'Luca' director admits they 'talked about' making the leads gay but decided to focus on a 'pre-romance' friendship

• "Luca" director Enrico Casarosa said there was talk of having the leads be romantically linked.
• However, eventually, "we were really focusing on friendship and so pre-romance," he said.

Since the first trailer for Pixar's "Luca" came out and showed two boy sea monsters who befriend one another as they try to be accepted above the sea in a small Italian fishing town, it has resonated with the LGBTQ+ community.

Watching the close relationship the main characters Luca and Alberto have, many even went and declared it the animated version of the gay coming-of-age 2017 drama, "Call Me by Your Name," starring Timothée Chalamet and Armie Hammer.

Though "Luca" director Enrico Casarosa has always said while doing press that the story is based on his straight relationship with his best friend growing up in Italy, in a recent interview with The Wrap he did admit that for a moment while developing the story they wondered if Luca and Alberto should be more than just friends.

"We talked about it," Casarosa said of the two having a romance. "I think the reason probably we didn't talk about it as much and, to a certain degree, we're slightly surprised by the amount of people talking about romance, is that we were really focusing on friendship and so pre-romance."

"But it is a kind of love, right?" he continued. "There's a lot of hugging and it's physical and my experience as a straight man certainly wasn't that. The things we did talk a lot about is what is the metaphor here for being a sea monster, for being different."

Casarosa said at the end of the day he leaned into how he and his friend were growing up to shape the two characters' dynamic.

"My version was certainly we were two geeks, losery," he said. "But it's so wonderful and even more powerful for the LGBTQ+ community who has felt so much of as an outsider, right, where this is so real and stronger than my experience."

Last June, former Insider reporter Jacob Sarkisian wrote about his disappointment that "Luca" didn't commit to being a queer movie.

"It's a shame that this decision has come when a gay romance could have so easily and naturally be explored," he wrote.

"Making Luca and Alberto explicitly gay or queer wouldn't have felt contrived, it would have been a meaningful confirmation of what is already a story rich in gay subtext."

Casarosa said he and Pixar were caught off guard by the queer take on the story because they were so focused on the characters being in a "pre-puberty" stage of their lives.

"There's no crush yet," he said.

But he is overjoyed that his story is going beyond that and is being viewed as "a movie about being open to any difference."

"I love that the metaphor is reading in all these different ways," Casarosa said.

"Luca" is currently available on Disney+ and to buy on Blu-ray.