NEW YORK, NY.- Luca Guadagnino has added creative director to his list of jobs.

As a filmmaker, his credits include “Challengers,” the Oscar-nominated movie “Call Me by Your Name” and the upcoming “Queer,” an adaptation of William S. Burroughs’ semi-autobiographical novella starring Daniel Craig, which recently premiered at the Venice Film Festival. He is also the founder of Studio Luca Guadagnino, an award-winning interiors firm in Milan that has designed several homes, boutiques and, most recently, the Palazzo Talia hotel in Rome.

Now, Guadagnino has marshaled the staging and curation of Homo Faber, a monthlong, biennial craftsmanship exhibition that opened Sunday at the Giorgio Cini Foundation, a cultural center on San Giorgio Maggiore island in Venice. Homo Faber, which means “man the maker” in Latin, is put on by the Michelangelo Foundation for Creativity and Craftsmanship, a Geneva-based nonprofit established by Italian author Franco Cologni and luxury industry billionaire Johann Rupert, chair of Richemont, which owns the brands Cartier, Van Cleef & Arpels and Alaïa. Guadagnino partnered with his design studio project manager, Nicolò Rosmarini, to conceive this third edition as a “holistic experience — like a narrative,” he said.

To achieve this, Guadagnino and Rosmarini created an immersive journey throughout the island’s 16th-century Palladio-designed monastery and assorted buildings that carries visitors through 10 multisensory set pieces, each dedicated to an aspect of the human experience like Childhood, Courtship and Dreams. They designed everything (“the lighting system, the uniforms, the tote bag, the tables, the cover of the cable on the floor,” Guadagnino said) then filled the rooms with 800 objects by 400 artisans from 70 countries.

Guadagnino sat down in the monastery’s burnished baroque library to talk about the importance of craftsmanship in modern life, and how he handles so many projects simultaneously. This interview has been condensed and edited.

Q: You direct and produce movies, you design interiors and now you orchestrate exhibitions. How are you able to juggle it all?

A: I am a homo faber. I like to do things, I am a multitasker. I have horizontal time and I have vertical time. While we’re doing this interview, I’m also working my brain of something I need to do, or I want to do. Yet, I hope that you feel that I’m completely here with you.

And I always have amazing partners. Like Nicolò. And the Irish architect Nigel Peake, who created the beautiful Homo Faber logo. And the great Italian landscape designer Antonio Perazzi, who I work with on different projects, and who brought love to these gardens. When you share ideas and responsibilities, and have conflict, confrontation and dialogue, you get better ideas. For me, talking to people is always untiring. I can talk to people all the time.

Q: It seems you are telling us that design and craftsmanship are everywhere we turn: in our childhood bedrooms, on our tabletops, in our gardens.

A: The 20th century was the century of design and mass production, which changed the idea of the unique piece into the piece that everyone can get. This is a beautiful form of democracy, but there is the danger of nondescriptiveness. For me, the idea of trying to make something that speaks to many is very unique. It is something that I really am trying to do.

Q: Tell us about the Dream room — a dark enclosure in the former swimming pool, where you have an army of mannequins dressed in the same Azzedine Alaïa clingy, hooded gown, hovering over a reflecting pool and framed by a display of hundreds of haunting masks.

A: I’m an old-fashioned Freudian, so I think the dream is how the unconscious speaks and that sexuality is always looming under the surface. I also like the idea of a dream being liquid, and then being opaque, so the water is black, and yet, over the surface, you have this eternal feminine design, displayed in 30 different shades in the same form, and the mask, which is about hiding, but also empowering your identity through it. Every dream is erotic, absolutely.

Q: Do you have a favorite piece in the show?

A: In the Courtship room, there is a sculpture of silver flowers by the Korean artisan Hyejeong Ko made from 3,000 little pieces connected to one another. That is amazing.

Q: Are you happy with how the exhibition turned out?

A: This question is fantastic because it’s the final two lines in my new movie, “After the Hunt,” with Julia Roberts. Ayo Edebiri asks, “Are you happy?” And Julia replies, “Yes, I am.”

So am I.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.