Aciman On “Call Me” Adaptation
Andre Aciman writes: “It had taken me two whole days and five pages to capture the diffident dialogue between the two would-be lovers. But Guadagnino had distilled it in just a few minutes. They shot it three to four more times. For me, the message was clear: film cuts and trims with savage brevity, where a shrug or an intercepted glance or a nervous pause between two words can lay bare the heart in ways written prose is far more nuanced and needs more time and space on the page. But the thing is, I couldn’t write silence. I couldn’t measure pauses and breaths and the most elusive yet expressive body language.â€
