“I like intimacy. I like closeness.” Luca Guadagnino is speaking quietly and matter-of-factly over coffee on a July morning in a corner of the bar at Palazzo Talìa, Rome’s buzziest new five-star hotel. Tall, broad-shouldered and slightly tousled, wearing a collarless seersucker shirt semi-tucked into pale chinos and trainers, he engages fully in the conversation: many gestures, much eye contact, pensive pauses to find apposite words or phrasing. He is remarkably, almost poetically articulate for someone for whom English is a second language – not to mention someone whose chosen creative milieus are all visual ones.

Guadagnino is best known as a director-screenwriter; a maker of soulful, stylish and, yes, very intimate films – narrative arcs full of sex, love, power, loss and really killer clothes, crowded with A-list actors (of whom many are also his friends) and set to original scores written by the likes of Sufjan Stevens and Trent Reznor. His independent production company, Frenesy, funds and produces series, documentaries and features beyond those he writes and directs himself, many of them critically acclaimed. His work is infused with subtle homages to heroes from across the worlds of cinema, art, architecture and literature. He is, in short, the thinking Italophile’s creative.