“I think that the duty of a good director, and I hope that I am one, is to launch ideas and then wait for other ideas to come back to you,” explains Luca Guadagnino, the director of Challengers, Call Me By Your Name, and most recently, Queer. “You may want to give a direction of something specific and maybe odd, and then let the other person, the artist that works with you, find their way into that.” For his newest film, Guadagnino worked with many repeat collaborators including screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes, fashion designer turned costumer Jonathan Anderson, and composers Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. To create the textured sets of Queer, Guadagnino turned to someone who, while technically new to production design, was already deeply familiar with the director’s aesthetic sensibilities.
Stefano Biasi has been part of the team at Studio Luca Guadagnino, the Oscar nominee’s interior design company, for seven years. The pair worked together, with other studio collaborators, on a home in Lake Como, Aesop stores in Rome and London, and an apartment in Milan, among other commissions. On these projects, Guadagnino and Baisi developed a rapport that is the bedrock of film collaboration, in Guadagnino’s telling. “Not to take anything off of the wonderful production designers that I’ve worked with in the past, but I actually wanted to be in conversation with someone who wasn’t a production designer,” Guadagnino says. “I wanted to be able to be in a creative space when it comes to the sets that could play in a very out of the box way, definitely, but with the rigor and the precision of someone with a very profound idea of architecture and design, and a sense of feverish curiosity.”
