“I asked myself, what could I write that would be as good as tennis and what would make tennis even better?” remembers screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes about the inspiration for his film “Challengers. “And for me, the answer to that question was tennis would be even better if I could know at every moment exactly what was at stake for the people playing and for the people watching.” Gold Derby talked to Kuritzkes as part of our “Meet the Experts” film writers panel. Watch our complete video interview above.
“Challengers” follows a love triangle between three tennis athletes — Tashi (Zendaya), Patrick (Josh O’Connor), and Art (Mike Faist) — over more than a decade of their lives, leading to an emotional match at a low-level Challenger event in New Rochelle. “Something that’s fun about a triangle is that it’s a very stable shape in some sense, but it’s also a shape with a lot of tension,” says Kuritzkes. “And anytime the distance between two points in the triangle move, the distance between the other point moves as well, and all the angles have to reform themselves.”
Much of the drama in the film is carried out on the tennis court, where every serve and volley communicates the characters and relationships. Kuritzkes explains about his approach to writing those scenes, “In a movie like this, where so much of the action is taking place through gesture and through tennis, and so much of the drama is happening wordlessly, it’s really important that you give both the reader, and then eventually the people who are going to make the film with you, all the tools they need to understand what’s happening dramatically.”
But you don’t want the sport itself to overshadow the rest of the story. “The trap of a sports movie a lot of the time, or something that can often go wrong in a sports movie, is that it’s often the case that it would be more engaging to just watch the actual sport because sports themselves are really dramatic.” That’s where director Luca Guadagnino comes in: “I knew that he would find a way to make the tennis feel exciting and dynamic and purely cinematic in a way that would elevate it beyond the sport itself.” The filmmaker took a story set in the world of tennis and in it found the story of great “desire,” which “runs all throughout his cinema.”
