Guadagnino says that he almost didn’t do it. Mostly he wants to discuss We Are Who We Are, his eight-part HBO series, which stars Chloë Sevigny as the incoming commander of a US army base in Italy and Jack Dylan Grazer as her upstart teenage son.

So he’d like to talk about Fiori, Fiori, Fiori, his little lockdown film, and he’d like to talk about Shoemaker of Dreams, an affectionate documentary about Salvatore Ferragamo. That’s because he’s a workaholic, always on the go, which he now thinks was a factor in his relationship ending. The director has several projects he has now finished, and is eager to discuss and promote before he moves on to new ones. Unguarded people have better conversations anyway. The layout is such that we can probably dispense with our masks. He’s lounging at a corner table by the open window, sunlight bouncing off the hotel walls. We meet in Venice, during the pandemic’s brief summer lull.

Photograph: Jacopo M Raule/Getty Images for Bottega Veneta Guadagnino, who is also remaking Scarface and Brideshead Revisited.