On December 5, the IndieWire Honors Winter 2024 ceremony will celebrate the creators and stars responsible for crafting some of the year’s best films. Curated and selected by IndieWire’s editorial team, IndieWire Honors is a celebration of the filmmakers, artisans, and performers behind films well worth toasting. We’re showcasing their work with new interviews leading up to the Los Angeles event.
The “I Told Ya” t-shirt, Zendaya and Josh O’Connor making out in a windstorm, Mike Faist asleep facedown in the tiniest of briefs — it’s impossible to identify at just what moment “Challengers,” the steamy tennis triad written by Justin Kurtizkes and directed by Luca Guadagnino, becomes iconic.
Despite a planned 2023 Venice premiere canceled due to the strikes, a less-than-plum wide April release date almost eight months later, and another Guadagnino joint getting the plusher awards corridor slot this year, “Challengers” is one of the year’s most iconic films. That’s thanks to the synergy and spark between cast and filmmakers, with Zendaya in her first feature film producing role, and producers Amy Pascal and Rachel O’Connor shepherding the year’s sexiest movie off the court and into the cultural imagination ($93 million worldwide). And “Challengers” made tennis sexy again. Even though, come on, it always was.
“I try to make things that are iconic all the time. I honestly try. I don’t know if I succeed,” Guadagnino said in a recent interview. “We knew the movie was quite fun when we did it. We knew it had an energy because of a few elements — a great script from Justin Kuritzkes, which is truly gripping. The really fresh and exhilarating performances by Zendaya, Josh, and Mike. The pulse of the movie, which can be summarized in the way we crafted it. You know when you are outside on a very hot day, there is sun everywhere, and you’re desperate for something refreshing, and you finally grab that soda, and you drink this cold soda. The feeling of it, I wanted the movie to play like that.”
Meanwhile, for screenwriter Kuritzkes there was one moment where all the elements coalesced into something that felt iconic in his romantic drama about three tennis rivals, Tashi (Zendaya), Art (Faist), and Patrick (O’Connor). They trounce each other on the court and in the bedroom, careening emotionally and athletically (and across often dizzying time jumps) to Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’ electro-hyped score and toward one of the most electrifying finales of the year.
“I remember the first camera test we did when everybody wears their costumes, and you’re testing out the different lenses you’re going to use,” Kuritzkes said. “We were doing it just on a soundstage, but I remember watching Zendaya come out in her costume for teenage Tashi Duncan, this sort of white Adidas thing with the ponytail. I remember seeing her on camera as Tashi for the first time and getting choked up because it just felt like that was the character I had always dreamed about, and she was right there in front of me.” Still, he said he couldn’t tell then that the movie would have the life it has.
“It’s really hard to know what kind of impact a movie is going to have until, hopefully, a couple of years or decades after it’s been released,” added Kuritzkes, who wrote the script on spec before it landed on The Black List in 2021 and the desk of Pascal and O’Connor at Pascal Pictures. “I had no real sense of how unreasonable it was to make a movie like this at this scale. I was just writing the movie I wanted to see, mostly because those movies I grew up watching and loving, where original, non-IP movies for adults that were nonetheless entertaining and had movie stars in them and felt like a big event. That was very much the spirit in which I was writing ‘Challengers.’ If the success of the movie means that more movies like that can get made, I’d be thrilled.”
Pascal, the maverick Hollywood producer best known for overseeing the ‘Spider-Man’ movies at Sony, said, “It’s so great that an original idea that isn’t IP, isn’t a television show, isn’t anything, isn’t a play, isn’t a remake, an original idea that is a story about people can be a commercial movie just like they used to be in the days of old. We love movies, whether it’s ‘Little Women’ or ‘The Post’ in addition to all the ‘Spider-Man’ stuff we do, it’s really important to us that we make movies that are about human beings having human relationships.”
O’Connor, Pascal’s producing partner who brought the script to her attention even before “Challengers” popped on The Black List, said, “We grew up going to movies and movie theaters… It was really exciting that Amy and Luca and Zendaya and the people at MGM and Amazon, who originally bought the movie, believed in the theatrical potential of an original screenplay, honestly.”
For Pascal, one of the reasons “Challengers” jumped off the page is that none of the characters is traditionally likable, often fumbling it on the court or in life. Like when Tashi tells Patrick, who entreats her to coach him for a final big Challengers face-off against Art, he’d have a better shot with a gun in his mouth than at a championship title. But, years of on-and-off romantic history between them and despite a now transactional marriage to Art, she pockets his phone number anyway. Cue gasps in seats.
“The character of Tashi is a really bold character, a woman trying to make her way in a world of men,” Pascal said. “Not necessarily everybody in a movie needs to be likable. They need to be understandable. You need to understand why they’re doing what they’re doing. Likable is very boring! The interesting thing is that television really understands how boring likable is, and all the best television, whether it’s ‘Breaking Bad, ‘Succession,’ yada yada, ‘The Sopranos.’ You don’t like those people, but you are fascinated by them… television really understands that because they can take their time with you understanding the truth about human nature… movies, in the modern world we’re living in, seem to have forgotten that complicated people are more interesting than good people. Movies used to get that but they don’t [anymore]. Maybe we can bring that back.”
