Oliver and Elio might be the two characters you fall for hardest at the cinema this year. Played by Armie Hammer and Timothée Chalamet, they lead Luca Guadagnino‘s wonderfully warm romance “Call Me By Your Name.” The film has been riding a steady wave of buzz since it debuted at the Sundance Film Festival, and it’s well in the mix for Oscar consideration, but the filmmaker is far from done with these characters. He has already suggested making a sequel to the film, but now those ambitions have considerably expanded.
READ MORE: Timothee Chalamet Is Living The Dream Thanks To ‘Call Me By Your Name’ [Interview]
“Sequels. I want to make five movies,” Guadagnino told Vulture.
“I think I want to see them grow up. How great would it be to see those actors grow older, embodying those characters?” he added. “It sprung out of my love for these characters and my desire to visit them again, and in doing so, to be with the same people I did this movie with.”
It all sounds like a mix of the “Before Sunrise” trilogy and Michael Apted‘s “Up” series, and Guadagnino says the second movie would pick up when Elio is 25 years old. However, don’t expect the character to run into Oliver right away.
“Maybe in the sequel, Elio and Oliver only meet after two hours of the movie. I want to follow them, Mr. Perlman, Marzia, all these people. Maybe the movie opens with how Mafalda the maid is living in the house, all alone! I definitely would buy myself the freedom of a movie that is not bound to a textbook of rules. Once, I dreamt of making a sequel to ‘I Am Love,’ which was basically about Emma, Tilda’s character, living with no money on the periphery of Rome. It would be about her daily routine, like Chantal Akerman’s ‘Jeanne Dielman.’ Five hours of watching Emma go to the supermarket where she’s a cashier, going home to cook a meal, eating her meal, and then one day she bumps into the daughter, who’s a big artist. I thought about doing that,” he said.
However, Guadagnino is the first to realize that his grand ideas may be outsized, and time is working against him. “The only problem for me is that for a director, time is very limited in general. You can do a certain amount of films and no more than that,” he said. “You know, I am 46. To make a movie is long. I have to learn how to discipline my ambitions.”
So, for now, savor “Call Me By Your Name” when it opens on November 24th.