Guadagnino thrives in these moments, as Hammer calls them, when a look or the touch of a hand says everything (or almost everything: There’d be no Call Me by Your Name if they said what they wanted straight away). Both of Guadagnino’s previous films, A Bigger Splash and I Am Love, starred Tilda Swinton, master of the dramatic. Call Me by Your Name, however, is almost excruciatingly natural. Watching the film, it’s as if you too were in the small Italian town of Crema that summer in 1983. “The crux of the film,” Hammer explains, “is the emotional honesty between these two characters, and the fact that there’s no effects: There’s no giant set pieces, there’s nothing that propels the characters along other than the authentic moments that happen between the two.”

“That was really nerve-racking. I’d never done a film that was so emotionally raw and unguarded before.” In what sounds like a protracted wooing, the director evidently persuaded Hammer to agree by convincing him that “fear and desire are sisters, almost twin sisters, and normally part and parcel with each other. That if you’re afraid of it, it means you want to do it in some way.” Hammer laughs, puncturing his seriousness, “The same way that if you’re afraid of heights, [it] kind of means you want to throw yourself off of it.”

The film, however, is notable for its lack of fear. Elio and Oliver fall in love and there are consequences, sure, but nothing totally dreadful happens—a rarity in films about gay romance (not to mention ones set in the ’80s). “There was no antagonist, no one got sick,” as Hammer puts it. This was by Guadagnino’s design, which the actor remembers particularly from one take: “There’s the one scene where Elio gets a nosebleed and Oliver comes up and goes, ‘Are you okay?’ And in the first take, I played it in a way where I came up and was really concerned.” He continues, “Luca called and he goes, ‘Why are you doing it like that?’ And I go, ‘Well, chronologically, this is the early ’80s, this is the onset of the epidemic where people were getting sick.’ Luca looked at me and he goes, ‘Huh. I did not even think about that. Do it differently.’ So, he didn’t even want a twinge of that.”