This is a completely stripped-away movie.
There's no fanfare, there's no green screen, there's no monsters.
There's nothing to distract from this raw and open vulnerability and honestness
of two characters who expose themselves to another person in an emotional capacity,
and it's so beautifully received and then reciprocated.
The entire movie would live and die depending on these little moments,
and if they weren't honest and genuine then it would just never work.
I just didn't know that I could be that honest as a performer.
I didn't know that I could do that.
It made me nervous to be that vulnerable and honest on film in an acting capacity,
but then I had several great conversations with Luca
about the nature of fear and desire and how they're very part-and-parcel,
and then he challenged me.
He was like, 'Look, if you say you want to live your life as an artist,
don't you want to take movies that challenge you?'
'Don't you want to take movies that force you to grow?'
I couldn't be more thankful that I took his advice.
In Aciman's book, it's a recollection of memories from Elio's perspective
many years after the events, and it's so internalised.
In the movie it's basically in third person,
and it's the now and then of the summer between Elio and Oliver.
What I tried to do was to be with them within the environment they're living in
and to try not to think in terms of a cinematic expectancy
of how things have to go in a movie to play, for a movie to work.
In fact, many of the people we asked to finance the movie,
they turned the movie down because it didn't play
according to the textbook of the coming of age,
and in particular of the gay coming of age, in which there has to be an antagonist.
There has to be an internal and an external antagonist.
The thing that felt very liberating for me as a director
was that there were no antagonists, internal and external.
It was more about what happens in real life,
that you find someone and you discover yourself in the eyes of the other one.
I think that the fact that the parents, and in general the world, is supportive
comes from a great Prefab Sprout song
which says 'all the world loves lovers, all the world loves people in love',
and I grew up with that song.
So for me, it's a really personal approach to the subject matter.
I have a question to Timothée from our Chinese audiences.
They really like you and they gave you a nickname called 'Tian Cha'
because Tim Cha sounds like Tian Cha and that literally means sweet tea.
- Sweet tea!
Yeah, so they really like you and they really want to know,
is there anything you can share with us about your future plan,
and does that include China?
Wow, I mean-,
(A), thank you, and from now on everybody please call me sweet tea.
Done.
Nothing in the future, but it'd be great to get out there.
I'm stunned or something, because I'm always surprised when anybody cares.
So yeah, I look forward to being out there, God willing,
if the world doesn't explode before then.
- Thank you.
James and I worked on this script in 2015, on the bridge between '14 and '15,
while I was shooting A Bigger Splash.
Ralph was naked a lot in the set, and James came on set and saw the spectacle
of the beauty of Ralph jumping like a satyr on set,
and I think he was really inspired by that.
(laughter)
Then we tried to make the movie with him as a director,
and we really tried very, very hard because I'm a cinephile
and I wanted to watch a movie by James Ivory,
let alone being a producer of James Ivory.
To be beside Mr Merchant would have been a great honour for me.
Unfortunately we didn't succeed, and so the wand passed to me.
When we started to work on the script with my editor Walter Fasano,
which we do basically on every movie because a movie is an organism,
it's alive until it ends in the eyes of who watches the film,
and so the script changes a lot through the shoot until the editing process,
I already had so much fulfilment with Ralph
that I didn't need to be fulfilled by Armie or Timmy,
but they were very eager to be challenging Ralph in that ground,
but I said, 'No, no, no.'
One of the particularly beautiful things about the film
were the songs by Sufjan Stevens that came every once in a while.
I'm interested in the process of getting him involved,
how he came to be involved, how working with him was,
and making those songs part of the film integrally, I think.
Speaking of nudity, I think that the great depth of Mr Stevens, of Sufjan,
is in the way he approaches his own biography
and how he fleshes out on his beautiful canon of songwriter.
Carrie & Lowell is like an incredible, painful album about his parents
and the relationship with his mother.
So when we decided to go away from the narrative first singular person of the book
and to skip the idea of some sort of narration in the film,
we still felt that we needed to have a sort of godlike personality
that was enveloping the film, and you can go there in different ways.
