The Big Picture · Interview
November 1, 2018/ 30 min/ Sean Fennessey
Sean Fennessey talks to Luca Guadagnino about remaking Argento's Suspiria, finishing it alongside the Call Me By Your Name wave, and his plan to disappear into American cinema.
6 films across 1 segment.
AI-generated This episode was transcribed and analyzed with AI models. The matches aren't perfect — expect the occasional misheard title or a link to the wrong film.
In conversation
The reason for the sit-down: Guadagnino's coven-in-a-dance-school reimagining, a project he says he wanted to make long before the films that made his name. He frames it as being about conflicting powers and the weight of the past, and defends its extreme violence as something the story led him to rather than a stamp he set out to leave.
Dario Argento's original, which he first met as a poster on a shuttered summer theater in northern Italy at 10 and saw at 14. A pastrami lunch in Westwood with writer David Kajganich turned into the remake, which opens the 'sealed world' out onto 1970s Germany and the Baader-Meinhof era.
Finished around the same time; its 'success quote-unquote' landed while Suspiria was nearly done. He calls Suspiria almost the exact opposite (Italian romance versus austere, cold, snowbound Germany) and says he sought out doing two films in one year.
He offers the scene of Paul killing Harry as his earlier stab at death played out in real time, granting it was intense but not as visceral, with no blades or guts exposed.
Cited with A Bigger Splash and Call Me By Your Name as films about artistic people coping with external forces, a throughline he only saw once Fennessey named it.
His answer to the show's closing question about the last great thing he'd seen. He calls David Lowery a humanist and a filmmaker he deeply admires.
Also mentioned raised along the way
Horror touchstones he rattled off PsychoThe ShiningThe ExorcistCat PeopleBlue VelvetAn American Werewolf in London
Richard LaGravenese scripts he admires The Fisher KingA Little PrincessBelovedBehind the CandelabraThe Bridges of Madison County
In passing The Thief of BagdadThe Lord of the Rings: The Return of the KingFifty Shades DarkerFifty Shades FreedUnforgiven
Not films filtered out: TV, games, ads
TV The Terror
Other Blood on the Tracks (Bob Dylan album / unmade Guadagnino project)