[music]

Alison Stewart: This is All of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. Not everyone can say their first two feature films were released in the same year, shot by the same director and star massive Hollywood talents. That is the exact year my next guest has had. Justin Kuritzkes is the screenwriter behind the smash hit tennis drama Challengers, which was out earlier this year. Then he also wrote the new film Queer, starring Daniel Craig. Both are directed by Luca Guadagnino. Challengers, an original work from Justin, stars Zendaya as Tashi Duncan, a former tennis phenome who finds herself caught in a love triangle between her famous tennis star husband and his childhood best friend.

The movie spawned memes, inspired Halloween costumes, and was beloved by audiences and critics alike. His new movie, Queer, is an adaptation of William S. Burroughs novel. Daniel Craig plays William Lee, a gay American who is living in Mexico in the 1950s. He's enchanted by a young man named Eugene Allerton and soon becomes a little obsessed with wooing him. He can't quite figure out how Allerton feels about him or whether he's even interested in being with men. Queer will be in theaters November 27th. Challengers is available to stream now. I'm joined in studio by the writer of both films, Justin Kuritzkes. Nice to meet you.

Justin Kuritzkes: Nice to meet you, too. Thanks for having me.

Alison Stewart: The first two films you've made, both the same year, both star major Hollywood stars, both by acclaimed director. First of all, what has this year been like?

Justin Kuritzkes: Pretty crazy. It's been incredibly gratifying. I come from off-Broadway theater. That's my roots. In theater, you're thrilled if 100 people see your play. That's the big success. To have this reception is pretty amazing.

Alison Stewart: Yes. You said you were in off-Broadway theater. How did your theater experience prepare you for the Hollywood experience?

Justin Kuritzkes: What you learn about yourself as a person who tells stories is pretty similar, and it carries over from one medium to another. Also, I had the real benefit, on Challengers, for example, we had this abnormal thing where we had a couple weeks of rehearsal before we started shooting. When the actors got to Boston and we were starting to really work together, it didn't feel any different from working on a play. It was a nice way to ease into filmmaking.

Alison Stewart: What was the process of getting the films actually made? Did you have to be persistent and patient? Did it suddenly happen and, "Wow, my film's getting made."

Justin Kuritzkes: It was a really quick, condensed process. I had written Challengers on spec, which means that you write it for yourself. I didn't know who was attached to it, nobody was asking me to do it. Nobody knew I was doing it. I wrote it because it was a movie I wanted to see.

Alison Stewart: I love that.

Justin Kuritzkes: Yes. That's how I've written everything I've ever written. That's how I wrote every play I ever wrote. Then I sent it to a bunch of producers and eventually decided to work with Amy Pascal and Rachel O'Connor. They make the Spiderman movies. Amy read it, and the first thing she said was, "I'm going to send this to Zendaya, and she's going to say yes." I said, "Okay, good luck with that." Then from there, things moved really quickly.

Alison Stewart: What did they tell you they saw in the script?

Justin Kuritzkes: A few things made me feel Amy was a soulmate for this movie in a lot of ways. One of them was that she read it and said, "This feels like a movie that Mike Nichols would make."

Alison Stewart: Oh, wow.

Justin Kuritzkes: I have loved Mike Nichols films forever, especially Carnal Knowledge, which was a real influence on Challengers, to the point where the character Art Donaldson, is named after Art Garfunkel.

Alison Stewart: Really? Wow.

Justin Kuritzkes: Yes. Then I didn't know this, but Luca had been saying for years that he wanted to make a movie that felt like a Mike Nichols movie. Amy knew that and connected that and sent him the script and that's how it all came together.

Alison Stewart: Now you have sports movies, you have love triangle movies. Which came first with Challengers? Did you want to write a sports film or did you want to write a love triangle?

Justin Kuritzkes: I wanted to write a tennis movie.

Alison Stewart: Tennis specifically?

Justin Kuritzkes: Yes, tennis specifically. I'm not a sports guy. If you had told me five years ago that my first movie would be about sports, I would be really shocked. This thing happened where in 2018, I happened to turn on the US Open, and it was this match between Serena Williams and Naomi Osaka in the final. There was this very controversial call where Serena Williams was accused of receiving coaching from the sidelines. Not being a massive tennis fan, I hadn't heard of this rule, but immediately it struck me as this intensely cinematic thing.

You're all alone on the court, there's one person who cares as much about what happens to you out there as you do, but that's the person you can't talk to. I, for whatever reason, started thinking, what if you really needed to talk about something and what if it was something beyond tennis? How would you have that conversation? How could you communicate the tension of that using film?

Alison Stewart: It's interesting because when I thought about tennis and this film, I thought, what is a sport where women and men are equal?

