I made plans to go to Crema after the Cannes Film Festival in May, where the restored Howards End was to be shown. The last time I saw Luca was before it began, in New York, when I still believed I was codirecting with him we joked about what might happen if we got into an argument on set, and laughed about it. When I turned in my script to them, it was accepted without any changes or requests for rewrites, and soon money was found to make the film, and to pay me. I was happy to be included in this attractive family. They were part of his company, Frenesy, and were helping him finish his new film, A Bigger Splash. Luca had a coterie of smart young men and women who shared his life and were fun to be with. The church bells rang nearby in the early morning, and someone ran down stone steps next to my room every day, as I lay on a big, white, square pillow. I was sleeping in his best guest room, which is also his library of film books. I was soon making frequent trips to Crema, the northern Italian city where Luca lived. But it was the thought of taking up an Italian life again that really drew me in, and to even write the script on spec-that is, for nothing. I felt I could identify with them, and I felt I knew how they would think and act, having known the madness of first love myself. I liked André Aciman’s story well enough I liked the two young men in it, Elio and Oliver. This was the screenplay of Call Me by Your Name, a film to be made in Italy, and which I had been asked to codirect by the director Luca Guadagnino. Fantastic to me, too, that I was being given it for a piece of work I’d taken up almost casually as a favor for some friends, and for the fun of it. So it seemed quite fantastic to me that in 2018, and at the age of eighty-nine, I was handed the most famous statue of modern civilization to keep as my own. Its fame eclipses even Michelangelo’s David and the Statue of Liberty. Since I started working, however, the reputation of the Oscar statuette has grown and grown until it has become the world’s most famous statue. But I think we can now say that painting is one of the sleeping arts, and so is sculpture, despite the gargantuan clamor of Richard Serra’s monoliths. Picasso, Matisse, and Braque were still at work then Frank Lloyd Wright, America’s greatest artist, was putting together the Guggenheim Museum on Fifth Avenue, and Charlie Chaplin continued to make his films. When in the early 1950s I began to make my first films, which were mostly about historic cities, artists, and painting, the Oscar statuette was not the most famous statue in the world. Adapted from Solid Ivory, by James Ivory, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.