Be Reserved In Your Private Life, Revolutionary In Your Art

"In 1993, when I was 22, I wanted to make a movie with Ralph Fiennes and Tilda Swinton," says Luca Guadagnino, director of A Bigger Splash. "And, 21 years later, I finally got to shoot a movie with them. So, I'm the embodiment of accomplishment."

Working with Swinton is nothing new for the 44-year-old Italian filmmaker: she was in his 1999 mockumentary debut The Protagonists and his operatic 2009 melodrama I Am Love, and will star in Guadagnino's upcoming remake of legendary giallo Suspiria. But, with A Bigger Splash, he finally got to cast Fiennes; and Matthias Schoenaerts and Dakota Johnson whilst he was at it. The film is a radical remake of Jacque Deray's La Piscine, another tale of simmering sexual tension and psychological gameplaying, that swaps out the original's Cote d'Azur "backdrop" for Pantelleria Island in the Sicilian Strait, close to the coast of Tunisia.

"I wanted a place that could challenge the characters. And a place that could perform as a character itself," Guadagnino says. He'd been there twice as a teenager — once with his sister and her friends, then with his friends — and thought of it when StudioCanal proposed he remake La Piscine. "I have this vivid memory of being terrified by the howling wind of the night. It was an extreme emotion that resonated in me. So, when I got the offer to do this movie, I had this instant connection in my mind that brought me back to there."

It wasn't a place Guadagnino longed to return to. He hates hot weather and the seaside, and did even as a teenager. "But I was very quiet, and our trips were very quiet," he says. "We were very shy people. It wasn't the summer of booze and fuck and sex."

A Bigger Splash is, however, full of drinking, fucking and plentiful full-frontal male nudity; Fiennes' junk almost deserves its own credit. Guadagnino has always been provocative: his first ever short film, Qui, shot when he was 24, was inspired by Nagisa Oshima's In The Realm Of The Senses, and revolved around fellatio. "In many ways, it's an experimental movie in time and duration, a punk gesture because of how explicit it is. But, for all my underground attitude, I still wanted to tell a story: the story of a blowjob."

In between A Bigger Splash and Suspiria, Guadagnino is making a smaller film about two boys falling in love — and fucking — in the '80s, meaning that his reputation as cinematic chronicler of sex isn't going away. But, away from the cinema, Guadagnino is a home-body ("I much prefer the travel of the mind"), who routinely retreats to the Swedish countryside for the cool and the quiet.

"If I die, and people read my diary, they will find a very conservative person," Guadagnino says. "I'm very reserved, very routine, very boring. But that could never forgive me for being boring when it comes to making movies. Tilda told me, when we did the first film together, that there was an adagio by a writer — I don't remember who now, I should ask her — that said: 'Be quiet and reserved in your private life, and wild and revolutionary in your art.' She instantly recognised that in me. That's exactly how I try to live."