Luca [Guadagnino] and I are partners. People have referred to me as a “muse” with regard to so many individuals, imagining it to be a compliment, but it’s almost never true. And it’s certainly not true with Luca. When I first met [Derek] Jarman it was like becoming part of a circus. And it’s no different with Luca, I love working with him around the kitchen table. Even on projects in which I won’t be featuring… I always say that we are family, and I profoundly believe it: we are brother and sister, playmates. Ours is an ongoing conversation, an experiment without end, in which I always ask myself: how will it work, and if it will work, this trap I’m luring myself into.

Tilda Swinton, Tilda Swinton e Luca Guadagnino: vent’anni insieme, interview by Paola Piacenza, “Corriere della Sera”, 13 November 2015

Let’s take a step back in time. The year is 1999 and an eccentric debut work makes its première at the Venice International Film Festival: The Protagonists, a cruel melodrama about the arrogant male universe in which it is set, a film that uncovers the most disturbing emotional impulses. In an interview, just a few days ago, its director Luca Guadagnino defined his debut as almost embarrassing. It is said that directors (first and foremost Bertolucci, whom Guadagnino adores and to whom he dedicated the documentary Bertolucci on Bertolucci) dislike rewatching their films, and yet that debut work, naïve as is often the case, and perhaps even a little presumptuous, had an insolent quality and a love of cinema that Guadagnino has kept intact over time, along with an international ambition that has disappeared in his generation (he was born in 1971)… The most provocative feature of Luca Guadagnino’s images/imagination is his unconditional faith in the image: it is the image that speaks, recounts, delineates the thresholds inside of which his characters move, the geography of the locations, the movements of the narrative space, the snippets of reality. This doesn’t mean an absence of writing. On the contrary, his scripts are extremely precise; however, Guadagnino’s films are always more than illustrations of the scripts. The same goes for the actors, with whom the Palermo-born director appears to strive for a synergy of classic cinema and post-modernism: a kind of sumptuous mannerism that transforms them into eloquent bodies, filled with irreverence, caressed and scrutinised until the unexpected is drawn from them.

Cristina Piccino, Variazioni sul desiderio, “il manifesto”, 26 November 2015