Luca Guadagnino

Luca Guadagnino (born August 10, 1971, Palermo, Sicily, Italy) is an Italian filmmaker known for Call Me by Your Name (2017), Suspiria (2018), Bones and All (2022), and Challengers (2024). Guadagnino is openly gay and often explores queer themes in his films.

Guadagnino was born in Palermo, Sicily, Italy, to a Sicilian father and an Algerian mother. He spent the first six years of his life in Ethiopia before returning with his family to Palermo in 1977 to escape the Ethiopian civil war. He went on to attend the University of Palermo before transferring to La Sapienza University in Rome, studying literature and film.

Guadagnino directed the short film Qui (1997), which centers on a couple having sex, before cowriting and directing his first feature, The Protagonists (1999). The film, the first of several collaborations between Guadagnino and the film’s star Tilda Swinton, is a faux documentary about an Italian film crew traveling to London to investigate a murder. After directing shorts and a music video, he was offered the opportunity to direct the film adaptation of the book 100 Strokes of the Brush Before Bed (2003), a fictionalized version of the diary of teenage author Melissa Panarello about her sexual coming-of-age in Sicily. Though Guadagnino did not like the book, he agreed to take on the project. He clashed with producers and the film’s funder Sony Pictures during the production of the film, Melissa P. (2005). The movie was met with poor reviews.

His next feature film was I Am Love (2009). Starring Swinton, the film follows a socialite wife in a wealthy Milanese family as she falls in love with a younger man. The film received critical praise, especially in regard to Swinton’s performance. He then adapted the 1969 French thriller film La Piscine (“The Swimming Pool”) with A Bigger Splash (2015). Swinton and Matthias Schoenaerts play a couple whose relationship is threatened when the wife’s old flame (Ralph Fiennes) and his daughter (Dakota Johnson) show up at the couple’s Italian villa. The film was met with a positive critical response.

Guadagnino then directed perhaps his most well-known film Call Me by Your Name (2017), an adaptation of a 2007 novel of the same name by André Aciman. Set in 1983 Italy, the film follows a summer affair between 17-year-old Elio (Timothée Chalamet) and Oliver (Armie Hammer), an intern to Elio’s father. Like Guadagnino’s two previous features, the film received generally positive reviews. The following year, he directed horror movie Suspiria (2018), an adaptation of the famous 1977 slasher film directed by Dario Argento. Featuring previous collaborators Swinton and Johnson as well as Chloë Grace Moretz, Suspiria follows a young ballet dancer (Johnson) as she discovers the dark underbelly of her dance academy. Suspiria received mixed critical reviews.

After creating, writing, and directing the 2020 HBO series We Are Who We Are, about teenagers on a U.S. military base in Italy, he again collaborated with Chalamet on Bones and All (2022). The film, which also stars Taylor Russell, tells the story of two teenage cannibals and is based on the 2015 novel of the same name by Camille DeAngelis. Like Suspiria, the film had a mixed critical response.

His next feature was Challengers (2024). A collaboration with novelist and playwright Justin Kuritzkes, Challengers stars Mike Faist, Josh O’Connor, and Zendaya as champion tennis players navigating a love triangle. The film received somewhat positive critical reviews. Also in 2024, Guadagnino and Kuritzkes collaborated on Queer, an adaptation of William S. Burroughs’s novel of the same name. The film features Daniel Craig as an American expatriate in Mexico City who has an affair with a younger man, played by Drew Starkey.

Guadagnino has received a number of awards for his films, mostly for Call Me by Your Name, for which he was nominated for the 2018 Academy Award for best motion picture of the year.