Interview With André Aciman

If there was any doubt art house cinema is alive and well one need only look to “Call Me By Your Name,” a multi language masterpiece from Italian director Luca Guadagnino that has inspired a dedicated legion of followers since its Sundance premiere in 2017. Guadagnino beautifully captures Armie Hammer and newcomer-turned Best Actor nominee Timothée Chalamet in a story of a life-altering connection between two bodies, minds and souls over one summer on the Italian Riviera. Overwhelmingly adored by critics, it is already cementing itself as a classic in the making, and as one of the most nuanced, deeply felt depictions of young love to be seen on screen. It has been nominated for four Academy Awards, including “Best Picture” and “Best Adapted Screenplay” for the script by James Ivory, of Merchant Ivory Productions, based on the 2007 novel by André Aciman.

Ten years after publication, Aciman’s slim novel has been on The New York Times trade paperback bestseller list for five weeks running. It is an intimate, literary first person account straight from the articulate, often bewildered perspective of a 17 year old boy falling in love for the first time.

I had the pleasure of sitting down with André Aciman, distinguished professor at the Graduate Center of City University of New York, to discuss the unabashedly erotic novel that began as a whim. Aciman was meant to be working on another manuscript, but the idea for “Call Me By Your Name” caught such a hold of him he began and completed it within months. How did a straight man in his 60s come to write so explicitly about two young men falling in love? Aciman, soft-spoken, candid and very funny, would be the first to say he couldn’t tell you, and perhaps that is the magic that keeps readers so devoted to the story and its characters. There is a sense of mystery and memory and a desire to desperately know what will happen - the same emotions Aciman had while writing. 

I had read the novel a year ago and when I heard Luca Guadagnino was to direct the adaptation I thought it was a perfect match.

It was for me too. It was like Luchino Visconti was coming back from the other world and saying, “I’ll direct.” It was perfect.

One of the most discussed sexual scenes in the novel has 17-year-old Elio making a narrative allusion to Ovid­ ­­— ­­ ­whom I also discovered when I was a teenager.

I was 14 years old. Actually, no, younger. Because my father used to read me “The Metamorphoses.” He thought it was absolutely beautiful, and I couldn’t understand it because it was in French, and it was in very, very highfalutin French. But I sensed that there was something between me and Ovid that I loved. I think that my cousin in England eventually sent me a book of Ovid. I devoured it. It had a slightly porno side to it.

It does! It definitely has that.

I was very aroused by it. And I remember feeling very wrong because it was supposed to be like high poetry. I realized, of course many years later, that it was the dirtiest book available for anyone who wanted to read porn. And it’s extremely smart. Ovid really understood what was going on in people’s minds — and that’s what interests me.

Elio references stories of lovers and transformation that felt very entrenched in my education, and it really brought back something from my childhood.

It’s supposed to, and I don’t understand it. I think it has to do with partly unfulfilled memories of old desires, but that’s only one part. The other part is that it’s an unquantifiable probing that keeps going and doesn’t stop. Because we all probe ourselves that way, you don’t need an author to tell you. But to see that somebody else is doing it makes you feel like, “Oh my god, this is me.”

There is this strong aspect of memory to the book, and when I first read it I had this sort of dreamlike experience where I felt I had been to this place before, or knew these people before. 

Yes, because it was you. It was all of us. Old ladies write to me and say, “I went through this myself.” I think that in desire there is a countercurrent of shame. To desire someone is to be ashamed that you do so. We’re taught that that’s not so, but it is so. The conflict of shame, desire and reluctance are constantly being spun around each other and it’s harrowing. 

Nothing in Elio and Oliver’s relationship progresses through physical gesture. There’s no come-hither glance, every action forward is through conversation.

Oh god, that’s because I’m partly French. It is very much in the tradition of an analytic novel, which is a very old tradition in France. Confession is the most difficult thing to write and to do in life. You’re basically coming on to them and you have to speak. The kiss is not going to do it. That’s child stuff. So they do talk, and I love that. That whole scene in the piazza where they’re confessing, that scene is inspired by Seneca, and Jean Racine’s “Phèdre”, where Phaedra talks to Hippolytus in very ambiguous words, and he says, “I’m sorry, I think I misunderstood you?” And she loses it. She says, “You haven’t misunderstood me, you idiot! I’m in love with you!” 

The relationship does go to physical places in the book, but there’s much that you don’t see in the film.

The director has very, very good sense. The film is so beautiful that it manages to remain chaste. People complained to me that there’s not enough nudity. There was not enough sex. But I liked the fact that Luca plays with you in a very smart way. It’s an aesthetic, chaste film that prioritizes emotion over anything else. 

The film also changes the ending. The last shot gives Elio a catharsis that the book doesn’t grant him.

The book ends in a conditional mood. All my books end in the conditional. We’re not in the indicative mood, so things might happen, this is what I think is going to happen … We don’t know. I like that kind of ending because I don’t believe in endings. There’s only one ending and it’s called death. I normally hate the idea of closure, but I think you do have a sense of it in the movie. But it still makes you think Elio continues to be in love, so that thwarts the idea of closure.

This interview has been edited and condensed.