-By David Noh

Luca Guadagnino's lushly produced I Am Love offers the viewer a totally cinematic escape both in terms of its setting—the aristocratic Milanese environs of an haute-bourgeois industrial family—and its subject, which is an exploration of love in its myriad forms. The Magnolia Pictures release, debuting June 18 in New York and Los Angeles, centers around Emma (Tilda Swinton), a Russian who has become completely Italian for her husband and family, obliterating her roots. This elegant matriarch finds herself magnetically drawn to the young friend of her son, an attraction which more than ruffles the surface of her pristine, perfectly appointed life. It's a richly textured work, rife with references to the great films and auteurs Guadagnino adores. Upon meeting him in Manhattan, we easily fell into a hardcore cineaste conversation.

Film Journal International: What inspired the film? Is it autobiographical? It felt as if you really knew this rarefied world.
Luca Guadagnino: If I should do an autobiography, it would be the story of a tiny petit-bourgeois family in Sicily. No, this was not my world at all. The story was based on many different things. I did a movie in 2002 with Tilda Swinton, The Love Factory, which was an extreme close-up of her without cuts—one short conversation in which she speaks to me about her vision of love. That was the seed that we planted to make this movie which was trying to explore different ideas of love.

There were also elements from Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks, which I read when I was a young kid, so there was this idea of talking about love as some sort of revolutionary force in the milieu of a bourgeoisie that was already gone, like in Buddenbrooks. These things together morphed into an image I had one day of a lady walking alone through the rooms of her beautiful mansion and that led me to write the outline of the story.

FJI: You really found beauty in the city of Milan, which we here in America feel is such an unattractive, industrial city.
LG: We have the same feeling about it in Italy. But I love Milano very much, the way I feel there, especially. It's a very protective environment for me. I feel like I’m cuddled in that city even though the city is grey, the weather is not good, the people are cold. But there is something that embraces me, probably its discreet fashion of expressing itself through the amazing shape of its buildings. I wanted to try to show a social class shaping itself into the shape of the town.

FJI: From those first magical shots of Milan, blanketed by snow, your film has such an elegant look. Did you have a big budget?
LG: We had average budget, small-average. I have to praise my production team for their incredible work.

I worked with my costume designer, Maria Cannarozzi, and we conceived the wardrobe like in the movies of the 1940s. So we went to special fashion houses: Jill Sander and Fendi. I asked Raf Simons at Jill Sander to completely create Tilda's wardrobe; we did not just borrow clothes from his fashion shows. He delivered exactly what we all wanted, an amazingly fruitful collaboration. I love Raf, a very emotional guy and a great artist. He inspires me very much. He'd never done a movie before, but now I am waiting for him to direct a movie. It will be fantastic—have you ever seen his shows in Milano, like the one where he recreated Antonioni's Zabriskie Point?

We asked Fendi, this amazing aristocratic family of fashion, to create the wardrobe of this great family of men, as well as the other characters' costumes. The objective was to make it look exactly as it does in reality, but to also show the emotion.

FJI: How did you get involved with Tilda Swinton, who is such an international muse to so many artists?
LG: We met almost 20 years ago when I was a kid. I first saw her in Caravaggio by Jarman, which affected me so strongly. A few years later, I wanted to use her voice as the narrator for a short film I shot from chapters of The Wild Boys by William Burroughs, set in a penny arcade peepshow. I sent a letter and script to her agent and never got a reply.

A few months later, I was in Rome, 22 at the time, and I opened a newspaper and read that she would be presenting British movies in some museum. I thought, "Let's try to approach her." She was very warm and welcoming, an open human being and I said to her, "Why don't you want to do it?" and she said she didn't have the time to read the script, but how did it go? I said I didn't do it because you weren't there—and we became friends. She came back to Italy a few months later and we recorded her voice. She's a total artist, and one of the producers of this movie.

FJI: What drew you to her originally, and did she have much input with this script?
LG: It's an organic process—we were privileged to work together and it's not like "You do this and I do this..." I love her as a person and feel I am home when I am with her. She is one of the most intelligent and warm human beings, an amazing performer and a great cineaste. You never know why you are drawn to somebody, you just love them. Also, the camera loves her and she makes love to it. She learned Italian for the movie—amazing—Italian with a Russian accent.

FJI: Her character's daughter decides to come out as a lesbian, and I liked the fact that you didn't push this as some kind of political agenda.
LG: This is love, too, and a choice that had to be dealt with. I believe belonging to a group can go against being truthful to yourself. Maybe it's sort of wishful thinking that a mother can be so open to this identity change of her daughter, but I don't think it's utopic. It's more about showing the capacity to listen; if you listen to someone being truthful about themselves, you also listen to yourself and become more truthful.

FJI: Another fascinating woman you worked with here is Marisa Berenson.
LG: Ah! With her, we wanted the legacy of the great cinema of Visconti, Kubrick and others. And also, because I love her so much as an actress. I had the great chance to meet her and we loved each other mutually. She was fantastic and very generous, she believed in the movie and is such an beautiful woman. I wish I could work with her again.

FJI: How has your film been received in Italy?
LG: Very well. We had good reviews. But more than that, in the world beyond, everywhere from Korea to America, from England to Africa, the attention we got was so overwhelming.

FJI: How did composer John Adams come aboard?
LG: I didn't know him before 2005, even though he is one of the greatest composers of our time. I had been given his CD, "Naive & Sentimental Music,” for my birthday and started to listen to it. Oh my God, that was the sound I imagined in my mind when I was writing the movie. I became addicted and started to track performances of his work everywhere, and shared my love of him with Tilda, my editor and producers. When we shot the movie, we used pieces of his music which Tilda and the other actors listened to. We had to approach him about using it, and he responded very nicely, came to see a rough cut of the movie and it was a great moment. He loved it and gave his permission and said he would be happy to do it.

FJI: So he did not actually compose anything specifically for the film?
LG: No, we used his repertoire. I am not comfortable working with a composer because music is too important to me. I don't understand how you can just have it added on by a composer who comes in at the end. I don't know—I'm old-fashioned.

FJI: You're unusual because so many directors love that big "Hollywood" score, which can sometimes ruin a movie.
LG: Or be redundant, even though there are great composers like Marvin Hamlisch, who did an amazing soundtrack for The Informant. But, in the end, using Adams' repertoire, we did get a big "Hollywood" score.

FJI: What is your training? Did you go to film school?
LG: My training is my VHS and videotapes and thousands of liras and euros spent going to movies and buying books on cinema. I never went to film school. I don't like them because they mold people into becoming formulas. Kubrick didn't make many films, but he knew more than anyone else in the world. I had a Super-8 camera when I was seven years old, but I'm not someone who's affected by tools. Like even now, as we have this conversation, I am here but I'm not here, as I am also trying to understand how would I see this conversation taking place on film.

FJI: I would love to see your earlier film, Melissa P.
LG: It was not well-received, a disappointing experiment. I was asked to do this film from this scandalous novel about a girl's sexual awakening in Sicily. I moved it to another part of Italy. It was an experiment that didn't succeed fully I can tell you now, although there were a couple of good moments.

FJI: What are your future projects?
LG: I produced a short film by a 22-year-old director named Ferdinando Citto Filimarino. We finished cutting it and are hoping to go somewhere big with it. I believe very strongly in helping very young people do their job at the highest level. And I'm reading scripts right now.