Luca Guadagnino to Adapt Bob Dylan’s ‘Blood on the Tracks’ Album Into a Movie

blood on the tracks movie

Luca Guadagnino is about to give Bob Dylan another turn on the big screen. Hot off the heels of his acclaimed drama Call Me By Your Name and the divisive horror remake Suspiria, the filmmaker is taking on another unique project: an adaptation ofDylan’s 1975 album Blood on The Tracks.

According to a New Yorker profile about Guadagnino ahead of the release of Suspiria, Guadagino and The Fisher King writer Richard LaGravenese are currently developing a feature film based on Blood on the Tracks. The publication writes:

A producer of “Call Me by Your Name” had acquired the theatrical rights to “Blood on the Tracks,” the album by Bob Dylan, and had asked Guadagnino to make it into a movie. Sure, Guadagnino had said, but only if LaGravenese, whom he had never met, wrote it. (LaGravenese had previously written “The Fisher King,” “The Bridges of Madison County,” and, most exciting to Guadagnino, Demme’s adaptation of “Beloved.”)

LaGravenese has already churned out a 188-page screenplay that follows characters through a “multiyear story, set in the seventies.” And because this is Guadagnino, don’t expect this to be a jukebox musical like American Idiot. This is an entirely original story inspired by the album’s central themes.

“When they’re repressing, we dramatize the repression, and what that does to them,” LaGravenese told the New Yorker. “And we dramatize what happens when you let your passions take over too much.

The legendary singer-songwriter Dylan has starred in many movies and has been the subject of many more — both dramatic and documentary — but this may be the first time that one of his albums gets the feature film treatment. But it’s fitting that this semi-autobigraphical album is being adapted into a movie by Guadaginino. Blood on the Tracks is considered one of Dylan’s finest and most personal accomplishments, and has been long rumored to tell, in painstaking detail, the story of Dylan’s crumbling marriage to his first wife. And considering Guadagnino’s recurring fascination with human connection in his films, a Blood on the Tracks movie seems like a perfect next project for the filmmaker.