Luca Guadagnino decides it's time to weigh in on ballet-and-opera-gate

Luca Guadagnino, the director of Call Me By Your Name and one of Chalamet’s earliest major collaborators, has now chimed in to ask: What’s the big deal? “I am not on social media and don’t understand how one [single] comment can become a planetary polemic,” Guadagnino recently told Italian outlet La Stampa (via The Guardian). Chalamet “could have spared himself … but he’s young, smart, sensitive, and he fears that cinema could become marginal. And that’s why every form of imagination should be nurtured,” continues the director. “We must unite the arts, not separate them.” The Guardian notes that Guadagnino directed a production of the opera Falstaff in 2011, for what it’s worth. 

At the same time, Alex Beard, chief of London’s Royal Ballet and Opera, said this morning that the theater got a huge boost of sales after Chalamet’s comments went viral. “I thought it important that we didn’t issue a kind of hoity-toity response to Chalamet. We simply said ‘Take a look at what we’re doing, mate,’” Beard told The Times. “And our ticket sales got an immediate boost. So cheers, Timmy!”