Getting to the Heart of ‘Bones and All’ with Screenwriter Dave Kajganich
This piece was originally published on FilmSpeak.
Looming over director Luca Guadagnino’s Bones and All is the notion that this coming-of-age love story is just a bit different than what most people are used to. The young lovers (Taylor Russell and Timothée Chalamet) are not shunned for their romance, but rather because they’re cannibals. However, writer Dave Kajganich hopes people see beyond the film’s initial strangeness.
“We love to be the victims of small things…like, oh my god, I just saw this movie that really pushed me around for two hours,” Kajganich says. He’s oddly charmed by the way people are in awe of the cannibalism, but he ultimately made a fundamental change to how he would portray cannibalism in the film.
Bones and All is based on a book of the same name by Camille DeAngelis. Her approach to cannibalism was more akin to a manifestation of desire, while Kajganich decided to make it a need for the “eaters.”
“I wanted there to be a very clear feeling, not necessarily an understanding, but a feeling in the film that they didn’t really have much of a choice,” Kajganich explains. “So by asking something like cannibalism in the film to feel like a desire suggested to me some kind of choice, or at least some kind of agency, and would also then feel like the subject of the film. And I didn't want cannibalism to be the subject of the film. It’s certainly a catalyst for a lot of what happens in the film, but I wanted your primary sense of desire to be about characters feeling seen by one another.”
At its core, Bones and All is a tale about otherness. Kajganich joked that he usually doesn’t like to be vague in his metaphors, but he was purposefully so for this film. Simply to expand the net of people who could potentially feel seen by the film.
“When you are an other, your hesitation or resistance to the other other is less,” says. “Once you have already been cast aside or left behind or pushed out, your community is everyone else. Or ought to be in some spiritual way…so I wanted there to be some kind of connective tissue between all the types of ways people are pushed out in this film.”
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Vision Distribution, United Artists Releasing
Kajganich read DeAngelis’ original novel through a queer lens and that led to his decision to change the book’s vague, timeless setting to one that he was intimately familiar with: 1980s America. It was when Kajganich was coming of age himself, and the return to this time period while shooting was overwhelming to him at times.
“I knew that going back to some of these places and the accents and the material, the culture, the Midwest…would call up memories. I really wasn’t prepared,” Kajganich says.
Throughout filming, Kajganich felt like he had one foot in the present and one foot back in time. “It felt great to revisit all that stuff with purpose instead of on a therapist’s couch or in your nightmares,” he laughs.
The most impactful difference in his change of time was the statement Kajganich was able to make through this tale of star-crossed others. “Yes, you can survive these things. And not only survive them, you can actually create something with them,” Kajganich explains. “Use your own experience to in some way comfort someone else…even if it’s just in a small way, in some horror movie they might see one year.”
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Vision Distribution, United Artists Releasing
Given the film’s title and consequence, there’s a feeling throughout that there might not be a happy ending as the film fades to black. Despite that, Kajganich manages to create little pockets of hopefulness. He considered the film in the broader picture of what he wanted the audience to walk away with. More than just an ending, a piece of hope to cling to for those who know what it’s like to be othered.
Kajganich thought a lot about “what the film might be able to say to an audience that might have some experience with being othered or being pushed aside…that it doesn’t have to define your life. And it certainly doesn’t have to define your expectations to itself.”
“I think it would've been a great disservice to somehow suggest that that is terminal,” he continues. “I mean, it is often for people in real life and that’s the sadness of the subtext of the film, but I don’t think I have any business as a filmmaker being that misanthropic… it would just feel gratuitous in the worst way, in a spiritual way to say, no, there’s really no hope here.”
Follow me on BlueSky, Instagram, Letterboxd, & YouTube. Check out Movies with My Dad, a new podcast recorded on the car ride home from the movies.