Justin Kuritzkes: Yes.

Alison Stewart: Because you couldn't do this with, necessarily, football.

Justin Kuritzkes: No.

Alison Stewart: You couldn't do it with hockey, but you can do it with tennis.

Justin Kuritzkes: It's a very weird particular sport in our culture. In that tennis, at least at the big tournaments, at the Grand Slams, the pay is the same, the viewership is pretty similar. It was important to me to set it in a Challenger event or not at a Grand Slam, because they play three sets. That's the experience of most men on the tour, is that they're playing three sets, which is the same as the women.

Alison Stewart: It sounded you went down a tennis rabbit hole.

Justin Kuritzkes: Big time.

Alison Stewart: In terms of research.

Justin Kuritzkes: I started doing research that I thought was research for the movie, and then it turned into this thing where tennis was the only thing that was holding my attention. It was better than every movie I was watching, better than every TV show.

Alison Stewart: Oh, that's interesting.

Justin Kuritzkes: Yes.

Alison Stewart: What did you see in tennis that you hadn't seen before?

Justin Kuritzkes: I think a few things. The first thing that I saw, which is true of all sports, but it feels especially pronounced in tennis, is that every moment is dramatic. Every moment is packed with stakes, and there's a very clear opposition. I think because tennis is an individual sport, you spend the whole match looking at two people. You project a lot onto these two people, and you project a lot into their heads and into their souls. That had a lot to do with it. Also coming from theater, tennis felt very theatrical. It felt like theater in the round, especially when you watch something like Wimbledon and you see the Royal Box or something. It's like watching Shakespeare at the Globe.

Alison Stewart: Also, when you watch people watching tennis, the looking left, the looking right, they're looking left. You can see on their faces, the expressions, the feeling, "Oh, my God, he's not going to hit that. Oh, my God, she hit that."

Justin Kuritzkes: Yes, exactly. Yes, you're very aware of the crowd and you're very aware of perspective in tennis. That felt an interesting place to set a love triangle, because love triangles are all about who's looking at who. Anytime you're watching a scene in a movie that has a love triangle and it's between two characters, you're always watching it from the perspective of the third. That felt that naturally fit within the world of tennis.

Alison Stewart: You said that it was important that the character of Tashi Duncan be played by a black woman.

Justin Kuritzkes: Yes.

Alison Stewart: She's played by Zendaya, for people who haven't seen. Why did that feel like it was a vital to the story?

Justin Kuritzkes: It's one of those things where you don't necessarily get to choose which characters come to you first. For me, with Challengers, Tashi was the character that first appeared to me. First of all, it was baked into the moment that inspired me writing the movie, because I was watching Naomi Osaka and Serena Williams, who have two very different life experiences, but are both these remarkable black women in tennis. That felt like the story of women's tennis for the past however many decades has been the story of women of color.

Then, next to that, I knew what Tashi's story was going to be, her backstory. I knew that it was important that for Tashi, the game of tennis meant something very different than it did for Art and Patrick. That tennis is a rich people's sport, usually, and it's a traditionally very white sport. It was important that something be at stake for her in losing her tennis career that wasn't necessarily at stake for these two very privileged boys.

Alison Stewart: How does Tashi measure success?

Justin Kuritzkes: That's a great question. I think it changes over the course of her life. I think so much of the movie is about her being very much on track to have a very clear definition of success, which is this success that she's felt has been promised to her since she was a teenager. Then it gets ripped away from her and she has to completely reorganize her view of what success means.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk about Art and Patrick. There is definitely this erotic charge between Patrick and Art. How much of that was in the script? How much of that was in the casting? Did this come later?

Justin Kuritzkes: It's a mixture of everything. A lot of it is baked into the very first draft of the script. Because when I think about those two characters, I think about them as these orphans. They both come from these well-to-do families, but they've been shunted off to this tennis academy to go be raised on a tennis court and grow up in dorm rooms together. They've done that since they were preteens. They've gone through puberty together. They've had crushes on the same girls. They've been living together. They're like an old married couple in some way, but they also know each other very intimately in the way that only friends from that time can know each other.

Every friendship that is charged with eroticism, whether we admit it or not. I also think within tennis, there's a deep eroticism. If you think about tennis as a combat sport, it has a relationship to boxing, where boxing is all about touching another person. Tennis is all about not touching another person. To me, that's a well of repression. There's a lot of eroticism in the game itself.

Alison Stewart: It brings to life the end of the movie.

Justin Kuritzkes: Yes, for sure. Yes. I always thought of the end of the movie as a culmination of all of that. What was interesting in collaborating with Luca on the movie is that he had this very sharp idea when we first talked about the film. He said, "In a love triangle, all the corners should touch." When I first heard that, I thought, yes, they do. They're all very embedded in each other's erotic and emotional lives. He went, "No, literally. They should literally touch." There hadn't been a scene in the movie where all three of them shared an intimate moment together.

