[Editor’s note: The following interview includes some spoilers for “Challengers.”]
Justin Kuritzkes managed to hit an ace with the first feature-length screenplay he’d ever written “that I felt good enough to share with anybody,” he joked during a recent interview with IndieWire over Zoom.
The playwright, author, and to some most memorably “Potion Seller,” credits the controversial 2018 U.S. Open final between Naomi Osaka and Serena Williams that began to devolve after an umpire penalized the latter tennis legend for allegedly receiving coaching from the sidelines.
“She immediately got really upset and said, ‘I didn’t do that. I would never do that.’ And I had never heard this rule before because I wasn’t massively into tennis. But immediately, this struck me as intensely cinematic,” said Kuritzkes. “You’re all alone on the court and there’s this one person in the stands who cares as much about what happens to you as you do, but you can’t talk to them.”
The questions that would take a few years for the writer to answer, and in a script that would eventually make its way from producers Amy Pascal and Rachel O’Connor to Emmy-winning stars Zendaya and Josh O’Connor, “West Side Story” breakout Mike Faist, and Oscar-nominated filmmaker Luca Guadagnino, were: “What if you really had to have a serious conversation that was about something beyond tennis, that was about your lives and that involved the person across the court? How could you have that conversation and how could you communicate the tension of that using film?”
Below, Kuritzkes goes into more detail on the key changes he made to the “Challengers” screenplay during pre-production, including which steamy scenes were added and cut.
The following interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
IndieWire: To start, how did “Challengers” come about? And did it being on The Black List in 2021 get it on Luca’s radar?
Justin Kuritzkes: I just became a legitimate tennis fan and got sucked into a deep rabbit hole of watching every match I could get my hands on. That led me to watch the Challenger Tour, which, it’s still the big leagues, but it’s the lowest level that’s the big leagues. It’s matches where guys are playing for a couple thousand dollars if they win, but most people are walking away with a couple hundred bucks, and in fact, they’re losing money just to get a couple ranking points.
And I thought that could be a really interesting place to set a movie that took place in a sports world, and specifically, it could be a really interesting place for two guys who have a lot of history to meet each other for the first time in years now that they’re on opposite ends of their careers. That was really the genesis of how I started thinking about the idea. I thought about it for a long time, and then eventually started actually writing it in 2021. And then from there, I was completely thrilled and honored to be on The Black List, but the movie was already totally put together by the time The Black List came out. We were already about to go into pre-production, but it still was really, really meaningful to me.
I read a version of the script that’s online, and what surprised me was that it did not yet have Tashi’s great speech about what tennis really is. When did that idea make its way into the movie?
Who the characters are and their relationship to tennis is pretty consistent from the original script to what ended up on the screen, and where they’re all coming from, that really didn’t change very much. But it became clear in pre-production that it would be important to have Tashi, at a certain point, say very plainly what it is about tennis that makes her feel alive, and that gives her life some direction and some purpose so that when we see it get ripped away from her, we know exactly what she’s losing, and we know exactly what she wants these guys to recognize they still have — and what she’s trying to still have through them to some extent.
Another moment of the film that was not yet in the script I read was the sort of threesome scene. When did that come into the picture as well?
Well, that was one of the first conversations Luca and I had about the script. He used this phrase that in a love triangle, you want all the corners to touch. And to me, I felt originally, when I heard that, that these people’s lives are so completely intertwined and their desires are so tied up in each other that they’re already touching. But then I realized that he meant it literally.
Immediately, that clicked for me as a great idea and something that we should pursue. It’s really important when you’re bringing a director on to a script that’s already written, especially a director like Luca, who’s an artist, and an auteur, and who has his own very specific and developed cinematic vision, that you need to make space for somebody like that to find a way in creatively into the movie.
It was really clear in our early conversations that it was important that the corners of this triangle touch for it to feel like Luca was getting what he needed creatively out of it. So the question for me as the writer became, “How can I find a place for that to happen that feels organic, and that feels earned, and that doesn’t completely jumble up what ends up happening in the rest of the movie?” Because we all felt really good about all of that. We just knew that we wanted to find a place for this to happen.
There was a lot of discussion with Luca, and with Amy, with the actors about where that could happen and how we could lead into it to feel like it had always been there. I’m really incredibly grateful for that process because now, that scene is one of my favorites in the movie. I love that scene, and I love the work that they’re all doing in that scene. So that’s one of those scenes that is really indicative of how amazing collaboration in a film can be and what’s so beautiful about filmmaking, which is that you’re doing it with other people.
