I dearly love the sequence on the waterfall. By the way in the book they go to Rome and they talked, they become part of a group of intellectuals, Roman intellectuals, which sounded very lyric to Aciman being American. But because I know many of those people I thought it impossible to put on the screen Italian intellectuals. And I still remember the critics I got for the Italian carabinieri in ‘A Bigger Splash’ back in Italy, so I said to myself ‘No’.
But then Ivory’s script took place, took them on to a tuna fishing exploration because it was Sicily. […] And there was always a crowd of people. But then I thought maybe these two want to be alone. They want to be alone.
And this water you see in the Lombardian countryside comes from those mountains. So in a way Elio is being so thoughtful of bringing him to the origin of the water of the region. And I thought it was great, so that’s what we did.