If you think of The Shining, you have the cards.
It's Wednesday, one o'clock, twelve o'clock.
This is how Kubrick conveys the idea of someone
controlling the time of the film and the space.
We thought that instead of going for something like that,
like cards or stuff like that,
maybe someone that was so honest and so bare in his, let's say, art, like Sufjan,
would have been a wonderful voice to be added
to the place and the characters of this film.
So I would say he's another character in the movie.
I approached him and, as with all the great people I approach in my life,
starting with Tilda Swinton in 1995, he called back and said, 'Yeah, why not?'
We discussed about the book, the theme of the book,
the script, the ideas for the film, and he was very shy.
I said, 'Maybe you can give us a song,'
and a few months later he showed up with three songs.
Two are new, Visions of Gideon and Mystery of Love,
and one is a reinterpretation, a rearrangement for piano, of Futile Devices.
So when the urgency of the voice of Elio and Oliver becomes strong in the movie,
we start to get also the voice of Sufjan that goes with us until the end.
I think the testament of the intelligence of the three people in here
is that we didn't do any rehearsals.
We did one rehearsal.
A little tiny one.
We did one rehearsal at the house.
We show up and Luca says, 'Let's just do a quick rehearsal.'
We go, 'Oh yeah, great.' We're all wound up, we're ready to go.
We've been spending a lot of time together, we're ready to do this.
He was like, 'Great, let's go out in the back yard.'
So we go in the back yard and there's a patch of grass,
and he goes, 'Why don't you guys lay down there
and just rehearse, I don’t know, scene 72?'
I don’t know if that was the actual number, but we flip in the page
and we find the script and it just says, 'Elio and Oliver make out in the grass,'
and that's all it said.
So he goes, 'Whenever you're ready.'
(laughter)
And so Timmy and I are like, 'Okay, let's do this.'
So we lay down on the grass, we start making out,
and he's like, 'No, no, no.'
'More like you feel it, like you mean it.'
Then we were like, 'Okay, alright, let's do it,' and we start making out again.
And we're going and we're going and we're going.
All of a sudden we look up, and Luca had already walked away
and just left us there in the grass.
That was our one rehearsal.
(speaking French)
It's humbling, what she said. I'm going to translate.
It's about me, sorry.
Esther just said-,
(laughter)
that what she's going to dearly bring with her in this movie
is the way I directed her, which wasn't about speaking the words
but the way I was looking at her, and that she never felt this way
apart from her father Philippe Garrel, who is one of the greatest directors alive.
Thank you so much, I'm humbled.
There is a moment in the movie in which I made Esther-,
this was sickening, this is perverted.
I made Esther speak a dialogue that is from 'J'entends plus la guitare',
which is the masterpiece from Philippe Garrel, 1985.
It's at the end of the movie when finally they meet
and they speak about being friends for life.
That was really, like, we took the dialogue from Garrel
and we put it in the mouth of Garrel's daughter.
That was a nice mise en abyme, as they would say in France.
That's a weird way to put it.
I'm stealing this from Armie so don't kill me when it gets to you,
but I don't think I'll ever have an experience as immersive as this one.
Being out there a month in advance,
getting to shoot in the region where it was from,
getting to shoot in the region where the director lives,
and getting a story that's so intimate and intimately told.
There are so many moments of thought in the script
and characters thinking, which is rare.
Usually things are very exposition-oriented and you've got to move the plot forward.
So yeah, I'm going to be hard-pressed to find a project like this anytime soon, I think.
I forgot the original question, I'm sorry.
What do you bring with you, after you made the movie, of this experience?
It's none of your damn business.
There have been a few comparisons to Moonlight.
Do you see any similarities at all?
I am a big admirer of Barry Jenkins' masterpiece
and I see in his research great love for the Taiwanese cinema of Hou Hsiao-Hsien,
and I love Hou Hsiao-Hsien so I think that's our common ground, probably.