They are not going to help us in any way. They are not going to allow us to shoot on the base. I really don’t think they’re going to allow us to do that.”

And the girl wants to change sex and the mother is sending troops out without preparation and the colonel is smuggling fuel. “And I thought, ‘Are you sure? Have they read the script?’ First, the kid is 14 and drinks like a drunkard from, um …” He racks his brains to think of the world’s drunkest city. HBO promised Guadagnino that he would be allowed to shoot the whole thing on the army complex at Vicenza and provide all the extras. The Department of Defense was initially gung-ho for the show. But it sits in the wetlands near Venice, where army brats can stroll around crumbling ancient towns and steer vaporettos up small weed-clogged inlets.

It is immediately apparent that the military base is the US in microcosm, with a baseball diamond and a Starbucks franchise. We Are Who We Are is a terrific series, a tale of boundaries and bubbles, lightly thrown against the backdrop of Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. People who say that, it’s just a PR stunt.”īased on the standard of the first four episodes, I’m glad he bit the bullet. TV hasn’t revolutionised the language anyway. “Maybe Berlin Alexanderplatz or Twin Peaks. Guadagnino says that he almost didn’t do it. Mostly he wants to discuss We Are Who We Are, his eight-part HBO series, which stars Chloë Sevigny as the incoming commander of a US army base in Italy and Jack Dylan Grazer as her upstart teenage son. So he’d like to talk about Fiori, Fiori, Fiori, his little lockdown film, and he’d like to talk about Shoemaker of Dreams, an affectionate documentary about Salvatore Ferragamo. That’s because he’s a workaholic, always on the go, which he now thinks was a factor in his relationship ending. The director has several projects he has now finished, and is eager to discuss and promote before he moves on to new ones. Unguarded people have better conversations anyway. The layout is such that we can probably dispense with our masks. He’s lounging at a corner table by the open window, sunlight bouncing off the hotel walls. We meet in Venice, during the pandemic’s brief summer lull. Photograph: Jacopo M Raule/Getty Images for Bottega Veneta

Guadagnino, who is also remaking Scarface and Brideshead Revisited.

We are who we are hbo