Anatomy of an Opening Scene: CALL ME BY YOUR NAME

A teenager, a bedroom, and his erotic imagination

By James Ivory

The script of CALL ME BY YOUR NAME begins like many of the Merchant Ivory screenplays — with a wide establishing view of where the story mostly is to be set, in a landscape which is often foreign, containing a big house, center stage. The chosen landscape here was to have been a wintry Sicily. But then, the director Luca Guadagnino decided CALL ME BY YOUR NAME couldn’t be shot there, but had to be made in Northern Italy around Milan, which has a very, very different kind of landscape — and in the summer.

The film’s action, perhaps more appropriately, now begins in the teenage hero’s bedroom, which in this story is pretty much where his erotic imagination is staged.

I would like to thank the young Italian director, Ferdinando Cito Filomarino for the Italian dialogue he wrote for the film. André Aciman, the author of the novel on which the film is based, and who grew up in Italy, has called Ferdinando’s dialogue “perfect.”

CALL ME BY YOUR NAME, which was co-written by Luca Guadagnino, premieres on January 22. Read more from screenwriters with films premiering at Sundance 2017 at Page One.

As a screenwriter James Ivory has made 7 produced features, collaborating usually with the late Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, his longtime scenarist: SHAKESPEARE WALLAH (1965); THE GURU (1969); BOMBAY TALKIE (1970); A SOLDIER’S DAUGHTER NEVER CRIES (1998); and LE DIVORCE (2003). In 1986 he wrote MAURICE with Kit Hesketh-Harvey. All of these films he directed, and all were made by Merchant Ivory Productions.