Also opening in D.C. this week is another film I reviewed for NPR: smart, funny Irish gangster farce PERRIER'S BOUNTY.

CONCEIVED AS A SORT OF COLLABORATION WITH BRITISH actress Tilda Swinton, Italian director Luca Guadagnino's I Am Love is set in an imperial Milan that still contains traces of the Fascist period. Swinton plays Emma, a Russian-born woman who married into a refined but about-to-fracture family whose wealth derives from the textile industry. At first, the film seems to be mostly about two of Emma's three grown children, but it gradually comes to focus on their mother, whose meticulously constructed facade cracks when she begins an affair with one of her son's friends, a young chef. (Click here for my NPR review of the film.) Guadagnino developed the project for seven years before he began to shoot, so I started a June 16 telephone interview by asking where the process began.

The starting point is a portrait of Tilda Swinton that I shot in 2002, called The Love Factory. Tilda and I have a conversation, with a closeup on her — I'm not on camera — and she speaks to me. All her thoughts about love, the radicalism of love, the subversive power of love. These conversations made a long-lasting impression on me. When I came back to Rome, after I shot this film in Cannes, I had a need to put these words into the form of a narrative film. I wrote a few pages of story, which is more or less what the movie's about now. Then from there on, we started desiring this movie, projecting this movie we were going to make.

Swinton is one of the film's producers.

Yes. She is one of the people who had the greatest ability to make this movie happen.

How was she involved in developing the story?

I wrote this story with Barbara Alberti, Ivan Cotroneo, and Walter Fasano. But Tilda and I were always talking to each other. It's not a specific collaboration — she does this. It's about always being on the same page, and always discussing, and always trying to sort out ideas.

Architecture seems to play a big role in the film's story and its visual compositions.

Yes. I think it's important to show the environment where a story takes place. How the urban and natural landscape shapes the inner landscape of the characters. If I'm going to do a movie in New York, the characters are going to be different than characters in Toronto. Or in Los Angeles. One of the things that makes the people is the place where they live. And architecture is one of the arts that's close to filmmaking. I like form, and I think it's important to keep an eye on that.

How did you find the palazzo where you filmed?

I was buying and buying and buying books of architecture in Italy, because I wanted to find that place that I had described, without knowing it, in my script. And I couldn't find anything. I was seeing only these baroque, pompous houses. And then one day I bought a book called Interiors, something like that, that showed some houses. One of those houses was Villa Necchi, built in 1937, and that was it. The house was the house in the script. Like the music of John Adams, that I didn't know. When I heard it in 1995, it was the music I was really thinking of, without knowing it. There's a general serendipity to this project, I would say.

Was it easy to get access to the villa?

It took a lonnng conversation with the foundation that has the house. It's a trust, a museum. Long, but nice — Italian. I think the people who run this trust, the Italian Trust for the Environment, are very good.

Is the house actually in Milan?

It's in the very center of Milan.

And what about the Russian church that Emma stumbles upon in San Remo, awakening memories of her previous life?

That's really in San Remo. I liked the idea of the unconscious coming out. You break your leg, and that means something. She goes to San Remo and she bumps into the Russian church. It means something. The moment she recognizes her roots, she spies the chef. It's as if she's materializing both things — her past and her future. These things happen in towns, when you see something that comes from history, that you don't expect. You don't expect to see a Russian church in the Riviera.

And how long had you known that the church was there?

I saw it for the first time in 2001. Probably that's the moment when the story started to spark in my imagination, in my unconscious.

So that's the instant in which you decided the character would be Russian?

I thought about it, after I wrote the outline. Then San Remo came to mind, and I wrote this thing about the Russian church. As Jean Renoir said, when you make a movie, you should leave the door open to reality. That's what I allowed to happen during the movie.

You seem very interested in physical details, not just the buildings but the furnishings and the food.

Yes, very relevant.

Because they bring out character?

They bring out the details. God is the in details. Or the devil is the details. Either way. I think you can understand a person much more if you see where he's putting his hand, or the shape of his hair. More than any words.

Do you prefer to shoot on actual locations, because of their authentic look?

We built some sets for the film. We built the restaurant. I love to shoot. I love to shoot anyplace. As soon as the place looks real.

But you need reality to begin the story.

Yes. You need to know. You need to do a lot of research.

In one interview, Tilda Swinton said the film has "an almost documentary spirit." What do you think she meant by that?

That we allowed many elements of life to enter the film. That we not looking for drama, but more we were looking for actual behavior. For things to happen.

At what point did you decide that the family would be in the textile industry?

This is typical of northern society. It's pretty accurate and real, that a family of that heritage have an enterprise like that. I really don't remember where it came from.

What part of Italy are you from?

I am from Sicily, actually. My mother is Algerian, and I was raised in Ethiopia.

So you have a certain distance from northern Italy.

I am very South. But I am attracted by North.

This is the first film ever to use music composed by Nixon in China composer John Adams. At what point did you start thinking of his music in terms of the film?

For me, music is always there. And then you realize how music can be a character in your movie. Not just a comment, or an indicator of what you should feel. But more something that is a voice, along with the voices of the movie's other elements. When I listened to John Adams's music for the first time, I fell in love with it. I felt that this was the music for the movie.

And he agreed?

Adams has the capacity of all the great people I've met in my life, to be humble, and to listen. He allowed us to use his music. We showed him the film. He loved it, and then he was part of it.

I saw the film at a screening that was followed by a discussion with Adams.

Oh! Good.

He said he'd been waiting 20 years for someone to use Shaker Loops for a sex scene.

Oh! Nice. [laughs] I showed him the movie before it was finished. I'm curious to know, was he happy with it?

He seemed happy.... I've noticed that a lot of reviewers compare I Am Love to Visconti. Do you think that's reasonable?

That's up to them. I studied all the elements that I had for this movie. I tried to think in cinematic language, and not in televisual language. And Visconti is not only a great storyteller, but also he's a great filmmaker. He speaks the language of cinema, not the language of TV.

And that's what you were looking for, that sort of grand canvas?

Yes. I like canvases. When you go to the National Gallery in London, you step inside the big hall and there are these huge canvases that show battlefields. Huge. It's fantastic. I want to do that.

I AM LOVE — 2009, 120 min; at Landmark E Street and Bethesda Row.