Perhaps the most quintessential (and, duh, hottest) moment in “Challengers” is a boozy motel-room makeout sesh between Tashi and the boys. Art and Patrick are longtime best friends and tennis rivals both chasing after the same woman, allured by her grace on the tennis court. One thing leads to another, they start having a threesome, only for Tashi to lean back, giddy with machinating eyes, and watch Art and Patrick go at each other’s faces. It’s a moment that wasn’t in Kuritzkes’ original script, and one Guadagnino brought to him when they first met up in Milan to discuss the project. (Pascal had brought the script to Guadagnino after wanting to work with the “Call Me By Your Name” director for some time.)
“Luca said something to the effect of ‘in every love triangle, all the corners should touch,’” Kuritzkes said. “These people are so deeply embedded in each other’s erotic and romantic and emotional lives, and all their ambitions and hopes for themselves are tied up in each other, they couldn’t be touching more. He meant, no, they should all touch literally.”
Guadagnino said, “The triangle was internal. Yes, the two guys were after the same woman, but there was not somehow an acting out of the triangle between them, and that was the most important of topic I had with Justin … We never intended it to be sexually explicit, this movie, because that’s not what it is about. I thought of this movie as a sophisticated comedy like Hawks, Sturges, and Lubitsch. It would’ve been a contradiction of the filmmaking instinct that I had to go explicit. There was no need because the energy of tennis is the sexual energy at stake here. More skin or more sex would not have added much.”
Kuritzkes said he never wanted the moment to feel like “something we as the filmmakers were doing to the characters.” After conversations with Pascal, O’Connor, and the actors to find the right runway to lead into this explosive moment of pent-up intimacy taking hold, “it immediately felt right to everybody. Now, it’s my favorite scene to watch because it feels like a real showcase for what everybody does so well. It’s the chemistry between the actors, the amazing way Luca is staging it, Sayombhu [Mukdeeprom, the DP] is shooting it. I think about the moment in that scene when Patrick and Art are finally kissing and Tashi removes herself from the kiss and leans back on the bed to watch them.”
Praising his collaborators, Kuritzkes added, “Luca has the brilliance of having the camera go over the boys’ heads and onto Tashi, and you just see the look on her face. None of that could happen if it weren’t for each of the individuals involved in the making of this movie, if Luca didn’t have the boldness to do that shot and if Zendaya wasn’t blessed with the face but also knew how to use it.”
Pascal said the movie they made was exactly the same as the script they first read — but with Guadagnino bringing his signature sensual touch. “Luca brought Luca to it, and that whole threesome idea was his whole invention. But him and Justin worked really hard on the script, and one of the interesting things that Justin understands as a writer is not everything is about what people are saying. Sometimes, storytelling in movies is visual, and you can tell stories visually. Justin is one of the rare writers these days that understands that.”
O’Connor praised how “Luca creates suspense in all his movies. Even in films that are purely dramas, he creates this propulsive feeling of wanting to know what happens next. That’s a rare quality I really enjoy when watching a movie.”
Another iconic moment in “Challengers” that elicits gasps out of any screening comes during the final match. During a nerve-crunching tiebreaker, having slept with Tashi the night before, Patrick uses Art’s classic serving tic to indicate that betrayal — by placing the ball in the neck of the racket, which Patrick first did years ago when they first started wooing her. (“Challengers” jumps from 2006 to 2019.)
O’Connor said at the film’s Australian premiere, “When he first puts the ball in the racket, people were like oh shit.” Pascal said, “When you think about it, that image, the ‘I Told Ya’ T-shirt, there were so many signature moments in that movie that seemed to become more than a movie story.”
Kurtizkes said that now-immortalized bookending exchange between Art and Patrick “was actually one of the first things I knew about the script. As I was writing it, I had that image or that payoff before I had the setup. A lot of the process of writing the movie was about figuring out how to make that meaningful. Because so much of the impulse to write the movie in the first place came from this moment of witnessing what felt like a wordless communication between people on a tennis court and thinking about ways that you could communicate action and drama through gesture and glances and not using words. That was really the impulse that made me think that this was a film and had to be a film, [it] couldn’t be a play or a book, but also it was part of the exciting cinematic possibility of tennis that made me want to write the movie in the first place.”
At the end of the day, as “Challengers” heads into another crowded awards season, Pascal wants audiences and voters to remember that movies like this — about characters and people, glances and gestures, dialogue rather than VFX — just don’t have this kind of reach anymore. And it’s up to audiences, not just the Hollywood folks in power, to make them a phenomenon.
“For proper movie studios to make movies where the only effect is the tennis ball, and the tennis ball is the way of telling the story, for movie studios to make movies about relationships, and for those to be commercial movies, for people to recognize that’s something people want to go see, I think that our job has been done,” she said.
“Challengers” is now streaming on Amazon Prime Video.