Alison Stewart: Except the end.

Justin Kuritzkes: Except the end, which was always there. Then I had this task of figuring out a place and a way giving the proper runway for a moment for them to all share this moment of intimacy early in their lives that would then make the end reverberate in a different way.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Justin Kuritzkes. He is the screenwriter behind two movies. Challengers, which you can stream at home, and Queer, which will be released in theaters on November 27th. We'll hear more about Queer after the break. This is All of It.

[music]

Alison Stewart: You are listening to All of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. My guest is Justin Kuritzkes. He is the screenwriter behind two movies this year. Challengers, which you can stream at home now, and Queer, which will be released in theaters on November 27th. Before I go on to Queer, is it true that you were actually on set in the movie Challengers as a writer?

Justin Kuritzkes: Yes, I was in pre-production and in rehearsal and on set the whole time, which was pretty amazing.

Alison Stewart: Yes, that's unusual for some writers.

Justin Kuritzkes: It's very unusual and it's a total testament to Luca and his confidence and generosity as a collaborator. Also to the producers. To Zendaya and Amy and Rachel. Yes.

Alison Stewart: All right, let's talk about Queer. It's a novel from William S. Burroughs. Luca gave it for you to read. What did you think when you first read it?

Justin Kuritzkes: I was completely amazed by it. I had been familiar with Burroughs' work in Naked Lunch, and I'd read the Yahe Letters. We were on set for Challengers one day, and Luca handed me this book and said, "Read this tonight and tell me if you'll adapt it for me."

Alison Stewart: That's funny.

Justin Kuritzkes: It is funny, actually. That's a window into what Luca's. I, of course, read it that night and called him immediately and said, I'm in.

Alison Stewart: Queer does not have a ton of dialogue, initially. At least the first few scenes don't have a lot of dialogue. It's really visual. How did you figure out how to introduce us to the main character, Lee, without having him speak so much?

Justin Kuritzkes: Something that was really useful is we had this great researcher, Ben Panzeca, who did all kinds of research about the gin he would drink, the cigarettes he would smoke, what he would wear, which then got internalized by Jonathan Anderson, our amazing costume designer. I had this image of how he was dressed, and how he was sitting at this bar in Mexico. For whatever reason, it clicked with me that the movie should open with him looking in the camera and saying, "You're not queer." Then we realize he's talking to this kid he's trying to suss out.

Alison Stewart: It's interesting because Allerton, in the film, who he's pursuing, obsessing with, he's not nearly as talkative.

Justin Kuritzkes: No.

Alison Stewart: As Lee. How did you want to get through a little bit of Allerton mystery? How do we get to know him when he really doesn't talk very much and we really don't get to know him at least 45 minutes in? We don't really know where he stands.

Justin Kuritzkes: It's a real challenge, and it's definitely a challenge for Drew Starkey, who plays him. I think it was really important to me that the movie not be a story of unrequited love. It's not the story of a man who falls for a younger man and the younger man isn't interested. I think there's just as much at stake for Allerton as there is for Lee. He expresses it in a very different way. So much of the movie is about the two of them trying to get in sync with each other, and then the horror of finding yourself in sync and what it feels like when you get what you want.

Alison Stewart: I love Lee's language in the film, the way he talks. It tells you a lot about who he is. Can you describe a little bit about how creating his language, his linguistics for the film?

Justin Kuritzkes: So much of that comes from Burroughs. I tried as much as I could to use Burroughs dialogue when I could, because it's amazing and so particular. I think one of the big challenges for me in adapting the story is that the book is full of monologues that Lee gives on all kinds of topics.

Alison Stewart: Oh, interesting.

Justin Kuritzkes: From chess to different political situations to everything.

Alison Stewart: You can't really do that necessarily in a film.

Justin Kuritzkes: You have to be very judicious about where you do it, or else it can become a little overwhelming for an audience. Figuring out how to get the spirit of Lee without getting all of the talk of him was part of my task.

Alison Stewart: When you found out that Daniel Craig was going to be in this role, did you change the script at all? Did you adapt to him?

Justin Kuritzkes: I didn't have to change very much. He was game to do everything. He was very much showing up to make the movie that I had written and the movie that Luca wanted to direct. No, he really threw himself into the character as he existed.

Alison Stewart: In the film, Lee becomes obsessed with telepathy. That's something that Burroughs was obsessed with as well. Why is telepathy something that he's so interested in?

