Interview: Justin Kuritzkes on ‘Challengers’
It’s hard to believe Challengers is Justin Kuritzkes‘ first screenplay. Directed by Luca Guadagnino, the acclaimed filmmaker behind Bones and All and Call Me By Your Name, Challengers stars Zendaya as Tashi Duncan, a former tennis prodigy turned coach who makes no apologies for her game on and off the court. Married to Art (Mike Faist), a champion on a losing streak, Tashi’s strategy for her husband’s redemption takes a surprising turn when he must face off against Patrick (Josh O’Connor), his former best friend and Tashi’s ex. Anchored by three stunning lead performances, Challengers is a character-driven drama that incisively explores the explosive dynamic between all three characters as if it was a tennis match in and of itself, every conversation, every argument framed as if it was a high-stakes tournament.
When it first landed on The Black List, an annual survey of the “most-liked” screenplays that have yet to be produced, back in 2021, Challengers was originally written as a spec script, a non-commissioned and unsolicited screenplay that is usually written with the goal of getting it optioned or eventually purchased by a production company or studio. “I just kind of wrote it for myself,” says Kuritzkes, when asked about the journey the film has taken from script to screen. “I didn’t know who was going to end up making the movie. Nobody specifically asked for it. Nobody was attached to it. I was just doing it because it was a movie I knew I would’ve liked to watch, so I wrote it.” Following the script’s placement on The Black List, Kuritzkes sent the script to a few producers around town, hoping to get it made. It ended up capturing the attention of prolific producer Amy Pascal, mostly known for her work on the Spider-Man films and Greta Gerwig‘s Oscar-nominated Little Women.
“One of the first things that Amy said when she read the script was, ‘We’re going to send this to Zendaya,’ and I thought, ‘Good luck with that. I hope she responds to it,'” he recalls. “And thankfully she did. We had this amazing conversation about the movie and about her character. I was incredibly excited that she wanted to not only be in it, but produce it as well. And then Luca was somebody I was always a fan of because he’s one of the greatest filmmakers we have. We sent the script to him and he really added to it. We ended up putting it all into motion really, really quickly; the distance between when I wrote the first draft and when we went into pre-production was only a couple months, which is a very rare and crazy timeline. But we were ready to go, so we did it and then it was a process of just figuring it out and then getting it up on its feet in pre-production.”
One of the aspects of the film that elevate it beyond any genre tropes or conventions is the authenticity in which the characters are portrayed. Tashi, Art and Patrick all feel like real people; messy, flawed and deeply human. Their interactions – regardless of how heightened they feel – come off raw and unfiltered, honest and vulnerable. Kuritzkes says he based their characterization on real tennis players – and also people he knows in real life. “You try to write characters that are as petty, cruel, kind, funny, caring and mean as the people you meet in real life,” he explains. “That’s really where it starts. You try to write a character that feels recognizably human and that means not sanding off the edges of that person, trying to really present them as they are.”
One character audiences will find themselves confounded by is Patrick, a high-wired, pompous disaster of a person who makes it his mission to push Tashi and Art’s (and in turn, the audiences’) buttons every chance he gets. In another person’s hands, Patrick could have very much been a caricature of a character; cartoonish and one-dimensional in his absurdity. But thanks to a phenomenal turn from Josh O’Connor, who brings a layer of nuance and complexity to the role that other actors may not have been able to, and Kuritzkes’ sharp, rich writing skills, audiences will find themselves equally charmed and repelled by his over-the-top persona.
“He’s a very extreme character in a lot of ways,” agrees Kuritzkes. “There’s a lot about him that is totally infuriating but I also find so much about him really charming. I know a lot of guys like that, I’ve met a lot of people like that, especially the entitled, privileged golden boy that he is. He’s this kid who’s been the best forever and then doesn’t quite know how to deal with all of a sudden not being the best. He isn’t willing to adjust his perspective on himself, and I think that’s a dilemma I’ve seen play out a lot. I was really just taking inspiration from that. And of course you see a lot of guys like that in tennis, you see a lot of that character play itself out on tennis courts.”
The film was originally set to premiere as the opening film of the 2023 Venice Film Festival, reuniting Guadagnino with the festival that’s hosted the premiere of almost every film he’s directed throughout his career. A mere month before the festival was set to kick-off, however, 10 days into the 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike, the film was pulled from the festival due to the cast’s inability to promote the film while the strike was on-going. “We were sitting with this film for a while after we finished it and we were all so excited about Venice,” says Kuritzkes. “It was obviously a bummer to move it but in a way, it feels almost more exciting that we get to finally release it. It feels exciting to have it be released right in the middle of spring, going into summer. It feels right to me so I’m really just very excited that we finally get to share it with people.”
It also helps that the film has stayed in the public’s consciousness for almost a year now, ever since the first trailer debuted back in June 2023. For awhile, the film felt almost inescapable, going viral on social media, appearing on the timelines of every meme page and even making international news several times over the course of a year. The characters have also since taken on a life of their own, with Team Art and Team Patrick arguments materializing before the film has even hit theaters. “I think so much of that has to do with who directed the movie and who’s in the movie,” says Kuritzkes about the fanfare surrounding the film. “These are all people who everybody is rightfully excited about because they do great work and because they are just such dynamic, exciting people in culture already. So I feel really lucky, grateful and excited that my script gets to live with them. That’s a really exciting thing. I try not to read too much of the stuff online that’s positive because that can get a little scary. But early on, I saw people changing their Twitter names to “Art Donaldson Defender” or something and that was really surreal to me, to see a character’s name be someone’s twitter bio. That’s pretty wild to me.”
Following Challengers, Kuritzkes is set to collaborate with Guadagnino once again on the filmmaker’s upcoming project, Queer, also set to be released later this year. The film is based on the beloved seminal novel from writer William S. Burroughs, and stars Daniel Craig and Drew Starkey. The film is also rumored to make its world premiere at this year’s Venice Film Festival, finally bringing Kuritzkes to the shores of Venice. “Burroughs is obviously a legendary author and Queer is a legendary book within his cannon,” says Kuritzkes of the project. “It’s a movie that Luca had wanted to make for a long time, since he read the book as a teenager. I was incredibly touched and honored when he gave me the book on the set of Challengers and said, ‘Why don’t you read this tonight and see if you want to write it for me?’ I read it that night and there was no way I could say no because the opportunity of being a bridge between these two great artists, between Burroughs on the one hand and Luca on the other. It’s a dream. I can’t tell you much about the movie other than that it stars Daniel Craig and Drew Starkey, and they’re absolutely fantastic in it. I can’t wait for us to share it with the world.”
Challengers will be released in theaters on April 26.