Luca Guadagnino Is Planning A Whole Film Based On Bob Dylan’s BLOOD ON THE TRACKS
Luca Guadagnino's movies are often just as obsessed with the music they contain as they are with the sunny, gorgeous images their author composes with his camera. After all, A Bigger Splash contains that extended sequence where Ralph Fiennes' old school rock man explains his relationship to the Stones' Emotional Rescue. Call Me By Your Name not only showcases a joyous moment set to The Psychedelic Furs' "Love My Way", but also lets strains of Italo disco float in to help establish its Early '80s European Summer setting. Suspiria sees Thom Yorke taking Goblin's original score and trying to replicate its dreadful discordance in only the way the Radiohead frontman knows how.
Seemingly not ready to give up his idiosyncratic musical ghost anytime soon, Luca recently revealed (via a New Yorker profile) that he's working on a feature length adaptation of Bob Dylan's seminal (and oft-interpreted) record Blood On the Tracks. The project is a brainchild of an unnamed Call Me By Your Name producer, who acquired the rights to the album for Luca to direct. However, Guadagnino apparently only agreed to the project as long as writer Richard LaGravenese (The Fisher King) could pen the script. From Nathan Heller's (incredibly insightful) piece:
"Guadagnino calls LaGravenese 'this guy that I totally and completely love!,' and LaGravenese calls Guadagnino 'the first director who has allowed me to write fully emotional moments.'
LaGravenese cleared his schedule and, between April and July, hunkered down to produce a hundred-and-eighty-eight-page screenplay following characters through a multiyear story, set in the seventies, that he and Guadagnino had invented, drawing on the album’s central themes. 'When they’re repressing, we dramatize the repression, and what that does to them,' LaGravenese says. 'And we dramatize what happens when you let your passions take over too much.'
Well, all that - repression, overwhelming passion - sounds like it fits snugly inside Luca's wheelhouse. Obviously, Dylan's "Blood On the Tracks" has been examined to death over the years (and even helped influence Todd Haynes' brilliant experimental biopic I'm Not There), with Bob's own son labeling the record "my parents talking" and critics saying it's a portrait of the musician's collapsing marriage to then-wife, Sara. Dylan has often denied that any of the songs are autobiographical, but he's also a professional trickster and liar, so taking his word for it probably isn't the best approach.
In regards to Luca's rumored Call Me By Your Name sequel, Heller's profile also details how Guadagnino wants to handle the evolution of Armie Hammer's closeted bisexual hunk, as it'll pick up with him married to a "New England kind of hoochie woman,” who has “maybe, five children.” In response, Hammer says:
"Oh, great."
So, there's that on the horizon for the Italian maestro, too. No word on when we should expect Luca's proposed Dylan epic, or what it'll be called (probably just Blood On the Tracks?), but we'll keep you updated as things progress. In the meantime, get ready for Suspiria, which drops in a few short weeks (and totally rips).
