@Courtesy of Amazon MGM Studios
Q: Challengers navigate some themes of ambition, love, rivalry. How did you balance these elements to ensure the film resonates on an emotional level?
Luca Guadagnino: The ingredients to manage these contradictory feelings and these heightened emotions starts from the beautifully written script that Justin wrote, and continues into the great performances that Zendaya, Mike Faist and Josh O’Connor have been able to embody. My duty is always being very consistent with what I have been given by the great author that I work with, Justin, and to translate that through the performances of my cast.
You have to be with your actors in the moment and see how the page flashes out. Then when you end up in the editing room, you have these elements that are so brilliant, you make the composition work in a way that the pulse is there. If we talk about the pulse, there is another character that we really managed to work a lot with, which is the score that Trent Reznor and Atticus put together.
Q: How challenging was the flashback structure of your script?
Justin Kuritzkes: I always knew that the structure of the movie was going to be that we would get dropped into a present-day tennis match, and then gradually figure out what was at stake. Gradually figuring out why these people were looking at each other like this thing was so important, even though on the surface of it was this low-level match. I knew that it would go from around when they were 18 to around when they were 35, and that’s because it is the lifespan of an athlete.
If you think of an athletic career as a mini-life, you’re born when you’re 18, when people can start making money off of you, and you’re dead when you’re useless, when you’re in your mid-30s usually, or if you’re lucky, when you’re in your 40s. So I always knew that that would be the container, but I didn’t know when I started writing exactly where we would go back to when, and that was something that I figured out as I was working my way through the script.
Q: How did you decide which storytelling components you’d want to denominate from moment to moment?
Luca Guadagnino: Justin’s script is very savvy in giving us enough of each character in the right moment at the right time. We begin with Patrick and Art, then there is a season for Art and Tashi, then everything unwoven seemingly. We edited it after we wrapped quite briskly, the original first assembly was almost the same length because we had this great script to help us go through it. My instinct was also to make a very entertaining movie. I wanted the fabric of the movie to be of the same kinetic energy and anxieties that these characters convey.
@Courtesy of Amazon MGM Studios
Q: Is there something of Antonioni’s Blow-Up, especially in relation to incommunicability, that is the best part of your love triangle? What is the biggest challenge of filming a tennis match and sensualizing it, making it seen?
Luca Guadagnino: Michelangelo Antonioni, one of the great masters of all times. Antonioni was an artist capable of communicating everything without many words, Blow-Up is a perfect example of that. I didn’t consciously think about it, but I am a cinephile and I love Antonioni’s work deeply. So it must have been somewhere here, certainly the last 10 minutes or more of the movie on silent. Apart from the music, there is no dialogue, but everything is very perfectly understandable by an audience, again, because of the perfect structure of how before everything was built, starting from the script that Justin wrote.
Q: The final tennis matches felt like a conversation between two competitors. Can you talk about the editing choices in relation to the emotional beats that the characters were feeling within the scene?
Luca Guadagnino: I wanted to build the movie in a very formalistic way, I wanted the movie to play as a very hyperkinetic movie, I always wanted the audience to know that everything that we were showing them had to mean something very precisely. We storyboarded everything in the tennis matches. What you see is literally the sewing of all these materials that we already built as one. In order to recreate this triangle, these two men have to find each other again after having fallen apart because of the impossibility of accepting that they have to be together. And what is the driving force of that? The tennis, which is Tashi played by Zendaya.
Q: Can you talk about writing this dynamic into the script and seeing Zendaya, Mike and Josh translate these relationships on screen? Were there any specific moments that you found in the script as you were writing that helped illuminate each other’s characters and motivations?
