Timothée Chalamet, a strong contender to win the Oscar, lost in this year’s awards show. In addition to the damage, he angered people with his comments several weeks before the ceremony.
Those comments were about opera and ballet, which drew the music community to immediately respond.
Now, director Luca Guadagnino, who launched the actor for the first time in Call Me By Your Name, has spoken out on his behalf months after the full-blown culture war.
I’m not on social media and I don’t understand how a (single) comment can become a planetary controversy,” he tells La Stampa, an Italian daily.
The filmmaker adds, “Maybe Timothy could have saved himself. But he is young, smart and sensitive, and he fears that cinema could be marginalised. And that is why every form of imagination should be nurtured. We should unite the arts, not tear them apart.”
Chalamet’s comments came from a discussion about cinema preservation at the University of Texas, where he said, “I don’t want to work in ballet, or opera, or things where it’s like, ‘Hey, keep this thing alive even if no one cares about it anymore.'”
