How Luca Guadagnino restyled a ’60s cult film to be A Bigger Splash

While Hollywood has no compunction about riding roughshod over old movies and remaking them, it’s a rather different matter in the rarefied world of European cinema. Classics from the golden age of auteurs – the days of Godard, Fellini and Bergman – are perhaps too singular to ever be attempted again. Who would dare rework 8½ or Persona? They tried it with Godard’s Breathless; the 1983 erotic effort starring Richard Gere was an unmitigated disaster.

So it’s no surprise Italian director Luca Guadagnino was hesitant when French-based Studio Canal approached him to take on Jacques Deray’s 1969 movie, La Piscine. “I thought ‘Why and how should I remake it?’” he says. Fortunately, Deray’s film, which starred Alain Delon, Romy Schneider and Jane Birkin, is more cult than classic. When Guadagnino looked at it again, he found a way in. “I thought it was about desire, so that was the hook for me.”

Also a subject Guadagnino undertook in his celebrated 2009 film I Am Love – which starred Tilda Swinton as a Russian émigré married into a Milanese industrial clan – the set-up for La Piscine allows for latent, lascivious passions to be fully explored. Relocating the original story from St. Tropez to the more remote Sicilian island of Pantelleria, A Bigger Splash borrows Deray’s template as an off-the-grid couple’s tranquillity is shattered by the arrival of an ex and his daughter.

“I don’t see it as a remake. It was a source of inspiration. We were not trying to recreate that very film,” argues Belgium-actor Matthias Schoenaerts (Rust & Bone), who plays Paul, a recovering alcoholic and documentary filmmaker based on the character originally played by Delon. “I didn’t want to burden myself with the idea that I had to replace Alain Delon. You can’t replace Alain Delon. Forget about it. I didn’t want to go there.”