Justin Kuritzkes: What’s exciting about a triangle specifically in cinema is that the triangle is a very sharp shape. It can cut you, and it’s also a shape that’s constantly reforming itself so that it can stay a triangle. So anytime that one of the points moves, the angles all have to readjust themselves. And so as I was writing, that was something I was always tracking, which was if the distance between two characters contracted or expanded, that meant that that would affect the third member of the triangle. You bring that into a rehearsal room, you bring the perspective of Luca directing these three incredible performers, and they’re finding things within the script and within the chemistry between each other that you couldn’t possibly plan for. All of a sudden makes it so much more alive, so much tender and so much more dangerous. We had the benefit of having weeks of rehearsal together in Boston, where the actors could really take ownership over their characters and discover the dynamics of that triangle themselves, discover new corners of it and new angles within it.
@Courtesy of Amazon MGM Studios
Q: What inspired the tennis ball point of view shots and how did you achieve this perspective with your cinematographer and the actors?
Luca Guadagnino: As I said before, tennis is the relationship. Becoming the game itself was a way to bring the audience within the visceral power of the dynamic between Art and Patrick. We were immersed into this flow of communication because tennis is their desire which was back and forth between the two of them, until they finally found each other again. That sequence is something that I thought about pretty early in the process of developing the movie. To be honest, the sublime DP that I have been working with forever now, Sayombhu Mukdeeprom, and the visual aspect team were great in making this happen. With filmed portions of these back and forth and the speed, as close as the speed of the ball. It took us a long time, it took a year to make it become what you see through the art of visual effects.
Q: Between writing the script and seeing the final cut of the film, did your feelings about the characters change?
Justin Kuritzkes: Something I noticed when I watched the movie for the first time is that there’s a lot of instances of characters on the surface doing something that might seem cruel or manipulative, mean to other characters. When I watched the movie, I realized that every time they’re doing those things, they’re always also trying to be kind. They’re almost trying to do what they think this other person needs, trying to push somebody towards a better version of themselves. Zendaya says a lot of very cutting things in the movie to the other characters, a lot of things that you might read on the page as very uncaring or very cold, but she’s able to bring so much depth to the character, she makes it clear in every scene that she’s really trying to get something out of these other two characters, she’s really trying take care of them. That’s certainly something that I felt on a much deeper level watching the movie than when I was just thinking about it in my head.
Q: How did you bond creatively on Challengers and how has this partnership evolved over the course of your follow-up projects?“
Luca Guadagnino: We like each other. We met and we felt that there was, in front of the other, somebody that we were interested in and that we had fun to be with. We were really ambitious to achieve a thing that could make us feel proud of, I guess.
Justin Kuritzkes: Luca and I had to get in the trenches with each other very quickly on this movie because we knew that the space between when Luca got my first draft of the script and when we were going to go into pre-production was really quick. We became friends immediately. When I met Luca for the first time, I instantly could tell that we spoke the same language, the same things that excited him about cinema were the things that excited me. If that’s the foundation, then collaboration and friendship become very easy. Luca made it really clear very early on that he was going to be this incredibly generous collaborator who invited me to be a part of the whole process of making Challengers, which is not the norm for a director and a writer. That really speaks to his generosity as a person and as a collaborator.
@Courtesy of Amazon MGM Studios
Q: Can you talk about how that and your inspiration for the visuals in the film and what, if anything, surprised you about how some of the scenes turned out?”
Luca Guadagnino: I loved the idea of making a movie set in contemporary America. You go from the tennis school to the tournament that is a simple challenger, to actually the world of big champions. The dynamic of all that was very interesting. We all really focused very deeply onto the details of the infrastructure of the life of these people. In that regard, the appearance of these people was so important that we had to record it. We had to understand it very deeply because it’s a very performative environment, very competitive, led by capitalism in every detail of it, including the idea of branding.
I’m proud to say that we have not gotten a single endorsement in this movie because we didn’t want any, because we wanted to be truthful to that world. We didn’t want to be sponsored. It is true that you build your life on the ground of performance, on the ground of competition, on the ground of the signs of the powers that you can exude as a sports person, and then you’re lost in a second. And how do you reinvent yourself to the fullest? That is what I wanted to do.
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