Yes, Luca Guadagnino has heard all your jokes about the parallels between his new cannibalism romance Bones And All and the allegations against his old Call Me By Your Name star, Armie Hammer—and he’s got no time for it.
“Any correlation with this kind of innuendo and silliness is preposterous,” Guadagnino said during a masterclass at the Zurich Film Festival this weekend, denying that there was any connection between the plot of his film—which stars Call Me By Your Name’s Timothée Chalamet and Michael Stuhlberg, but notably not Hammer—and allegations that Hammer had expressed cannibalistic fantasies toward women in a series of leaked text messages last year.
(And here’s where we should probably give the standard disclaimer that that same batch of allegations also included much less fantastical accusations of sexual assault and abusive behavior on Hammer’s part, amid the more lurid and headline-grabbing stuff.)
Anyway, Guadagnino seems to have been genuinely annoyed at the suggestion that he might launch a whole movie as some sort of elaborate sub-tweet, detailing to the questioner the long history of his adaptation of Camille DeAngelis’ 2015 book. “David Kajganich and Theresa Park, the writer and one of our producers, have been working on Bones And All since the book was released. Many years ago, probably around the time when we were shooting Call Me by Your Name. It was to be directed by my great colleague Antonio Campos, but he decided not to go for it. That’s when they gave me the script.”
Bones And All is currently making the festival rounds—where Guadagnino has already taken home the Silver Lion for directing at the Venice Film Festival—ahead of a U.S. theatrical opening on November 18. The film has drawn pretty widespread critical acclaim for its depiction of two young cannibals (Chalamet and Taylor Russell) on the run in the U.S.
But enough about that! Luca Guadagnino, tell us what you learned about eating people (and American jaw habits) while making your cannibal movie!
We took it very matter-of-factly. Several pathologists provided us with answers on how you perform a bite on the body of someone who just died, for example. We learnt practical stuff. It takes a lot of effort to bite through the skin. Someone was wondering if we would need [more defined] jaw muscles, but Americans are like that anyway. It’s from chewing gum.
You heard it here first, folks: Chewing gum leads to cannibalism.