But the most beautiful things in life aren’t things..They’re people, memories, they’re feelings, moments, smiles and laughter.

André Aciman, Call Me By Your Name

“I Couldn’t Write Silence”

I arrived on the film set of Call Me by Your Name an hour after landing in Milan. I was tired, jet-lagged, and needed an hour to rest, but my driver took me directly to a square in the town of Pandino where the film crew was assembled and preparing for a shoot. At the center of the piazza was a World War I monument, and tucked away in a corner was a tiny café.

This was not the kind of piazza I had pictured when writing Call Me by Your Nameyears earlier. The town square I imagined was far smaller and stood high on a hill overlooking a windswept Mediterranean. Here in Italy’s landlocked Lombardy region there was no sea whatsoever, nor even a telltale hint of a breeze in the air and, drenched under an intensely blinding noonday sun, the square felt spookily deserted. Right away, I knew that very little in the film would correspond to my novel and, like any author, was wistfully resigned to watching my story morph under someone else’s vision.

Before me stood the two lead actors, Timothée Chalamet (Elio, in the film) and Armie Hammer (Oliver), and the director Luca Guadagnino. All three greeted me warmly before going back to discussing a scene for which everyone was busily setting up. Meanwhile, I was shown around the piazza. The signs in the shop windows bore prices for food and clothing in liras, not euros; one of the billboards sported a very dated Communist Party poster; a boxy, old, gray Fiat stood away from the square, and against the wall of the small café, I spotted an obsolete red Illy coffee sign. The square, I was told, was retrofitted for 1983. “Who could possibly spot the small cursive prices in liras on the shop windows?” I asked Peter Spears, the producer. Guadagnino, like his idol Luchino Visconti, the great Italian film director of The Leopard and Death in Venice fame, is a stickler for these micro-devilish details.

Moments later, the actors hopped on their bicycles and vanished from the piazza, waiting to be summoned as the camera rolled. Then, the word “action,” and suddenly Elio and Oliver ride into the square. They stop, buy cigarettes, and begin to smoke. They stand before the statue, which Oliver mistakenly assumes is a World War II memorial. No, Elio interjects, it commemorates the battle of the Piave, a devastating battle where the Italians sustained huge losses despite their victory.

I’ve arrived at the most difficult and, perhaps, most important scene in my novel. Three minutes later, in a single tracking shot, the climactic moment of the film is done. This was the “avowal” scene: a moment when Elio finds the nerve to tell Oliver, though very obliquely, that, despite what everyone thinks, he “knows very little about things that matter.” Elio and Oliver wrap around opposite sides of the war memorial. “What things that matter?” Oliver asks. “You know what things.” “Why are you telling me this?” asks an intrigued, though still baffled Oliver. “Because I thought you should know.” “Because you thought I should know?” asks Oliver again, beginning to seize Elio’s meaning. “Because I wanted you to know,” Elio repeats, almost speaking the words to himself.

It had taken me two whole days and five pages to capture the diffident dialogue between the two would-be lovers. But Guadagnino had distilled it in just a few minutes. They shot it three to four more times. For me, the message was clear: film cuts and trims with savage brevity, where a shrug or an intercepted glance or a nervous pause between two words can lay bare the heart in ways written prose is far more nuanced and needs more time and space on the page. But the thing is, I couldn’t write silence. I couldn’t measure pauses and breaths and the most elusive yet expressive body language.

Cinema can be an entirely magical medium. What I do as a writer, and what Guadagnino does as a film director, is more than speak two different languages. What I do is chisel a statue down to its finest, most elusive details. What a film director does is make the statue move.

I recall that when discussing his plans for the film, Guadagnino had told me that he would end the film with a shot of young Elio weeping before the camera. My heart sank. This was not at all what I had envisaged for the ending. The last pages of my novel sought to capture the lovers 20 years later as they reconnect and tell each other that, despite the years, they’ve forgotten nothing. Guadagnino told me that he had asked Sufjan Stevens to compose part of the soundtrack. I could not believe that a popular contemporary songwriter was particularly adapted to my story, especially since I had hoped for Haydn. But I kept quiet, thinking that perhaps the role of an author is never to intrude on someone else’s medium.

