Interview: Luca Guadagnino and Taylor Russell on Bones and All and Cannibalism As Metaphor

“What sign are you?” Luca Guadagnino interjects toward the end of our interview after observing my very regimented notes. When I reply that I’m a Libra, he smiles with satisfaction, registering the validation of his hunch by simply saying, “Very balanced.” As for Guadagnino, a Leo, he stays true to his own sign: confident in his art, not to mention fiercely protective and proud of his artistic collaborators.

With Guadagnino’s Bones and All, the filmmaker deepens one partnership with returning performer Timothée Chalamet while also forging a beautiful new connection with rising star Taylor Russell. The young actors play Lee and Maren, respectively, two itinerant outcasts on the run due to their insuppressible taste for human flesh. As the cannibals navigate the debris of a hollowed-out Midwest in Reagan-era America, they form a powerful connection rooted in something greater than their shared illicit desire. Guadagnino swoons for the emotional vulnerability of the budding romance, which sparkles thanks to the combination of the immediacy of Chalamet’s lanky physicality and Russell’s ethereal grace.

I spoke with Guadagnino and Russell prior to Bones and All screening to rapturous applause at this year’s New York Film Festival. Our talk covered how they found the metaphorical resonance of the story, why the specifics of cannibalism factored little into their creative processes, and what they learned about America on their road trip through the country’s heartland.

This film, like Call Me By Your Name, features a character who’s drawn out of their introverted shell by a passionate connection they feel to someone else. How do you capture something so interior as a director and convey it as an actor?

Luca Guadagnino: My answer is very short: I have amazing actors to look at.

Taylor Russell: [laughing] And my answer is that to be seen by somebody with his eyes and his lens is the greatest gift you can have as an actor.

Luca, you recently dismissed the idea of chemistry as American stupidity…

TR: Did you say that?

LG: Can I use this platform to apologize for that? I meant Hollywood stupidity, not American stupidity. I take it back.

I mean, we can own it as a country.

LG: You know, the problem for me is that I like the mystery in things. I like the possibility of something you don’t predict and you don’t expect. The way in which art works for me is that space that you don’t know. You cannot know everything when you do something as an artistic aim. So, for me to kind of slot everything in boxes and find a way to control everything is the opposite way of an artistic process. That’s why I don’t like that.

Is that part of why you look for new talent like Taylor to slot into your work alongside regular collaborators because you know what to expect from the latter?

LG: Taylor being as green as a baby pea. She’s not new. I was impressed by her when I saw Waves. I went to see the film because of Kelvin [Harrison Jr.], who’s divine, but I discovered Taylor. Which, again, I didn’t predict. It was like an epiphany. When I got the script and I started to think about who could be Maren, I quickly thought of this young lady I saw in that Trey Shults movie that I love. That was immediate. She might claim that I made her wait a little bit before offering the role. But I have this idea that I offered you the role almost on the spot.

TR: We can go with that.

Obviously, the film is rooted in the literal elements of cannibalism, but it has such a wide resonance for anyone who’s ever felt like an outsider or an outcast. Do you have to hold the metaphorical and the literal in your head at the same time?

TR: Interestingly enough, the cannibalism wasn’t something that I was concerned about how [it would come] across or how I would do it. One, when you are doing a physical act, there’s something relieving about that because it’s a physical embodiment of an emotional undercurrent. So it feels really good in a way to have something to do physically. And I knew that Luca would take care of most of that, so that wasn’t something that I was concerned with. I mean, it’s all the emotional stuff you want to make sure that you’re representing and painting well. Also, I think every day is so different, so you’re just trying to get through as it comes.

You all did research on the physicality of eating the flesh and the muscular movements it entails. Was that something you filed in the back of your mind then?

TR: I knew that it was never going to be so technical [that we’d show] each artery, how we’re going to pull that apart, and what it would feel like. But you have to know the practical aspects of it not being the same as eating a piece of fish. It’s different.

LG: We were very focused on making sure that the practice of eating [human flesh] was met with a strong sense of reality. But I think that cannibalism, at least for me, wasn’t the point of this ever. It’s about the impossibility of escaping your own self and your identity. And, at the same time, the aim for a possibility that soothes your soul in a way and makes you meet the other. The cannibalism is more about being someone who has a condition that is inescapable.

On the note of escaping yourself in the ’80s, I know that you’re a big fan of Jonathan Demme. Was Something Wild at all in your head?

LG: Huge. [And that film is] a huge, huge milestone, and a sort of paragon. I always think of Jonathan, and Something Wild is just such an incredible movie.

There’s a familial environment that you cultivate on your sets. Timothée Chalamet said you were more like a father on the set of Call Me By Your Name and a brother on the set of Bones and All. Is that an evolution of you as a person, or was being more like a peer to the cast what was required to make this film?

LG: No, I think because he was younger, and now he’s grown up. He was a young boy, and now he’s a man. I think he was a genius and intuitive when we did Call Me by Your Name. And now he’s a genius, intuitive, and also very well prepared and thoughtful like a man would be. We grow, and then one day I will be the one who’s to be taken care of.

The script came your way during the pandemic. Did either of you feel like the film has some element of releasing some of the anxieties and the tensions that we felt during the pandemic? The sense of immediacy and physical contact feels so pointed given that we were so cloistered away from people for so long.

TR: I think the brilliance of the chrysalis of cannibalism in this film, and all of the themes of this film, is that you can insert it into any sort of frame to break out of. Addiction, mental illness, family trauma, trauma from Covid—it shifts and moves like water to work in all these different worlds to understand those things or to feel seen by [the film].

LG: For me, it was [about more than just] processing Covid or lockdown. A friend of mine who saw it very early made me realize that this is a movie that unconsciously has processed a lot of the pain that I went through while in Covid lockdown. This movie [is] a resistance to the concept of the adulthood that is destroying the children. And so, then, who is the monster? I had lost my father a few months before shooting the movie. My father, who I dearly loved…you can see in the movie this anguish [associated with] being a son and being interlaced with your father. Again, it’s something that comes off on screen unconsciously. I think I would have not been able to make the movie that I did while my father was still with us.

The road trip genre is a great way to explore America, and I’m curious what you all learned about the country or took away from it from the journey.

LG: I studied American literature. I was aware of the idea of the wilderness and civilization being two forces that push and pull against one another in America. Think of Herman Melville, Stephen Crane, or Edgar Allan Poe. It was delightful for me, as an Italian, coming to America and [seeing] that tension even now. At the same time, I discovered all the great contradictions of this amazing country. All the sorrow that comes with the idea of a society that relies very strongly on the power of capital and how much the capital needs to be neutral, thus creating a sort of disparity of treatment. And yet the constitutional right of the search of happiness for each American is inhabited with a sense of grace and community that I found beautiful and that I don’t see in Europe. It’s a spectacle that I want hold my gaze as much [as possible].

TR: Nice!

LG: And she’s Canadian.

I knew that! There’s such a rich tradition of people from outside of America being the ones who come in and show us the things about us that we can’t always see.

TR: Hmm, yes!

LG: I think that’s true to everything.

TR: You can appreciate something when you don’t live in it every day. You can illuminate it. There are so many differences between Canada and America that you wouldn’t necessarily think. The most beautiful part of us shooting this movie, and about America in general, is that I’d filmed in a lot of small towns in America but not ever in the vastness of it, like in Nebraska. You can acutely feel the heartbeat of America there. In a strange way.