As if remaking a cult classic seventies Italian horror film Suspiria wasn’t a peculiar enough endeavour, Luca Guadagnino has revealed the source material for his next movie: Bob Dylan’s classic, middle-period post-divorce album Blood on the Tracks.
According to a profile on Guadagnino, published in the New Yorker in advance of Suspiria‘s release, one of the director’s producers on Call Me By Your Name had purchased the theatrical rights to Blood on the Tracks (because if you can licence a board game or action figure to be a movie, why not an LP?) and asked Guadagnino to helm it.
The director agreed, on the proviso that The Fisher King and The Bridges of Madison County‘s Richard LaGravenese would pen the screenplay. Despite the pair never having collaborated or even met before, LaGravenese reportedly immediately set to work and now has a completed script “following characters through a multiyear story, set in the seventies, that he and Guadagnino had invented, drawing on the album’s central themes.
“When they’re repressing, we dramatise the repression, and what that does to them,” LaGravenese says in the piece. “And we dramatise what happens when you let your passions take over too much.”
So not only is there a planned Blood on the Tracks film coming round the bend, but it has a finished script and director on board. It also sounds better than a movie adaptation of an album should, but then, Dylan’s 15th studio album is unusually rich in drama and conflict. While the characteristically cagey singer has never come out and said so, it’s more-or-less understood the record is about his estrangement and subsequent divorce from first wife Sara.
I mean, nobody is going to mistake the lyrics of Blood on the Tracks for heartfelt love songs (sample lyric from “Idiot Wind”: “You’re an idiot, babe / It’s a wonder that you still know how to breathe”). Bob and Sara Dylan’s son Jakob has even referred to the album as his “parents talking.” Personally, I think “Shelter From The Storm” would fit a Call Me By Your Name-style sobbing in front of the fireplace weeping ending pretty well.
