Daniel Craig has spoken about filming explicit sex scenes for Luca Guadagnino’s Queer at the Venice film festival, ahead of its premiere on Tuesday.

An adaptation of the William Burroughs novel of the same name, Queer is set in 1950s Mexico City and stars Craig as a rackety American expat who begins an affair with a young student, played by Drew Starkey.

“There’s nothing intimate about filming a sex scene on a movie set,” said Craig. “We just wanted to make it as touching and as real and as natural as we possibly could. Drew is a wonderful, fantastic, beautiful actor to work with and we kind of had a laugh. We tried to make it fun.”

Starkey agreed, and said working with choreographers some months before the shoot help accelerate the actors’ intimacy. “When you’re rolling around on the floor the second day it’s a good way to get to know someone.”

Guadagnino is a regular in Venice: his debut feature, The Protagonists (1999), premiered at the festival, as did 2015’s A Bigger Splash, Suspiria (2018) and 2022’s Bones and All.

His most recent feature, tennis drama Challengers, had been scheduled to open last year’s festival, but was withdrawn in the wake of the actors’ strike.

He and Craig had first met two decades ago and long hoped to collaborate. Said Craig of Queer: “If I wasn’t in this movie and I saw this movie, I’d want to be in it. It’s the kind of film I want to see, I want to make, I want to be out there.”

Guadagnino, meanwhile, praised Craig’s “generosity of approach”, calling him one of “very few iconic actors who allow their fragility to be seen”.

Many are tipping Craig for considerable awards recognition for his performance, which marks a return to the daring and experimentalism of his early career.

During the press conference, Guadagnino rebutted a question about the sexuality of James Bond, the spy Craig played until recently, asking reporters to “be adult in the room for a second” before reminding them that “there’s no way anybody could know James Bond’s desires. The important thing is that he does his missions properly.”

Burroughs wrote Queer during the time period in which it was set, but didn’t publish it for 30 years for fear of being ostracised. Originally conceived as a sequel to Junkie, it explores the parallels between obsessive love and drug addiction.

Asked about his own vices, Guadagnino protested that he had never taken drugs or smoked, recently lost 15kg on a diet and could count the number of lovers he’d had on two hands.

He had first read the book as a 17-year-old, he said, and become preoccupied with “the idea of seeing people and not judging them. Making sure that even the worst person is the person you identify with.”

He credited the film-making duo Powell and Pressburger as his creative inspiration in the adaptation, describing the production as “a quite remarkably simple and straightforward process: joyful and fun and melancholic.”

Craig called Queer a “tiny book” with an “emotional thump”. “It is about love and loss and loneliness and yearning. If I was writing myself a part and trying to tick off things I wanted to do, this would be all of them.”

The film, whose supporting cast includes Lesley Manville and Jason Schwartzman, is expected to be released in the US and UK later this year.