James Bond star Daniel Craig will leave his fans shaken but hopefully not stirred in his latest film, which has been described as “the year’s most provocative movie”.
Director Luca Guadagnino’s Queer tells the story of two gay men in 1950s Mexico City and has admitted “there’s a lot of semen in the movie”.
Guadagnino’s previous films include this year’s Challengers and 2017’s Call Me By Your Name which saw Timothee Chalamet perform a sex act with a peach.
He also made HBO’s My Brilliant Friend series and Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla.
Queer is based on Beat Generation writer William S. Burroughs’ novella, published in 1985, which fictionalises the author’s own experiences of recreational heroin use and his sensual love affair with a discharged serviceman.
Outer Banks star Drew Starkey is Craig’s love interest.
Craig, in his first film outside the James Bond and the Knives Out franchise in seven years, plays William Lee and says he managed to have a laugh during the sex scenes.
Variety magazine has described the movie as “a film that’s utterly unafraid to depict both the literal fact of sexuality and the inner turmoil that leads many to use sex to escape” and “about as risky as a film can get…
“The sex scenes that they share will likely unsettle Gen Z audiences, who have made clear that lovemaking in movies is better left off-screen.”
At the Venice film festival, it received an 11-minute standing ovation.
Asked about the erotic scenes, Craig said: “There’s some choreography in the movie which is very important. Drew and I started rehearsals on that months before we started filming. There’s nothing intimate about filming a sex scene on a movie set. There’s a room full of people watching you. We just wanted to make it as touching and as real and as natural as we possibly could. We kind of had a laugh and tried to make it fun.”
On his decision to take on the role, Craig said: “I thought this is a story about love, about someone opening themself up to somebody else.”
Some hardcore aspects of the film have already been cut from the original three-and-a-half hours to 135 minutes.
Craig, who features on the cover of the latest issue of Variety magazine, said: “I’d love people to see it, because there’s other things going on.”
He added: “I’ve been in movies with terrible love scenes. It doesn’t work. You need a director who has a sensitivity, a director who understands — to put it crassly — how to make it real. That’s one’s job on the day: to make it as real as possible.”
The former 007 also revealed the decision to make his Knives Out character Benoit Blanc a gay man came about only because Hugh Grant was willing to play his lover in Glass Onion.
He added: “We had discussions about not wanting to dig into it. Because the classic idea of the detective is that they come from somewhere that we don’t know. Columbo has a mystery wife we don’t know — and I think it’s good that way. So I didn’t want it, but it was too tempting. Hugh will do it? Great! That forced the decision, really…
“If I wasn’t in the movie and I saw this movie I would want to be in it. It’s the kind of films I want to see, I want to make, I want to be out there. They’re challenging but they’re hopefully incredibly accessible.
“I don’t look back at it as a challenge, just as a joy.”
Read the full interview here.
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