Justin Kuritzkes: I think it's about-- He says this phrase, communicating on the level of intuition. It's about this complete open channel between yourself and another person. There's this real gap that is always present, no matter how close you get to somebody else. At the end of the day, there's an invisible wall between the two of you because you're stuck in your own body and in your own mind. I think he sees telepathy or the possibility of this drug that they're chasing after called Yahe, which is Ayahuasca, that they think it might open up this channel between the two of them. That's what he's hoping for, a leaving of the self.

Alison Stewart: How did you go about writing a scene which is a vision or a hallucination brought on by the Ayahuasca?

Justin Kuritzkes: I've never done Ayahuasca. I thought about it for a second. I thought maybe I should try it. Then I had this realization that Ayahuasca now has become corporatized. There's a very Burning man, tech-startup, vibe around Ayahuasca. Now you can pay $7,000 and go to Costa Rica and be looked over by a shaman. That's completely the opposite of what was Burroughs experience of Ayahuasca. He was one of the first gringos to even take it. I wanted it to feel this completely alien thing and this completely new experience. In a way, I think having gone and done one of those Ayahuasca experiences that you can do today maybe wouldn't have helped.

Alison Stewart: Yes.

Justin Kuritzkes: What I did is I read a lot. I read a lot of Burroughs writing on Ayahuasca. I watched a lot of testimonies. I watched one documentary where a neuroscientist took Ayahuasca and his lab partner documented it and interviewed him as he was tripping. Then all of that fades away and you're trying to do a particular thing with a particular character.

Alison Stewart: I was going to ask, in terms of research, what did you do for your research into Mexico in the 1950s? What did you find that surprised you? What did you think was unusual about Mexico in the '50s?

Justin Kuritzkes: A lot. The visuals of it surprised me. The colors of the buildings and the cars and all of that is so lush. When you look at old camera footage of that time it's really incredible. I think what was interesting about this community that I was writing about is that there are these American expats who are almost not interested in embedding themselves in Mexican society.

Alison Stewart: They're not really, yes.

Justin Kuritzkes: They're in a world to themselves. They have none of the guilt or self-consciousness that we might today about that.

Alison Stewart: It's funny, in the movie, the music that's playing. They're playing Nirvana.

Justin Kuritzkes: Yes.

Alison Stewart: They're playing modern music. Was that written into the script or did that come in later?

Justin Kuritzkes: Some of that stuff is written into the script if it's on a jukebox, if it's diegetic and it's happening within the logic of the scene. All of that is Luca knowing really early on that he wanted to have the soundtrack be full of stuff Nirvana and Sinead O'Connor.

Alison Stewart: It's interesting. Do you see any parallels between Queer and Challengers?

Justin Kuritzkes: I think of them as siblings in that Queer wouldn't exist in the way that it does if Luca and I weren't in Boston together making Challengers. I think the thing that connects them thematically is this thing of them both being movies about the limits of what you can try to get out of another person and what you have to get for yourself, what you have to do for yourself. Challengers is a movie about an individual sport. Of course, anybody who watches tennis knows that the players are not alone. They've got a whole box of people and there's more than one person playing. At the same time, when the ball is in play, you're the only one with the racket in your hand. I think Queer, to some extent, is about this false promise of telepathy.

Alison Stewart: It's award season. It's about to be awards season. Your wife, Celine Song, went through all of last year with her Best Film, Best Picture nominated, Past Lives. She was a guest on the show, actually.

Justin Kuritzkes: Oh, amazing.

Alison Stewart: Has she given you any advice?

Justin Kuritzkes: She went through that whole process with such intelligence and grace.

Alison Stewart: She was lovely.

Justin Kuritzkes: Through osmosis, I learned a lot from watching her go through it, for sure.

Alison Stewart: What did you notice about awards season and all that comes with it? All the glamour.

Justin Kuritzkes: It goes on for a long time. Honestly, what I think about it is that at the end of the day, you're campaigning to have the movie stick around in people's consciousness. That's a really important thing because a lot of great movies come out every year that then, for whatever reason, people forget about or don't see. I think if you can use the energy of something like awards season to get people to see those movies or remember those movies, that's an energy worth tapping into.

Alison Stewart: My guest has been Justin Kuritzkes. He's the screenwriter between two movies opening this year. Challengers, which you can stream at home now and Queer, which will be released in theaters on November 27th. It was really nice to meet you, Justin.

Justin Kuritzkes: It was so nice to meet you, too. Thank you for having me.

[music]

Alison Stewart: That-- Oh, yes, we're going to go out on Challengers. I like it.

Justin Kuritzkes: Here we go.

Alison Stewart: Get it. It's All of It. I'm Alison Stewart. I appreciate you listening. I appreciate you. I'll meet you back here tomorrow.

