Luca Guadagnino has – at least partly – come to Timothée Chalamet’s defense regarding the “Marty Supreme” star’s viral comments that he didn’t want theatrical moviegoing to end up like the “ballet or opera.”
The Italian director did so just as he prepares to open his rendition of U.S. composer John Adams’ 1991 opera “The Death of Klinghoffer” in Italy.
In an interview over the weekend with Italian daily La Stampa — ahead of the April 19 premiere of “The Death of Klinghoffer” at the prestigious Maggio Musicale Fiorentino opera festival in Florence — Guadagnino, who is credited with launching Chalamet’s career with “Call Me by Your Name,” was asked about Chalamet’s caustic quip.
“I am not on social media and don’t understand how one [single] comment can become a planetary polemic,” Guadagnino said.
“Maybe Timothée could have spared himself,” he added. “But he’s young, smart, sensitive and he fears that cinema could become marginal. And that’s exactly why every form of imagination should be nurtured. We must unite the arts, not separate them.”
Chalamet infuriated the global ballet and opera communities when during “A CNN & Variety Town Hall Event” last month he said that he didn’t want theatrical moviegoing to end up like the “ballet or opera,” where artists want to “keep this thing alive” even though “no one cares” about it anymore.
The Florence event that is hosting the Guadagnino-directed opera was among the institutions that took offense. “Hey Timothée Chalamet, why don’t you drop by the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino to see John Adams’s ‘The Death of Klinghoffer’? It’s directed by your old pal Luca Guadagnino, so you know it’s going to be a masterpiece,” The Maggio Musicale said in a social media post.
“Come and see for yourself that Opera is alive, kicking, and actually matters to people!” the Maggio post added.
In the La Stampa interview, Guadagnino — who is also set to direct Giuseppe Verdi’s opera “Un Ballo in Maschera” at Milan’s venerable La Scala theatre next year — said that he directs operas “not as a film director who does opera to get attention from the press, but as a director who does opera full stop.”
“The Death of Klinghoffer,” which revolves around the 1985 hijacking of the Achille Lauro cruise ship and the killing of American Leon Klinghoffer, is “part passion play, part docudrama, part modern ballet,” as the Variety review from 1992 puts it, calling the opera “a somber exploration of suffering and loss that attempts to deal with current events in terms of their deep-seeded roots.”
In the interview, Guadagnino said that composer Adams and libretto writer Alice Goodman have “explored in depth the atavic, mythical and mythological dimension of two peoples [Jews and Palestinians] who are condemned to a rapport that is both symbiotic and conflictual, and therefore deeply upsetting.”
Asked about his upcoming feature “Artificial,” which is reportedly about OpenAI and has a stellar cast comprising Andrew Garfield, Monica Barbaro, Jason Schwartzman and Yura Borisov, Guadagnino said the film is “almost finished.”
Guadagnino revealed that “Artificial” is “the story of a group of kids who gamble on the utopia of an artificial intelligence that can self-generate, with all the ethical consequences this carries.” The Amazon MGM Studios production is expected to premiere at the Venice Film Festival this fall.
