Call Me By Your Name screenwriter James Ivory is angry that Armie Hammer and Timothee Chalamet did not get fully naked in the film’s sex scenes.
James‘ script won him a Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar, but he originally planned for Armie and Timothee’s characters’ gay romance to be much racier, and has called director Luca Guagadino’s explanation that he cut out full frontal nudity for aesthetic reasons “bulls**t”.
“When Luca says he never thought of putting nudity in, that is totally untrue,” he tells The Guardian. “He sat in this very room where I am sitting now, talking about how he would do it, so when he says that it was a conscious aesthetic decision not to – well, that’s just bulls**t.
“When people are wandering around before or after making love, and they’re decorously covered with sheets, it’s always seemed phoney to me. I never liked doing that. And I don’t do it, as you know.”
According to The Guardian editors, James explained that the nude scenes were cut due to clauses in the actors’ contracts.
Despite being set in 1983, as the AIDS epidemic began to take hold in the gay community, the film features no reference to the disease.
James says he did pen scenes where the parents of Timothee’s character, Elio, played by Michael Stuhlbarg and Amira Casar, discuss AIDS, but wasn’t too unhappy they were cut, as he felt they didn’t add much to the story.
“I did write a scene where Elio’s parents talked about it,” he explains. “There was some timidity on the part of the mother regarding this new and terrible disease everyone was hearing about. I wrote two scenes where the parents discuss that. It didn’t matter to me that they were dropped. They didn’t do anything terribly important.”
The filmmaker had a long relationship with his production partner Ismail Merchant, who died in 2005. The couple kept their relationship secret, however, as Ismail had conservative relatives in India.
“It’s not the sort of thing he was going to broadcast,” the 89-year-old says of their secret love. “Since we were so close and lived most of our lives together, I wasn’t about to undermine him.”
His Academy Award win earlier this month (Mar18) made him the oldest ever Oscar winner in a competitive category.
