‘CMBYN’ Director Reveals Plans for AIDS-Focused Sequel

· Updated on May 28, 2018

If you haven’t seen Call Me by Your Name yet, prepare yourself to relive your first heartbreak in excruciating emotional detail. Although the film doesn’t tackle every plot point from the book, director Luca Guadagnino captured the essence of André Aciman’s novel with brutal cinematic skill.

He also recently announced plans to make sequels to the popular gay film. But don’t get your hopes up to learn the fate of Elio and Oliver’s love story anytime soon. Guadagnino compared his plan for the follow-up installments to the Before Sunrise series, in which director Richard Linklater catches up with two lovers (Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy) throughout the years, with each film of the trilogy releasing nine years apart.

That means it could be a decade before we get a proper follow-up to Call Me by Your Name. But given that the last section of the novel catches up with Elio and Oliver throughout the following decades, there’s definitely material for Guadagnino to expand on.

And although it could be years before we see a sequel, the director is already brainstorming the next film. He recently revealed some planned details of the next installment to The Hollywood Reporter.

Although the novel is set in 1987 at the height of the AIDS epidemic, Guadagnino set the film in 1983, around the time it was discovered. For the sequel, he plans to confront the disease more directly.

“I think Elio will be a cinephile, and I’d like him to be in a movie theater watching Paul Vecchiali’s Once More,” he said. “That could be the first scene.”

The title Guadagnino refers to is a 1988 film about a man who leaves his wife and falls for another man, the first French film depicting AIDS.

“The novel has 40 pages at the end that goes through the next 20 years of the lives of Elio and Oliver, so there is some sort of indication through the intention of author Andre Aciman that the story can continue,” he said. “In my opinion, Call Me can be the first chapter of the chronicles of the life of these people that we met in this movie, and if the first one is a story of coming of age and becoming a young man, maybe the next chapter will be, what is the position of the young man in the world, what does he want and what is left a few years later of such an emotional punch that made him who he is?”

If it means reuniting Timothée Chalamet and Armie Hammer, we could definitely hold out for a few more years. But if the original made us cry as hard as it did, we can only imagine how a sequel set during the AIDS epidemic will tug at our heartstrings.

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