This article appears in the pages of VMAN39, available on newsstands February 22. Pre-order your copy now at vmagazineshop.com.

The artistry of filmmaking has always preoccupied Timothée Chalamet. Fittingly, the quality of the craft is more than apparent in his first major leading role, Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me By Your Name. To prepare for being on set, Chalamet has long immersed himself in complex cinema— movies like critically-acclaimed Canadian filmmaker Xavier Dolan’s I Killed My Mother. Here, Chalamet and Dolan meet up in Paris to discuss Chalamet’s creative sights for the future, his relationship with Armie Hammer, and the realities of love and pain.

XD When I saw Call Me By Your Name, I had the feeling I knew you. Although I guess that’s what movies are trying to achieve: To connect us, strangers, and make us feel that we know the characters we’re presented.

TC Absolutely. I’ve been the biggest fan of your work for years. You direct films that make really strong, clear choices...the moment, in Mommy, when the actor opens up the aspect ratio—wait, I don’t want to ruin it!

XD Oh, everybody has spoiled that already! Thank you, you’re very sweet. So, what kind of artist are you? What are you looking for in your experiences with directors?

TC I look for a certain feeling, and I wouldn’t know how to describe it, but I know I’m always chasing it. I don’t quite know what it is that I’m after. I always like to think that the art doesn’t take place on screen, but in the audience member’s head. At a certain point I was able to come to grips with the idea to just “be.” That’s why I’m so impressed with your films, because you’re doing an incredible job just “being,” which is all I’m focused on while working. But you’re also weaving and keeping the story synchronized.

XD What do you look for in a film? The vision? Emotion, uniqueness?

TC My favorite movie is James White by Josh Mond, and it’s a testament to the filmmaking that I couldn’t tell where the filmmaking was. It felt like watching a man’s journey. Josh has his finger on what it is to be alive now. You keep seeing stories told with similar tropes, and that, as a viewer, is what’s scariest to me. I’m not worried about being bad in anything, because I know I’ll be bad in things, and that’s fine. But what scares me is being boring, and being part of stories I feel too familiar with, or being cynical for the sake of being cynical.

XD I’m curious to hear about Armie and you. It’s a very intimate story, and the whole movie revolves around the central piece of your relationship.

TC I wish everybody could hang out with Armie, because our relationship, the way it blossomed when we first met, was so conducive and helpful to what it is in the movie. I was way more inexperienced, and I knew seconds after meeting Armie that I was in the best hands. He’s an instinctual caretaker, which is part of his incredible performance in the film: his character wants to succumb to his love and desire for another human being, but also doesn’t want to hurt him. It’s best epitomized in this scene towards the end where I’m sleeping in bed, before the farewell at the train station. Oliver sits on the bed next to Elio and you see about 6,000 emotions go across Armie’s face: love, empathy, regret, and fear. There’s so much Armie in that moment; so much love there. We were also in Luca’s hands—this movie is Luca’s baby. Truer to this experience than in any movie I’ve been in, it felt like, hey, we gotta be into the director, but we gotta be into each other...