Luca Guadagnino was first struck by his After the Hunt star’s A-list powers when she played Steel Magnolias’ effervescent Southern belle Shelby in 1989. Now three-and-a-half decades on, the Italian auteur finally got his professional meet-cute with Julia Roberts in a quiet corner of a glitzy LA bash.

‘It was at the house of a very important person in Hollywood,’ he remembers. ‘This wonderful person put us together, we sat on the couch and we never stopped talking.’

Even for a filmmaker of the pedigree and experience of Guadagnino, there were nerves to banish during those couple of hours chatting with the Hollywood icon. But, he says, ‘she made me feel familiar in a second. Over time we bonded over many things.’

Their first chat zeroed in on a buzzy screenplay by rookie scree

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