[END OF AUDIO]

[music]

Alison Stewart: This is All of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. Not everyone can say their first two feature films were released in the same year, shot by the same director and star massive Hollywood talents. That is the exact year my next guest has had. Justin Kuritzkes is the screenwriter behind the smash hit tennis drama Challengers, which was out earlier this year. Then he also wrote the new film Queer, starring Daniel Craig. Both are directed by Luca Guadagnino. Challengers, an original work from Justin, stars Zendaya as Tashi Duncan, a former tennis phenome who finds herself caught in a love triangle between her famous tennis star husband and his childhood best friend.

The movie spawned memes, inspired Halloween costumes, and was beloved by audiences and critics alike. His new movie, Queer, is an adaptation of William S. Burroughs novel. Daniel Craig plays William Lee, a gay American who is living in Mexico in the 1950s. He's enchanted by a young man named Eugene Allerton and soon becomes a little obsessed with wooing him. He can't quite figure out how Allerton feels about him or whether he's even interested in being with men. Queer will be in theaters November 27th. Challengers is available to stream now. I'm joined in studio by the writer of both films, Justin Kuritzkes. Nice to meet you.

Justin Kuritzkes: Nice to meet you, too. Thanks for having me.

Alison Stewart: The first two films you've made, both the same year, both star major Hollywood stars, both by acclaimed director. First of all, what has this year been like?

Justin Kuritzkes: Pretty crazy. It's been incredibly gratifying. I come from off-Broadway theater. That's my roots. In theater, you're thrilled if 100 people see your play. That's the big success. To have this reception is pretty amazing.

Alison Stewart: Yes. You said you were in off-Broadway theater. How did your theater experience prepare you for the Hollywood experience?

Justin Kuritzkes: What you learn about yourself as a person who tells stories is pretty similar, and it carries over from one medium to another. Also, I had the real benefit, on Challengers, for example, we had this abnormal thing where we had a couple weeks of rehearsal before we started shooting. When the actors got to Boston and we were starting to really work together, it didn't feel any different from working on a play. It was a nice way to ease into filmmaking.

Alison Stewart: What was the process of getting the films actually made? Did you have to be persistent and patient? Did it suddenly happen and, "Wow, my film's getting made."

Justin Kuritzkes: It was a really quick, condensed process. I had written Challengers on spec, which means that you write it for yourself. I didn't know who was attached to it, nobody was asking me to do it. Nobody knew I was doing it. I wrote it because it was a movie I wanted to see.

Alison Stewart: I love that.

Justin Kuritzkes: Yes. That's how I've written everything I've ever written. That's how I wrote every play I ever wrote. Then I sent it to a bunch of producers and eventually decided to work with Amy Pascal and Rachel O'Connor. They make the Spiderman movies. Amy read it, and the first thing she said was, "I'm going to send this to Zendaya, and she's going to say yes." I said, "Okay, good luck with that." Then from there, things moved really quickly.

Alison Stewart: What did they tell you they saw in the script?

Justin Kuritzkes: A few things made me feel Amy was a soulmate for this movie in a lot of ways. One of them was that she read it and said, "This feels like a movie that Mike Nichols would make."

Alison Stewart: Oh, wow.

Justin Kuritzkes: I have loved Mike Nichols films forever, especially Carnal Knowledge, which was a real influence on Challengers, to the point where the character Art Donaldson, is named after Art Garfunkel.

Alison Stewart: Really? Wow.

Justin Kuritzkes: Yes. Then I didn't know this, but Luca had been saying for years that he wanted to make a movie that felt like a Mike Nichols movie. Amy knew that and connected that and sent him the script and that's how it all came together.

Alison Stewart: Now you have sports movies, you have love triangle movies. Which came first with Challengers? Did you want to write a sports film or did you want to write a love triangle?

Justin Kuritzkes: I wanted to write a tennis movie.

Alison Stewart: Tennis specifically?

Justin Kuritzkes: Yes, tennis specifically. I'm not a sports guy. If you had told me five years ago that my first movie would be about sports, I would be really shocked. This thing happened where in 2018, I happened to turn on the US Open, and it was this match between Serena Williams and Naomi Osaka in the final. There was this very controversial call where Serena Williams was accused of receiving coaching from the sidelines. Not being a massive tennis fan, I hadn't heard of this rule, but immediately it struck me as this intensely cinematic thing.

You're all alone on the court, there's one person who cares as much about what happens to you out there as you do, but that's the person you can't talk to. I, for whatever reason, started thinking, what if you really needed to talk about something and what if it was something beyond tennis? How would you have that conversation? How could you communicate the tension of that using film?

Alison Stewart: It's interesting because when I thought about tennis and this film, I thought, what is a sport where women and men are equal?

