This week, Luca Guadagnino started shooting his next feature film, Bones & All, a Timothée Chalamet-starring cannibal horror set in the US. Filming in the Ohio Tri-State area, the project will be the director’s first shot on US soil, but fear not: he’s assembled a cast of friends and past collaborators that should make him feel right at home.

According to the Hollywood Reporter, the previously-announced leads — Chalamet and Waves’ Taylor Russell — will be joined by Chloë Sevigny, who starred in Guadagnino’s HBO series We Are Who We Are last year, and Michael Stuhlbarg, AKA Chalamet’s on-screen dad in Call Me By Your Name.

Another We Are Who We Are actor, Francesca Scorsese, is also newly on board for the upcoming film, alongside the original Suspiria’s Jessica Harper, André Holland, Mark Rylance, and Halloween filmmaker David Gordon Green (in his acting debut).

Written by David Kajganich (another previous collaborator, having worked on A Bigger Splash and Suspiria), Bones & All is based on Camille DeAngelis’ 2015 novel of the same name. The book tells the story of Maren, a cannibalistic young woman living on the fringes of society, and Lee, a disenfranchised drifter, who fall in love on a journey across Ronald Reagan’s America.

According to Guadagnino, he immediately saw Chalamet, Russell, and Stuhlbarg as a perfect fit for the key roles. “I’d been handed this beautiful script by David Kajganich, and while I was reading it, I felt like I knew how to make this movie,” he told Deadline on the first day of filming (May 27). “At the same time, the second I read it, I said, I think only Timothée can play this role.”

“He’s fantastic, a great performer and to see him soaring the way he is doing now, I feel proud of him. And this character is something very new for him, both endearing and heartbreaking.”

“I’ve been a fan of Taylor Russell since I saw her in Waves, and I made it a point to myself to make sure we found something to do together,” he continues, adding: “This is a very romantic story, about the impossibility of love and yet, the need for it, even in extreme circumstances. Timmy and Taylor have this power, this gleaming power, to portray these universal feelings.”

When Bones & All was first announced in January this year, it unfortunately coincided with disturbing allegations, including claims of cannibalism, made against Call Me By Your Name star Armie Hammer (who, needless to say, isn’t involved in the film). The allegations have led Hammer to be dropped from a series of other projects, and reduce the likelihood of the rumoured CMBYN sequel ever seeing the light of day.

Guadagnino also suggests that he’s got too much on his plate to be thinking about the potential follow-up right now. “The truth of the matter is, my heart is still there,” he says, “but I’m working on this movie now, and I’m hopefully going to do Scarface soon. I have many projects and so will focus on this side of the Atlantic and the movies I want to make.”