‘Call Me By Your Name’ Director Says Sequel Will Tackle The AIDS Crisis

Luca Guadagnino has spoken about plans for a Call Me By Your Name sequel…
 
While André Aciman’s 2007 novel Call Me by Your Name takes place at the height of the AIDS epidemic in 1987, for the film adaptation, diretor Luca Guadagnino opted to shift Elio (Timothée Chalamet) and Oliver’s (Armie Hammer) romance to the summer of 1983, around the time that HIV was discovered.
 
The disease, however, will be tackled head-on in the sequel, says Guadagnino, who hopes the Oscar-nominated film will be the first instalment in a decades-long Before Sunrise-like series.
 
“I think it’s going to be a very relevant part of the story,” he told Hollywood Reporter at the Los Angeles Film Critics Association Awards.
 
“I think Elio will be a cinephile, and I’d like him to be in a movie theater watching Paul Vecchiali’s Once More,” a 1988 French film about a man who falls in love with a man after he leaves his wife, which was the coutnry’s movie to deal with AIDS. “That,” said Guadagnino, “could be the first scene [in the sequel].”
 
“The novel has 40 pages at the end that goes through the next 20 years of the lives of Elio and Oliver, so there is some sort of indication through the intention of author Andre Aciman that the story can continue,” Guadagnino added. “In my opinion, Call Me can be the first chapter of the chronicles of the life of these people that we met in this movie, and if the first one is a story of coming of age and becoming a young man, maybe the next chapter will be, what is the position of the young man in the world, what does he want — and what is left a few years later of such an emotional punch that made him who he is?”
 
Call Me by Your Name has earned almost unanimous praise from critics and received four Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture and Best Actor for Chalamet.
 
For his part, Aciman supports the idea of a Call Me By Your Name sequel, though he told New York Magazine’s Vulture blog in December, “I’ve said what I had to say.”