Justin Kuritzkes: Yes.

Alison Stewart: Because you couldn't do this with, necessarily, football.

Justin Kuritzkes: No.

Alison Stewart: You couldn't do it with hockey, but you can do it with tennis.

Justin Kuritzkes: It's a very weird particular sport in our culture. In that tennis, at least at the big tournaments, at the Grand Slams, the pay is the same, the viewership is pretty similar. It was important to me to set it in a Challenger event or not at a Grand Slam, because they play three sets. That's the experience of most men on the tour, is that they're playing three sets, which is the same as the women.

Alison Stewart: It sounded you went down a tennis rabbit hole.

Justin Kuritzkes: Big time.

Alison Stewart: In terms of research.

Justin Kuritzkes: I started doing research that I thought was research for the movie, and then it turned into this thing where tennis was the only thing that was holding my attention. It was better than every movie I was watching, better than every TV show.

Alison Stewart: Oh, that's interesting.

Justin Kuritzkes: Yes.

Alison Stewart: What did you see in tennis that you hadn't seen before?

Justin Kuritzkes: I think a few things. The first thing that I saw, which is true of all sports, but it feels especially pronounced in tennis, is that every moment is dramatic. Every moment is packed with stakes, and there's a very clear opposition. I think because tennis is an individual sport, you spend the whole match looking at two people. You project a lot onto these two people, and you project a lot into their heads and into their souls. That had a lot to do with it. Also coming from theater, tennis felt very theatrical. It felt like theater in the round, especially when you watch something like Wimbledon and you see the Royal Box or something. It's like watching Shakespeare at the Globe.

Alison Stewart: Also, when you watch people watching tennis, the looking left, the looking right, they're looking left. You can see on their faces, the expressions, the feeling, "Oh, my God, he's not going to hit that. Oh, my God, she hit that."

Justin Kuritzkes: Yes, exactly. Yes, you're very aware of the crowd and you're very aware of perspective in tennis. That felt an interesting place to set a love triangle, because love triangles are all about who's looking at who. Anytime you're watching a scene in a movie that has a love triangle and it's between two characters, you're always watching it from the perspective of the third. That felt that naturally fit within the world of tennis.

Alison Stewart: You said that it was important that the character of Tashi Duncan be played by a black woman.

Justin Kuritzkes: Yes.

Alison Stewart: She's played by Zendaya, for people who haven't seen. Why did that feel like it was a vital to the story?

Justin Kuritzkes: It's one of those things where you don't necessarily get to choose which characters come to you first. For me, with Challengers, Tashi was the character that first appeared to me. First of all, it was baked into the moment that inspired me writing the movie, because I was watching Naomi Osaka and Serena Williams, who have two very different life experiences, but are both these remarkable black women in tennis. That felt like the story of women's tennis for the past however many decades has been the story of women of color.

Then, next to that, I knew what Tashi's story was going to be, her backstory. I knew that it was important that for Tashi, the game of tennis meant something very different than it did for Art and Patrick. That tennis is a rich people's sport, usually, and it's a traditionally very white sport. It was important that something be at stake for her in losing her tennis career that wasn't necessarily at stake for these two very privileged boys.

Alison Stewart: How does Tashi measure success?

Justin Kuritzkes: That's a great question. I think it changes over the course of her life. I think so much of the movie is about her being very much on track to have a very clear definition of success, which is this success that she's felt has been promised to her since she was a teenager. Then it gets ripped away from her and she has to completely reorganize her view of what success means.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk about Art and Patrick. There is definitely this erotic charge between Patrick and Art. How much of that was in the script? How much of that was in the casting? Did this come later?

Justin Kuritzkes: It's a mixture of everything. A lot of it is baked into the very first draft of the script. Because when I think about those two characters, I think about them as these orphans. They both come from these well-to-do families, but they've been shunted off to this tennis academy to go be raised on a tennis court and grow up in dorm rooms together. They've done that since they were preteens. They've gone through puberty together. They've had crushes on the same girls. They've been living together. They're like an old married couple in some way, but they also know each other very intimately in the way that only friends from that time can know each other.

Every friendship that is charged with eroticism, whether we admit it or not. I also think within tennis, there's a deep eroticism. If you think about tennis as a combat sport, it has a relationship to boxing, where boxing is all about touching another person. Tennis is all about not touching another person. To me, that's a well of repression. There's a lot of eroticism in the game itself.

Alison Stewart: It brings to life the end of the movie.

Justin Kuritzkes: Yes, for sure. Yes. I always thought of the end of the movie as a culmination of all of that. What was interesting in collaborating with Luca on the movie is that he had this very sharp idea when we first talked about the film. He said, "In a love triangle, all the corners should touch." When I first heard that, I thought, yes, they do. They're all very embedded in each other's erotic and emotional lives. He went, "No, literally. They should literally touch." There hadn't been a scene in the movie where all three of them shared an intimate moment together.

