Call Me By Your Name may have received three Academy Award nominations, including a Best Picture nod, but the Oscar-winning screenwriter James Ivory still saw a problem with the final product: a lack of frontal male nudity. In an interview with the Guardian, Ivory revealed that the original script called for young lovers Elio (Timothée Chalamet) and Oliver (Armie Hammer) to bear it all. “When [director] Luca [Guadagnino] says he never thought of putting nudity in, that is totally untrue,” Ivory said. “He sat in this very room where I am sitting now, talking about how he would do it, so when he says that it was a conscious aesthetic decision not to — well, that’s just bullshit.”
Ivory depicted male nudity on film after a gay sex scene in his 1987 film Maurice. The filmmaker explained, “When people are wandering around before or after making love, and they’re decorously covered with sheets, it’s always seemed phony to me. I never liked doing that. And I don’t do it, as you know.”
The Guardian reports that Elio and Oliver did not appear in the nude due to a clauses in Chalamet and Hammer’s contracts. However, Guadagnino previously told The Hollywood Reporter that he did not want to include explicit sex scenes for other reasons. “The tone would’ve been very different from what I was looking for,” Guadagnino said. “I wanted the audience to completely rely on the emotional travel of these people and feel first love.”
