Queer: Luca Guadagnino says new film will feature “scandalous” sex scenes

Challengers director Luca Guadagnino has confirmed lots of steamy sex scenes in his new film Queer.

Back in December 2022, Deadline revealed that Daniel Craig would be teaming up with the Call Me By Your Name filmmaker for an adaptation of William S Burroughs’ short novel of the same.

Set in the 1940s, the forthcoming film follows Lee (Craig), a man who travels to Mexico City to escape his drug-fueled life in New Orleans, Louisiana.

While navigating the diverse city and his looming heroin withdrawal, he becomes infatuated with a young American Navy serviceman named Allerton (Drew Starkey), who’s dealing with his own set of drug-induced problems.

Alongside Craig and Starkey, Phantom Thread’s Lesley Manville, Moonrise Kingdom’s Jason Schwartzman and Trinkets star Henry Zaga also star in the film.

Over the last year, additional details surrounding Queer have been kept under wraps… until now.

During a recent interview with Cinecittà, Guadagnino teased what moviegoers can expect from the gritty three-hour-long project, including its handful of steamy sex scenes.

“Queer will be my most personal film. It’s a tribute to Powell and Pressburger,” he revealed.

“I’ve seen The Red Shoes at least 50 times, and I think they would appreciate the sex scenes in Queer, which are numerous and quite scandalous.”

Guadagnino isn’t the only creative from Queer to express their excitement for the film’s release.

In February 2023, the movie’s costume designer, Jonathan Anderson, told The Guardian: “It is one of my all-time favourite books. And the film has everything – Mexico, lots of drugs, and Daniel Craig.”

Queer‘s screenwriter Justin Kurtizkes – who previously teamed up with Guadagnino on Challengers – echoed similar sentiments during an April 2024 interview with Radio Times.

“Luca gave me the book for Queer while we were on set for Challengers and said, ‘Read this tonight and tell me if you want to write it,’ and I read it that night, and I told him I wanna write it, and I was really honoured that he asked me,” he said.

While he was eager to write the screenplay, Kurtizkes admitted that adapting Burrough’s book was far from easy, describing it as a “not a made for the movies” novel.

Towards the end of his interview, the American playwright expressed his excitement for film enthusiasts to see Burrough’s novel come to life.

“I really saw working on that as a sort of, I felt like I was a medium between these two brilliant artists – Luca on the one hand and William S Burrough’s on the other – and it was my job, really, to bring them together,” he added.

As of this writing, a theatrical release date for Queer has not been announced.

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