Luca Guadagnino spent 40 years chasing Queer's bloodiest scene
The scene was inspired by something he witnessed happen to his aunt in his childhood.
Photo: A24
This article discusses plot details from Queer.
Luca Gradagnino’s Queer is full of uncanny, surreal, and at times, downright grotesque imagery. Perhaps the film’s most stirring scene comes in its final act, when William Lee (Daniel Craig) and the object of his affection, Eugene Allerton (Drew Starkey), go on an ayahuasca trip together. When they first drink the concoction, presented by a mad botanist (a show-stealing Lesley Manville) deep in the jungle, they both initially think it hasn’t worked. Then, out of nowhere, they begin to blow balloons made of blood from their mouths and vomit up their hearts. Whatever level of gore you’re imagining, double it.
For Guadagnino, it’s an image he’d “pursued doing for 40 years,” as he told fellow director Denis Villeneuve in their recent Directors on Directors conversation for Variety. Disturbingly, the image “comes from my own life,” he continued. Apparently, he and his father had gone to pick up his 90-something-year-old aunt from another village. When he opened the door to her house, he saw the older woman “blowing a big, red balloon.”
“I thought, ‘Wow, auntie’s blowing a balloon.’ I’m transfixed by this image,” he continued. “The balloon becomes bigger and bigger and redder and redder until it pops and it collapses. She had a hemorrhagic [event] in front of me. So that image has been haunting me forever.”
Another thing that’s haunted Guadagnino is the idea of doing Queer itself, which he said he’s had in mind since he first encountered the William S. Burroughs novel at age 17. One day, he’s “terrified of being in a place where I’m doing something and I don’t want to do it. So [my] task for the future will be to really understand when [I] don’t have the fire anymore.” For now, though, it seems like he’s doing just fine.