call me by your name (reprise)

Call Me By Your Name’s Director Would Like to Do a Sequel, Please

Luca Guadagnino already has a plan for a follow-up to his heart-stopping romance.
A still from the movie.
Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics.

Call Me by Your Name still hasn’t officially hit theaters, but director Luca Guadagnino is already plotting out his dream sequel. The romance has been a much buzzed-about hit on the festival circuit, earning acclaim from Sundance to Toronto. It’s blazing a trail all the way to the Oscars, baby! And once that happens, Guadagnino has plans for even more movies set in the CMBYN cinematic universe.

“I want to do a sequel, because Timothée Chalamet, Armie Hammer, Michael Stuhlbarg, Amira Casar, Esther Garrel—they are all gems,” Guadagnino said during a sit-down at the BFI London Film Festival, per Screen Daily. “The texture we built together is very consistent. We created a place in which you believe in the world before them. They are young, but they are growing up.”

The (first?) film, based on the lovely André Aciman novel of the same name, is about a pair of lovers (17-year-old Elio and 24-year-old Oliver, played by Chalamet and Hammer) who fall for each other over the course of a very beautiful summer in Italy. In a perfect world, Guadagnino would set the sequel for a 2020 release. “If I paired the age of Elio in the film with the age of Timothée, in three years’ time, Timothée will be 25, as would Elio by the time the second story was set,” he said.

He also pointed out that the new film would take place in the 1990s, an exciting era for these thoughtful characters: “It is the time of the fall of Communism and the start of the new world order and so-called "end of history" that Francis Fukuyama established then. It would be the beginning of the Berlusconi era in Italy, and it would mean dealing with the war of Iraq.”

A sequel would also allow Guadagnino to take his own liberties with these characters, and craft new storylines outside of the book’s canonical version. In the book—here’s a spoiler alert 10 years in the making—Elio and Oliver carry on a heated summer romance, then part and meet 15 years later, when Oliver is married with a wife and kids. In Guadagnino’s potential sequel, that could change, and Elio’s sexuality might be more fluid as well. “I don’t think Elio is necessarily going to become a gay man,” Guadagnino said. “He hasn’t found his place yet. I can tell you that I believe that he would start an intense relationship with Marzia [Garrel] again.”

Beyond a sequel, the director believes he’s found characters worth staying with for a while. He’d like to revisit Elio every now and then, like François Truffaut did with the character Antoine Doinel, who pops up in five of his films over the course of 20 years. “I think we can go there,” he said.