Behind a softly lit control panel, hushed and expectant, the director Luca Guadagnino sat with editors and listened for breath noises at the start of his new film. The studio was dark. The screen, too large for those assembled, glowed. Outside, a hard late-winter rain fell on Rome, joining with the patter of an onscreen storm, as if the line between the real world and the imagined one were weakening, bleeding, beginning to leak.

“Ho perso molti respiri,” Guadagnino murmured. Then, calling to the mixer at the controls, “We missed a breath.” Onscreen, an old man and a young woman were speaking in a state of high alarm. The editors were adding into the mix passing noises of human exchange: footfalls, paper rustlings, a little gasp, a sigh.

“After he closes the last curtain, he’s panting, but I don’t hear him breathing,” Guadagnino told the film’s editor, Walter Fasano.

In the script, the young woman, played by Chloë Grace Moretz, is visiting a psychoanalyst. She is drenched from a storm outside. Rain has always had a special significance for Guadagnino, because he spent the first five years of his life in Ethiopia, and it rained there all the time. “My dreams are very aquatic,” he explains. He was born two months prematurely, and links water with the womb.

The scene played again. Guadagnino fussed over the cutting of the dialogue. “The line from Chloë—”

Fasano quoted, “ ‘If they knew I was here . . . ’ ”

“It’s very bad,” Guadagnino said with a frown.

He was dressed in a gray woollen hoodie and loose navy pants, cable-knit like a sweater. He is slightly more than six feet tall, and gangly, with the posture of a bearskin tossed across a chair: he slumps and drapes and dangles. For some years now, he has worn a beard, gray-dusted, and a fizz of thinning brown hair. His manner is both limpid and assured. “I think we’re going to be very good friends,” he sometimes says on meeting people for the first time. “It is inevitable—I am Italian.” He refers to those he hasn’t met yet in the courtly style of the Times (“Mr. Spielberg,” “Mr. Tortora”), a spirit of deference which his work belies. Guadagnino has lived almost all his life in Italy, but his feature films have consistently been in English since 2009, when he released “Io Sono l’Amore” (“I Am Love”), announcing a voice that was sensuous, elegant, fervid, and, some critics have suggested, stylish to excess. In “A Bigger Splash” (2016), he assembled Ralph Fiennes, Dakota Johnson, Matthias Schoenaerts, and Tilda Swinton to perform a tense and deadly four-point human drama at a wind-stricken villa. His next feature, “Call Me by Your Name,” drawn from the André Aciman novel, centers on a love affair between a young scholar, Oliver (Armie Hammer), and a seventeen-year-old music prodigy, Elio (Timothée Chalamet). “So much of that movie was about being young and constantly submerged in water,” Chalamet says.

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Guadagnino recalls realizing that “Call Me by Your Name” would be a hit when his fifteen-year-old niece, who’d never seemed remotely interested in his work, texted to say that she and her friends were dying to see it. The film won over both the Hollywood establishment and a demographic that Guadagnino calls, with a nod to his niece, “kids and girls”: youths stirred by a tender story of long-lashed young men falling in love over a summer filled with midnight dancing, volleyball, and Bach.

Guadagnino did not expect his new feature, out at the end of this month, to have the same effect on kids and girls. “Suspiria,” loosely a remake of Dario Argento’s horror film from 1977, is set at a dance company, in a divided Berlin, during the cold months. It follows a shy Mennonite girl from Ohio, Susie (Johnson), as she joins the troupe. Haunted by the disappearance of a politically insurrectionary dancer (Moretz) and various creepy feelings, Susie tries to understand the company’s secrets—even as she gives herself to its brilliant, opaque mistress, Madame Blanc (Swinton), and the sinister-seeming power of her dance.

The movie looks at first like an outlier in the landscape of Guadagnino’s work. Like the Elio character in “Call Me by Your Name,” Guadagnino, who is forty-seven, was a skinny gay teen-ager during the eighties, and many people took that film to be a veiled memoir. In fact, Guadagnino says, he felt no more connection with the story than with any other he’d put on the screen. “Suspiria” is different. He has hoped to make the film for more than thirty years. Where Argento’s version, set at a dance school, was brightly colored and campy, Guadagnino builds his setting unironically, in layers, from a Fassbinderian backdrop of browns and blues and grays. The movie reaches downward, to Germany’s ugly past treatment of bodies, and upward, to a mental realm of ritual and symbol: Freudian, creative, and occult. And it tells a coming-of-age story about mastering creative and destructive strength. “Suspiria” is very much a horror film: flesh is ripped; bones are broken; heads explode. Guadagnino also calls it the most personal movie that he has made.

In the editing room the next day, Guadagnino was in one of his favorite states: surrounded at work by an eclectic group of friends. “Wow!” he exclaimed as new visitors arrived, rushing forward to embrace them. “Look who’s here!” (“There are always people visiting on set—always,” Dakota Johnson reports. “It’s absurd.”)

Although Guadagnino never went to film school, there is something of the dorm-room atelier in the way he fills his life and his credits with trusted comrades, handing out filmmaking tasks like chores. The writer of one film might do marketing for another. Of three male actors listed in the main credits of “Suspiria” (the cast is otherwise thirty-eight women), one is a distinguished cinematographer and another is an architectural photographer. The third—Lutz Ebersdorf, the actor playing the old psychoanalyst, about whom Guadagnino avidly sought all visitors’ opinions—had never been seen on a set before. “Luca’s approach can be very disorienting for new collaborators,” says Fasano, who has been the film editor on all of Guadagnino’s features but also, variously, a co-director, an assistant director, a screenwriter, and a composer. Guadagnino’s approach transgresses many of the industry’s usual hierarchies. “Normally, as a writer in Hollywood, you’re hired as a kind of builder—it’s your work ethic that’s valued,” David Kajganich, the screenwriter of “Suspiria” and “A Bigger Splash,” says. “With Luca, I was part of the prep conversations. I was part of the casting conversations. I was part of conversations about location. Actually writing the script is probably one-fifth of our collaboration.”

That afternoon’s passing circle included Carlo Antonelli, formerly the editor of Italian Rolling Stone, Italian Wired, and Italian GQ but also a Guadagnino actor, writer, and producer; Lisa Muskat, who produces indie films; and Sheikh Mubarak Al-Sabah, a young Kuwaiti aristocrat whom Guadagnino met at Fashion Week. Ferdinando Cito Filomarino, whom he refers to as “my sentimental partner,” circulated briskly through the studio all day. They met ten years ago, on the set of “I Am Love,” for which Cito Filomarino was an assistant director. Now a sandy-haired thirty-one-year-old, Cito Filomarino released his own first feature in 2015, and is about to shoot his English-language début.