Call Me By Your Name screenwriter details axed sex scene

By Neil Wilkes, Editor-in-chief | 2h

Call Me By Your Name screenwriter James Ivory reveals details of an axed sex scene between Elio and Oliver in his original script.

Call Me By Your Name screenwriter James Ivory has revealed that a slightly more suggestive sex scene was dropped from his original script.

The acclaimed film - released in 2017 - follows American postgrad student Oliver (Armie Hammer) and teenager Elio (Timothee Chalamet) as they embark on a clandestine relationship over the course of a summer in 1980s rural Italy.

One scene in the movie depicts the time the pair first have sex in Elio's room, although their carnal activities are mostly implied rather than shown.

In his new book, Ivory details how the original script called for slightly more exposition, while also revealing that both Hammer and Chalamet had clauses in their contracts preventing them from having to go full-frontal nude.

"Elio and Oliver's lovemaking, with no need of frontal nudity, is explicitly described in my screenplay dated April 17, 2015, and features Elio's bare foot moving rhythmically over Oliver's left shoulder during the latter's exertions," wrote Ivory in an excerpt published by GQ.

"My script can no doubt be found on those sidewalk tables in midtown Manhattan selling old screenplays for a few dollars each. Such a shot, as described above, and if taken, would have said everything an audience might want to know. See my page 78.

"[Director] Luca Guadagnino's seemingly decorous panning away through a window from the two boys in bed to some uninteresting trees needn't have concluded the sequence of lovemaking as blandly as it did. If I had directed the film with Luca I'm sure we could have come up with a better solution than that for the moment every member of the audience had been waiting for."

He continued: "Both Luca and I were blamed when the film came out for the lack of male frontal nudity in it. But Armie Hammer's and Timothee Chalamet's agents made sure in their client's contracts that they wouldn't have to do that.

"American male actors, with the exception of Viggo Mortensen, refuse to do it, while their European contemporaries fling everything off with abandon given the chance, as earlier films of Luca and mine show."

A proposed sequel to the film had been in development by Guadagnino but the project has been put on indefinite hold following allegations about Hammer's private life.