‘Bones and All’ Director Luca Guadagnino: Armie Hammer Comparisons Diminish Important Topics

Sometimes there are just unfortunate coincidences out there, like the House of Hammer Armie Hammer docuseries trailer releasing on the same day as news and a trailer for Luca Guadagnino’s Bones & All (a young cannibal love story) is on the way, considering the abuse allegations about Hammer that involved him talking about living out cannibalistic fantasies. And this new film reuniting Guadagnino’s with Timothée Chalamet, after they famously worked on Call Me by Your Name together with Hammer, just really made the connection worse.

For Guadagnino though, the allegations against Hammer weren’t even on his radar when work on this project began, given that it has been in development since long before the accusations came out, and now, in a new interview with Deadline for the film, he talks about how he wants the film to be separate from that line of thinking: “It didn’t dawn on me. I realized this afterward when I started to be told of some of these innuendos on social media,” Guadagnino said when asked if he anticipated the reaction that people had with this film and the Hammer accusations.

He went on to break down what brought him into the project in the first place, versus the social media chatter that he hasn’t engaged with: “This project—which was a popular book—had been in development for a number of years before Dave Kajganich brought it to me in 2020. I responded immediately to these characters who are disenfranchised and living on the edge of society. Any link with anything else exists only in the realm of social media, with which I do not engage. The relationship between this kind of digital muckraking and our wish to make this movie is non-existent and it should be met with a shrug. I would prefer to talk about what the film has to say, rather than things that have nothing to do with it.”

And look, it’s a weird coincidence and an easy connection to make. It’s all topical bits of news coming into this one specific niche thing, and it’s all too easy to erase the importance of both stories in making a joke about it, but Guadagnino went on to talk further about how that changes the conversation for both his film and the women involved in the Hammer accusations. “It’s also a travesty towards the fundamental need for new attitudes to the ways in which we work together and deal with one another,” he said. “Women have historically been put in a lesser position by patriarchal entitlement, and it’s important for that injustice to be addressed constructively so that it brings about real change. The muckraking of social media doesn’t address anything constructively, and the idea that this very profoundly important fight for equality can be misdirected in this way is something that frustrates me greatly. We mustn’t diminish that most important thing with this muckraking.”

Bones & All is set to hit theaters on November 23rd and the film, based on the novel of the same name by Camille DeAngelis, is going to be one you don’t want to miss.

(featured image: MGM)