Nate Gualtieri
Nate Gualtieri
In 2012, Nate Gualtieri was on a very different career path: Accepted into Cornell’s chemical engineering program, he soon realized that was simply not for him. “I would have just ended up a petroleum engineer and probably not have contributed something that was a net positive to the world,” he jokes. He took a gap year before beginning to apply to film school, during which Gualtieri was undergoing another personal reckoning. “I was like, ‘Fuck, I think I’m transgender,’” he recalls. “I was going to therapy and my parents didn’t know. I told them I was going to a writing group.”
While he may have been concealing an integral personal truth, a passion for writing was far from fabricated. he initially felt “crazy” for enrolling at University of Southern California with a focus on screenwriting. “I’d never written a screenplay,” he laughs. “To this day, I sometimes think, ‘What have I done?’ Both in a positive and negative way.” All things considered, his career is one marked by early success. Gualtieri hadn’t even graduated before landing a job as a writer’s PA. (“I did that whole climb.”) Three years later, in 2020, he took a playwriting class at L.A.’s Echo Theater Company. Even though he consider the resultant play “so bad,” certain lessons from the class inspired him to write their “first good thing.” All-American Boy, a feature screenplay about a closeted trans athlete who begins hoarding testosterone, was a semifinalist for the 2021 Outfest Screenwriting Lab. The project also marked the first time that he began professionally writing about the trans experience—a full seven years since he began hormone therapy. “I actually really think that decision served me well,” says Gualtieri, “because I had enough space to speak about that process with a little bit of poignancy.”
The attention garnered for All-American Boy led trans filmmaker and artist Jules Rosskam to commission Gualtieri in 2021 for his first paid writing opportunity on the hybrid feature Desire Lines, a “deeply trans and homosexual” story. (The film went on to premiere at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival, where it earned the NEXT Special Jury Award.) Then, in 2022, Gualtieri was hired as a staff writer on the Berlanti/CW series Gotham Knights, a DC Comics series that ran for one season in 2023. “That was a great experience,” he says. “But what happened with the strike ended up pointing me towards independent film in a way that I’m incredibly grateful for right now.”
While working on the show, Gualtieri applied for the Film Independent Project Involve Fellowship. He was “shocked” to get an interview, even more so to be selected as a writing fellow for 2023. Through this program, he wrote Wrong Bathroom, a short film about “using the men’s restroom as a trans person.” While the program prohibited writing fellows from directing their own work, watching someone else behind the camera taught him “so much,” and he realized that another screenplay he submitted for the Film Independent fellowship, Queerbait, would be his feature directorial debut. Before then, the self-financed 2022 short Piercing and a college film were the only directorial efforts under his belt. “I used to only be able to see what was wrong,” Gualtieri says of these early efforts. “Now I can see some of the potential, even though they are pretty bad.”
After a disappointing first draft, Gualtieri completed the feature script for Queerbait in just five days to apply to Netflix’s Proof of Concept Accelerator in early 2024. Once accepted, he brought several members of the Film Independent fellowship cohort back to serve as cinematographer, editor and producers. (Cate Blanchett, co-founder of the program, also EPs.) The short, which dissects an inappropriate power dynamic between classics scholar David Reynolds (Matthew Floyd Miller) and transmasc protege Ezra Wilder (Sydney Mae Diaz), was shot in October of the same year. Now aiming to make the feature-length version of Queerbait, Gualtieri heads to Gotham Week’s U.S. Shorts to Feature program in October with the hope of raising more funding, just seven months after participating in Sundance’s Screenwriters Lab. He hopes the film can “flip what the erotic thriller used to be,” noting that the genre has often utilized “trans people as a villain or plot twist.”
“I don’t want to be somebody who makes a movie every seven years,” Gualtieri states. Not short on intriguing ideas, he is concurrently seeking funding to shoot a proof of concept for his next feature, a “body horror about male pregnancy.” “In an ideal world, I would love to do those two features, then move into TV directing,” he says, citing Sundance mentor Andrew Ahn as a shining example. Above all, he hopes to “bridge the gap between art and commerce” to elevate trans stories. “Easier said than done,” he laughs. —Natalia Keogan/Image: Isak Rappaport