Alison Stewart: Except the end.

Justin Kuritzkes: Except the end, which was always there. Then I had this task of figuring out a place and a way giving the proper runway for a moment for them to all share this moment of intimacy early in their lives that would then make the end reverberate in a different way.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Justin Kuritzkes. He is the screenwriter behind two movies. Challengers, which you can stream at home, and Queer, which will be released in theaters on November 27th. We'll hear more about Queer after the break. This is All of It.

[music]

Alison Stewart: You are listening to All of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. My guest is Justin Kuritzkes. He is the screenwriter behind two movies this year. Challengers, which you can stream at home now, and Queer, which will be released in theaters on November 27th. Before I go on to Queer, is it true that you were actually on set in the movie Challengers as a writer?

Justin Kuritzkes: Yes, I was in pre-production and in rehearsal and on set the whole time, which was pretty amazing.

Alison Stewart: Yes, that's unusual for some writers.

Justin Kuritzkes: It's very unusual and it's a total testament to Luca and his confidence and generosity as a collaborator. Also to the producers. To Zendaya and Amy and Rachel. Yes.

Alison Stewart: All right, let's talk about Queer. It's a novel from William S. Burroughs. Luca gave it for you to read. What did you think when you first read it?

Justin Kuritzkes: I was completely amazed by it. I had been familiar with Burroughs' work in Naked Lunch, and I'd read the Yahe Letters. We were on set for Challengers one day, and Luca handed me this book and said, "Read this tonight and tell me if you'll adapt it for me."

Alison Stewart: That's funny.

Justin Kuritzkes: It is funny, actually. That's a window into what Luca's. I, of course, read it that night and called him immediately and said, I'm in.

Alison Stewart: Queer does not have a ton of dialogue, initially. At least the first few scenes don't have a lot of dialogue. It's really visual. How did you figure out how to introduce us to the main character, Lee, without having him speak so much?

Justin Kuritzkes: Something that was really useful is we had this great researcher, Ben Panzeca, who did all kinds of research about the gin he would drink, the cigarettes he would smoke, what he would wear, which then got internalized by Jonathan Anderson, our amazing costume designer. I had this image of how he was dressed, and how he was sitting at this bar in Mexico. For whatever reason, it clicked with me that the movie should open with him looking in the camera and saying, "You're not queer." Then we realize he's talking to this kid he's trying to suss out.

Alison Stewart: It's interesting because Allerton, in the film, who he's pursuing, obsessing with, he's not nearly as talkative.

Justin Kuritzkes: No.

Alison Stewart: As Lee. How did you want to get through a little bit of Allerton mystery? How do we get to know him when he really doesn't talk very much and we really don't get to know him at least 45 minutes in? We don't really know where he stands.

Justin Kuritzkes: It's a real challenge, and it's definitely a challenge for Drew Starkey, who plays him. I think it was really important to me that the movie not be a story of unrequited love. It's not the story of a man who falls for a younger man and the younger man isn't interested. I think there's just as much at stake for Allerton as there is for Lee. He expresses it in a very different way. So much of the movie is about the two of them trying to get in sync with each other, and then the horror of finding yourself in sync and what it feels like when you get what you want.

Alison Stewart: I love Lee's language in the film, the way he talks. It tells you a lot about who he is. Can you describe a little bit about how creating his language, his linguistics for the film?

Justin Kuritzkes: So much of that comes from Burroughs. I tried as much as I could to use Burroughs dialogue when I could, because it's amazing and so particular. I think one of the big challenges for me in adapting the story is that the book is full of monologues that Lee gives on all kinds of topics.

Alison Stewart: Oh, interesting.

Justin Kuritzkes: From chess to different political situations to everything.

Alison Stewart: You can't really do that necessarily in a film.

Justin Kuritzkes: You have to be very judicious about where you do it, or else it can become a little overwhelming for an audience. Figuring out how to get the spirit of Lee without getting all of the talk of him was part of my task.

Alison Stewart: When you found out that Daniel Craig was going to be in this role, did you change the script at all? Did you adapt to him?

Justin Kuritzkes: I didn't have to change very much. He was game to do everything. He was very much showing up to make the movie that I had written and the movie that Luca wanted to direct. No, he really threw himself into the character as he existed.

Alison Stewart: In the film, Lee becomes obsessed with telepathy. That's something that Burroughs was obsessed with as well. Why is telepathy something that he's so interested in?

