'We are all wounded by being born': Bones And All director

America eating itself is tricky to portray on screen. Italian director Luca Guadagnino does it with cannibals using The Star-Spangled Banner as a napkin.

America eating itself is tricky to portray on screen. Italian director Luca Guadagnino does it with cannibals using The Star-Spangled Banner as a napkin.

The films of Italian director Luca Guadagnino are luscious excavations of identity and otherness.

With his acclaimed Desire trilogy: I Am Love (2009), A Bigger Splash (2015) and Call Me By Your Name (2017), he tapped into the lust and anxieties of the bourgeoisie. In his latest, Bones and All, Guadagnino turns his lens to the broken midwest of Ronald Reagan’s America during the 1980s. 

Director Luca Guadagnino on the set of Bones & All - first film he has shot in the US.

Bones and All - which premiered the Venice Film Festivabol in September -follows the great tradition of “us against the world” road films, like Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde (1976) and Terrence Malick’s Badlands (1973): two driftless lovers, estranged from society, searching for identity within each other amid the unforgiving American landscape.

In this case, our two lovers Maren (Taylor Russell) and Lee (Timothée Chalamet), happen to be cannibals. 

Bones and I has its grisly share of nipples and intestines being gorged on, but the whole cannibalism thing isn’t over-egged. At the core of this extraordinarily ambiguous film is a love story: a rousing depiction of how love, like nothing else, can shape the foundation of who we are.

Guadagnino tells The Oz that he took on the film, based on Camille DeAngeles 2015 novel of the same name, because he was “interested in the heartbreak” of its leads.

“The fact that they were driven by something that he couldn't control. And at the same time, they were fighting it,” he says. “They were trying to find a way beyond it that somehow then leads them to, to quest for their own identity, and at the same time, a quest for the other, the other who can love them.

Taylor Russell as Maren and Timothée Chalamet as Lee in Bones and All.

Guadagnino is a director that tends to work with the same actors; Bones and All marks his first collaboration with Taylor Russell, who is mesmerising as Maren. “I found a woman of great determination and will,” Guadagnino says. 

“I felt like I had an artist in front of me who was going to choose to do things that were very powerful for the movie and for the character.” 

Maren is a sweet introvert living on the brink of poverty with her caring but overburdened father. At night, she’s kept trapped in her room with a skeleton lock. Something feels off - her father doesn’t seem the type to lock his daughter up. 

She escapes her room after being invited to a sleepover by a new school friend. The evening starts innocently: all nail painting and intimate conversations. A flirtatious heart-to-heart with one of the girls takes a dark turn when Maren bites off and devours her finger. 

“I found a woman of great determination and will."

Maren doesn’t know she is a cannibal. It isn’t until her 18th birthday, after she is abandoned by her father, left only with a birth certificate, money, and a cassette tape explaining his reason for leaving, that she learns of her lifelong hunger for human flesh. A desire that has kept her and her father on the run since she was 3-years-old — when she mauled her first and only babysitter to death. 

Now alone, Maren begins her great cross-country quest for identity: she is looking for her estranged mother, in the hopes that finding her will help her make sense of why she is the way she is. 

Bones and All is the first film Guadagnino has shot in America. He notes that the observational, pioneering work of photographer William Eggleston “was a very strong point of references,” when capturing the landscape. 

On the road, Maren learns there are other “eaters” like her. Rogue and wily cannibals with their own moral codes: they never eat other “eaters.” Her first encounter is with the seasoned Sully (Mark Rylance), at face value he is friendly, a little eccentric (as most that don a feathered fedora are), but there’s something unsettling and odious about him. He keeps a rope, woven from the hair of his victims. There’s also a brilliant performance by Michael Stulhbarg, as the riotous flagrant Jake - a complete heel-turn from Stalhburg’s genteel, fatherly role in Call Me By Your Name. Jake teaches Maren about the ultimate cannibal experience: to eat a human, “bones and all.” 

She eventually meets her lover, Lee (played with exquisite grace by Chalamet), at a grocery store.

It was Guadagnino who launched Chalamet to great heights at 21 with Call Me By Your Name. With their second collaboration, Chalamet helped sculpt the script, to reflect who he thought Lee should be. 

Timothée Chalamet in Call Me By Your Name.

“He had this great intuition that Lee should have been as fragile and lost as Maren,” says Guadagnino. “We had these very beautiful conversations between us and the writer that led to this wonderful, heartbreaking lead that he created and portrayed.”

“Timothée is someone who is up for a challenge, and he’s up for making something very ambitious and provocative. I felt safe in his hands as much as I hope he felt safe in my hands.” 

DIVE DEEPER: Timothée Chalamet warns of 'societal collapse' ahead of cannibal film

A recurring thread that runs through Guadagnino’s films is characters that are outcasts or outsiders to the situations they inhabit — Bones and All takes that curiosity to its extreme. “I think that I'm more interested in what is at the margin of the frame than or to the centre of the frame,” Guadagnino says. “I'm interested in what makes us alone more than what makes us popular in a way.”

“I like to think that we all are wounded somehow, by being born. We always try to find a way to belong, even though we feel that we don’t.” 

Lee and Maren’s estrangement is codified in the film’s music choices: '80s outcast anthems like Joy Division’s ‘Atmosphere’ and New Order’s ‘Your Silent Face’, punctuate the score. 

There’s an ecstatic scene where Lee dances to KISS’s ‘Lick It Up’ in the bedroom of one of their victims. Dancing, Guadagnino notes, has been a constant fascination for him. 

“I remember when I was a kid, and there were these parties in school. I always sat at the back of the room, watching people dancing more than dancing myself,” he says. 

Music is pivotal in Guadagnino’s storytelling: from Ryuichi Sakamoto’s arresting Call Me By Your Name instrumentals; Thom Yorke’s haunting Suspiria score; and pulsating, narrative-driving swagger of Blood Orange in We Are Who We Are. 

For Bones and All, Guadagnino turned to “the greatest living composers for cinema”, Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, whose score, bolstered the lonesome romance of a road trip.

Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross

“They are the most gracious and wonderful people,” says Guadagnino. “They came with such poetic ideas. I’m very proud that they are part of my work.” 

Bones and All premieres on November 24.