Luca Guadagnino has achieved cinematic auteur status rather quickly, thanks to his luscious filmmaking style and hypnotic films. His latest, the HBO show “We Are Who We Are” aired earlier this year, but Guadagnino is already looking ahead at a potential second season.
In a recent interview with IndieWire, Guadagnino talked about the show’s characters and how he hopes to explore their complications in season 2. “Me and my beautiful writers, we already wrote a Bible for the second season,” Guadagnino said, referring to co-creators Sean Conway, Paolo Giordano, and Francesca Manieri. “But we have to see. We did it because we were locked down [during the pandemic], and we didn’t want to waste our time. In lockdown, making Zoom calls, we thought about the characters and we came up with something .”
“We’ll see. I’m very curious to know how this is received,” Guadagnino continued. “You can see that this is a very dear project to me. I feel it as something very close to me, and I’m very happy that I’ve done it. So if HBO and Sky would be game for making the great cast return to their great characters, I will be there.”
HBO has not yet renewed the show, which aired its season finale earlier this month. The first season of the show got a mixed reception, with our own critic writing that the show is “At best, a meandering, mildly lyrical meditation on arrested development – at worst, a head-scratching misfire by an otherwise major talent of cinema.”
A big part of the first season was its 2016 setting, where the presidential election played a background role throughout the season. Now that there’s a new day and a new President-Elect, will viewers want to revisit the pain of the past four years in a new season of “We Are Who We Are”? It’s hard to say, but Guadagnino seems passionate about telling this story.