacity to listen. And I am decisive. I am not the kind of director who wants a lot of options to decide from at the last minute. When I say that I like transformation, I like to change my mind, but it doesn’t mean I don’t know what precisely I want.