Again, going back to the script I read, there was also a more explicit sex scene between Mike Faist and Zendaya’s characters. We’ve made note of how ultimately the film is suggestive, but we don’t see the scenes of embrace go too far. Were more literal sex scenes filmed? Was there a conversation about pulling back on how far you all wanted to go in terms of telling the story?
Well, listen, neither Luca nor I or any of the people who made this movie are particularly prudish or moralistic when it comes to that. A lot of the films we love have very explicit sex scenes, and I don’t think it’s beyond any of us to make movies with those kinds of scenes. When it comes to this movie, so much of it is about what these people can say to each other and feel with each other on a tennis court that they can’t experience anywhere else. And so there is a feeling like the court is where they know each other most intimately, where all of the things that they’re not getting from each other in their lives, they’re all of a sudden getting there. The understanding that they’re getting that they wish they could have for each other in their lives, they can get on a tennis court wordlessly through action and through crashing together just through the physics of tennis. So that metaphor was always present in the script, and it was something that is really present in the film. I don’t know that I have anything more interesting to say about the sex scene beyond that.
Was there the idea that things would go further? Was there anything shot? Because I know there was an intimacy coordinator on set and everything.
No, everything we shot ended up in the movie. There wasn’t a lot of stuff that ended up on the cutting room floor. We cut stuff in pre-production, but once we were actually putting things in front of a camera, we were pretty much shooting the film we wanted to make.
Also, when does the climactic windstorm come in as well? I don’t think there was note of it in the script.
Yeah, that was something that we came up with in pre-production, I’m pretty sure. And I love the windstorm. It looks fantastic.
Was the most challenging part of this figuring out the structure, bouncing back between times? And did you have to keep track and/or adjust the power dynamics as well, as you made changes to the script, determining who is in control at any given point?
The structure of the movie came pretty immediately to me as I was starting to think about the movie because the movie really came out of this desire I had to watch a tennis match, where I was learning step-by-step what was at stake for everybody playing in this really microscopic way. I had almost stopped wanting to write the movie for a while because I was just loving watching tennis so much, and I didn’t want to pollute my love of tennis by all of a sudden making it work, by turning it into my job. And what I was realizing is that I was getting more drama and more excitement pound for pound from watching tennis than I was getting from anything I was watching at the movies or on TV.
I really wanted to ask myself, “OK, what could I write that would be as exciting as tennis? And what would make tennis even more exciting?” And for me, the question of what would make tennis even more exciting is if I could know exactly why each point mattered. If that’s why you want to write the movie, the structure of it naturally flows out of that. I always knew that we were going to start the movie right in the middle of the match, and then we were going to learn how we got there.
But the power dynamics, that also comes out of the experience of watching a really good tennis match, that the who’s on top switches really rapidly in tennis, and you think something’s going one way, and then all of a sudden, somebody’s got match point. That’s what’s so dynamic about tennis and what’s so exciting about it, is that the match is never over until it’s over. You’ll watch a grand slam where somebody loses the first two sets, and everybody’s already writing the eulogies for them, and saying, “OK, well, I guess this wasn’t their year,” and then they come back miraculously and win the next three. And so that’s what’s thrilling to me about watching tennis, is that constant instability, that you can never really rest on your laurels or feel safe or secure in how well it’s going for you because it can turn around really quick. It felt like that should naturally be present in what’s going on personally with these characters. Because just like in tennis, I think in a movie, that’s really fun and exciting and dynamic.
This being your first-produced script, what surprised you when you saw the final product? Because it sounds like you were with Luca during production too?
The whole time. It’s one of the amazing things about Luca, that he really insisted that I be there for the entire process of pre-production and rehearsals and then all throughout production. And so I got to watch the movie being made and help make the movie the whole time. So by the time I saw it, I knew what I was going to see because I was there, but it’s still totally overwhelming the first time you watch it, especially without music and no special effects or anything, you just watch the first cut. That was a totally new experience to me, and that was completely disorienting.
And then I watched it again immediately, and I was like, “Oh, my God, Luca did such a great job.”
An Amazon MGM Studios release, “Challengers” opens in theaters nationwide on Friday, April 26.
