I was 17, a young over-ambitious loner in 1980s Palermo. Think blue skies, towering palm trees and frangipani flowers on the corners of the old town’s crumbling walls. I was already in an exotic environment. I would spend all my time in the Sellerio bookshop on Via delle Croci. They were the nicest people, who didn’t mind letting a lanky teenage freeloader read their stock for hours on end. I can still remember (the now defunct publisher) Sugar Co’s white cover of Queer (Different in Italian). And feeling different too, I was naturally attracted to the title and the evocative power of its author’s name, William S. Burroughs.
As soon as I started reading the novel in the solitude of my small bedroom, I had an epiphany about the worlds conjured there and the language with which they were described. I also recognised something very familiar, something intimate: the author gave life to this giddy feeling I couldn’t put into words, the feeling of visceral contact with someone who ultimately transforms your worldview. I immediately came up with the idea of a film adaptation. Without knowing how to write a screenplay, write one I did, learning as I went along. Needless to say, it was a disaster, but over the past 33 years, I’ve never stopped wanting to make this movie. So when I obtained the rights to the novel decades later, I convinced my friend the great screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes to pen an adaptation of this timeless text. The finished result is extraordinary (and certainly better than mine).
When thinking about how to make this film, I’ve always had some fixed ideas, guiding stars. The first was that William Lee’s character had to be an icon, an actor willing to put everything into this performance, and it’s been my privilege to find these qualities in Daniel Craig, who has proven to be a wonderful colleague. Another necessity was that the world described by Burroughs had to be staged as an artificial place – a projection of the author’s total imagination rather than a ‘period drama’. We set ourselves the ambitious plan of mixing accurate historical research of the places named in the novel with a deep, emotional understanding of the mind and heart of Burroughs. The colleague I chose for this daring cinematographic stance was the architect Stefano Baisi, someone with whom I’ve worked for the last six years in my interior-design studio (Wol May 2024).
Following my intuition, I asked Stefano to make his debut as a set designer and he boldly rose to the challenge. Together we decided to use every form of representation that the language of cinema would allow, from building entire neighbourhoods in the Cinecittà backlot to producing a lysergic Ecuadorian jungle on the hillside above the studios. And we recreated bars (like the legendary Ship Ahoy), streets and private apartments as if they were projections of the protagonists’ frames of mind. ‘The world of Queer is a place of disconnection, but also of strong connection between the two protagonists, which had to be reflected in its environment,’ as Stefano put it. ‘We chose visual elements that could amplify the feeling of isolation of the characters or the connection between them, creating spaces with a two-fold meaning, of one looking at the other and reflecting, of the permeation and meeting of two souls. There is a deliberate symmetry, a play with refractions and mirrors. For example, one of the sets, Lola’s, a Mexican tavern, was transformed into Chimu, a gay club, by simply removing the central pillar and creating empty space where it was previously full.’
The theme of desire and addiction plays an important role in William Lee’s labyrinthine wanderings through the streets of Mexico City. When Lee goes to the cinema with Eugene Allerton to see Orpheus by Jean Cocteau, his phantasmagoric projection stretches clearly towards the object of his desire. To bring this powerful image to life, we created a cinema that resembled ones in Mexico City in the 1940s, but also had elements of a Vienna that Burroughs had visited a decade earlier and which impressed him. The movie theatre actually had different dimensional scales, shrinking little by little as the camera’s gaze approached the screen. Starting with real spectators, we reach a small screen in front of which stand tiny viewers that we later moved with the aid of digital technology. In this sense, the use of miniatures was really significant. We recreated pieces of our protagonist’s neighbourhood at a small scale, giving it a surreal feeling. Thus we hoped that the viewer would become increasingly immersed in the mind of Burroughs/Lee.
Memories of Vienna return with the location of the Rathskeller, or beer cellar, described in the novel as a dusty place frozen in time. Stefano imagined it as a hall that revolves around the central axis of a bar and a row of hexagonal columns with geometric motifs typical of Adolf Loos. Continuing with the artifice, many of the plants we see in the exteriors were intended to simulate the ‘hazy blue’ of the jacarandas blowing in the breeze, so we lined up long rows of fake trees designed to steep Lee and Allerton in the desperate romanticism of these flowers.
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Once in Panama, our protagonists go in search of drugs that can control Lee’s addiction and speak to a shopkeeper whose sign in Spanish reads ‘To Our Loves’. This is our direct tribute to the influential film A Nos Amours (1983) by Maurice Pialat, the great master of extreme feelings. Once more, there is a crossover between real places and Burroughs’s imaginary world – but also my passion for cinema.
To represent the Ship Ahoy, the bar where us expats meet up to do nothing and the heart of Lee’s alcoholic and sentimental roving, we decided that the naval theme should be taken to extremes by emphasising, and deconstructing, the form of a large ship – hence its transformation into a place with a repeated architectural rhythm, where the acid yellow colour would evoke its acrid, flashy nature.
This pure, immersive cinema experience has been the most personal adventure of my career as a director, and its culmination. All of me, I believe, is in every Burroughs-esque location. Not surprisingly, in an unspoken and intimate way, this film is ‘to our loves’.
A version of this article also appeared in the December 2024 issue of ‘The World of Interiors’. Learn about our subscription offers. Sign up for our bi-weekly newsletter, and be the first to receive exclusive stories like this one, direct to your inbox
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