Justin Kuritzkes: I think it's about-- He says this phrase, communicating on the level of intuition. It's about this complete open channel between yourself and another person. There's this real gap that is always present, no matter how close you get to somebody else. At the end of the day, there's an invisible wall between the two of you because you're stuck in your own body and in your own mind. I think he sees telepathy or the possibility of this drug that they're chasing after called Yahe, which is Ayahuasca, that they think it might open up this channel between the two of them. That's what he's hoping for, a leaving of the self.

Alison Stewart: How did you go about writing a scene which is a vision or a hallucination brought on by the Ayahuasca?

Justin Kuritzkes: I've never done Ayahuasca. I thought about it for a second. I thought maybe I should try it. Then I had this realization that Ayahuasca now has become corporatized. There's a very Burning man, tech-startup, vibe around Ayahuasca. Now you can pay $7,000 and go to Costa Rica and be looked over by a shaman. That's completely the opposite of what was Burroughs experience of Ayahuasca. He was one of the first gringos to even take it. I wanted it to feel this completely alien thing and this completely new experience. In a way, I think having gone and done one of those Ayahuasca experiences that you can do today maybe wouldn't have helped.

Alison Stewart: Yes.

Justin Kuritzkes: What I did is I read a lot. I read a lot of Burroughs writing on Ayahuasca. I watched a lot of testimonies. I watched one documentary where a neuroscientist took Ayahuasca and his lab partner documented it and interviewed him as he was tripping. Then all of that fades away and you're trying to do a particular thing with a particular character.

Alison Stewart: I was going to ask, in terms of research, what did you do for your research into Mexico in the 1950s? What did you find that surprised you? What did you think was unusual about Mexico in the '50s?

Justin Kuritzkes: A lot. The visuals of it surprised me. The colors of the buildings and the cars and all of that is so lush. When you look at old camera footage of that time it's really incredible. I think what was interesting about this community that I was writing about is that there are these American expats who are almost not interested in embedding themselves in Mexican society.

Alison Stewart: They're not really, yes.

Justin Kuritzkes: They're in a world to themselves. They have none of the guilt or self-consciousness that we might today about that.

Alison Stewart: It's funny, in the movie, the music that's playing. They're playing Nirvana.

Justin Kuritzkes: Yes.

Alison Stewart: They're playing modern music. Was that written into the script or did that come in later?

Justin Kuritzkes: Some of that stuff is written into the script if it's on a jukebox, if it's diegetic and it's happening within the logic of the scene. All of that is Luca knowing really early on that he wanted to have the soundtrack be full of stuff Nirvana and Sinead O'Connor.

Alison Stewart: It's interesting. Do you see any parallels between Queer and Challengers?

Justin Kuritzkes: I think of them as siblings in that Queer wouldn't exist in the way that it does if Luca and I weren't in Boston together making Challengers. I think the thing that connects them thematically is this thing of them both being movies about the limits of what you can try to get out of another person and what you have to get for yourself, what you have to do for yourself. Challengers is a movie about an individual sport. Of course, anybody who watches tennis knows that the players are not alone. They've got a whole box of people and there's more than one person playing. At the same time, when the ball is in play, you're the only one with the racket in your hand. I think Queer, to some extent, is about this false promise of telepathy.

Alison Stewart: It's award season. It's about to be awards season. Your wife, Celine Song, went through all of last year with her Best Film, Best Picture nominated, Past Lives. She was a guest on the show, actually.

Justin Kuritzkes: Oh, amazing.

Alison Stewart: Has she given you any advice?

Justin Kuritzkes: She went through that whole process with such intelligence and grace.

Alison Stewart: She was lovely.

Justin Kuritzkes: Through osmosis, I learned a lot from watching her go through it, for sure.

Alison Stewart: What did you notice about awards season and all that comes with it? All the glamour.

Justin Kuritzkes: It goes on for a long time. Honestly, what I think about it is that at the end of the day, you're campaigning to have the movie stick around in people's consciousness. That's a really important thing because a lot of great movies come out every year that then, for whatever reason, people forget about or don't see. I think if you can use the energy of something like awards season to get people to see those movies or remember those movies, that's an energy worth tapping into.

Alison Stewart: My guest has been Justin Kuritzkes. He's the screenwriter between two movies opening this year. Challengers, which you can stream at home now and Queer, which will be released in theaters on November 27th. It was really nice to meet you, Justin.

Justin Kuritzkes: It was so nice to meet you, too. Thank you for having me.

[music]

Alison Stewart: That-- Oh, yes, we're going to go out on Challengers. I like it.

Justin Kuritzkes: Here we go.

Alison Stewart: Get it. It's All of It. I'm Alison Stewart. I appreciate you listening. I appreciate you. I'll meet you back here tomorrow.

[END OF AUDIO]