When I finally saw the film at the Berlin International Film festival, I was stunned. The ending captured the very spirit of the novel I had written in ways that I could never have imagined or anticipated, and as for the music, it resonated with the love of the two young men, so much so that the final scene with Elio and Sufjan’s song stayed with me long, long after I walked out of the movie theater and, as happens so rarely, into the next morning and the evening after that.

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/rambling-reporter/call-me-by-your-name-director-reveals-details-planned-sequel-1077963?utm_source=twitter

“Everyone goes through a period of traviamento— when we take, say, a different turn in life, the other via. Dante himself did. Some recover, some pretend to recover, some never come back, some chicken out before even starting, and some, for fear of taking any turns, find themselves leading the wrong life all life long.” ― André Aciman, Call Me by Your Name

“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn’t quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.” 

― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“I don’t do anything with my life except romanticize and decay with indecision.”

― Allen Ginsberg, The Book of Martyrdom and Artifice: First Journals and Poems 1937-1952

- André Aciman, Call Me By Your Name I just don’t know what to think about this novel anymore. Mad emotional.

They shot this scene in the town where I live, Capralba, in the Province of Cremona. Here some infos about this place called “Fontanile Quarantina”. A “Fontanile” is a sort of microenvironment created by men that allows controlling the water that naturally emerges from the underground that otherwise would inundate vast acreages. Anyway, in the film, we see Oliver that screams “It’s freezing!” and that’s because the water arrives directly from the Alps. (its temperature is around 10°C, even in summer). Now, of course, it’s winter so the place looks a little bit different from the film but I can tell you that in summer it’s exactly Iike that. P.s Hopefully, in the next few weeks, I’ll make more of this kind of posts so that you can see all the various locations where they shot the film. I’ve already posted some of them, you can check the “call me by your name” tag on my blog.

a drop in the ocean, clif of moher ireland     

( via occhidacqua ) 

Sheeran and Beyoncé wrote and sang Perfect (Duet) together

Earlier this year, Beyoncé sang the refrain to one of Eminem’s new singles

And tonight, Eminem dropped his new album, on which Ed Sheeran features on one of the songs

There’s a new holy trinity of music:

The Rap God

Queen Bey

And Ed

Vorrei solo essere lì dove sei tu. Vorrei solo fidarmi di te ed amarti e stare con te. Solo con te, dentro di te, intorno a te, in tutti i posti concepibili ed in quelli inconcepibili. Mi piacerebbe essere lì dove ci sei tu.

Frida Kahlo

scusate per la scritta lunedì, ma ormai l’avevo messa come storia

Virginia Woolf, La signora Dalloway, 1925 (via somehow—here)

Noi maturandi siamo un po’ come in Harry Potter: l'esame è Lord Voldemort perché è colui che non deve essere nominato, altrimenti le crisi di nervi ci troveranno e ci verranno a prendere. Le materie delle prove sono gli Horcrux da distruggere prima di poter sconfiggere l'Oscuro Signore. Il presidente di commissione è Dolores Umbridge, pronta a vietarci perfino di respirare non appena metteremo piede in aula per le prove scritte. Un giorno ci scontreremo con lui: dovremo usare tutte le nostre forze per sconfiggerlo, ricorrendo a bigliettini e qualche artificio, poiché saranno gli unici metodi per sbarazzarsi degli Horcrux (si spera). Avremo bisogno di un’ Hermione Granger pronta a tenderci un quesito risolto nei momenti di sconforto e del Deluminatore di Ronald Wesley per guidarci nei momenti bui e oscuri della seconda prova, quando la matematica avrà preso in ostaggio il nostro cervello. Ma alla fine ce la faremo, la finiremo come è cominciata: insieme!

Banana Yoshimoto, Il giardino segreto (via mordersilelabbra)

Banana Yoshimoto, Moshi moshi (via lelettere)

Yoshimoto, Banana. Goodbye Tsugumi. (via thequotejournals)