[lounge music] ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ [Narrator] "On Story" is brought to you in part by the Alice Kleberg Reynolds Foundation, a Texas family providing innovative funding since 1979.

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[waves] [kids screaming] [wind] [witch cackling] [sirens wail] [gunshots] [dripping] [suspenseful music] [telegraph beeping, typing] [piano gliss] From Austin Film Festival, this is "On Story," a look inside the creative process from today's leading writers, creators and filmmakers.

This week's "On Story," on "Challengers," a conversation with Justin Kuritzkes.

- Every match you're playing, you're playing the match of your life, because this is your life in the same way that my desk is my life, so I always kind of knew that tennis courts would be these time machines, and that the passage of time would be the passage of a ball across the net.

[paper crumples] [typing] [carriage returns, ding] [Narrator] This week on "On Story," screenwriter, Justin Kuritzkes joins us for a conversation on his process writing the summer blockbuster "Challengers."

Kuritzkes discusses creating high stakes in a grounded world that explores a tangled tale of friendship.

[typewriter ding] - In doing my research for today, I came upon a panel when you all were out promoting the film, and Amy Pascal, one of your producers, said, "The structure and the characters are interchangeable.

There is no difference between the choices that the characters make and the plot of the movie."

So I'm curious, as the writer, do you see it similarly, differently?

- This movie kind of all came of a piece.

When I got the idea for it, I already kind of knew what the structure was going to be, so there was never a world where these characters existed outside of this structure.

It all kind of came from the inspiration to write the movie in the first place, which was that I was watching this tennis match between Serena Williams and Naomi Osaka in the final of the U.S. Open in 2018, and there was this very controversial call where Serena Williams was accused of receiving coaching from the sidelines, and at the time, you weren't allowed to do that, and I had never heard about this rule because I hadn't been a massive tennis fan, but it immediately struck me as this very cinematic thing where you were trying to have a conversation without language in front of a lot of people, and I started thinking, it would be very interesting if you were trying to talk about something beyond tennis, something about the two of you, and something that somehow involved the person on the other side of the net.

I started doing a lot of research, and just getting my hands on everything about tennis that I could, and I started asking myself, "What could I write that would be as good as tennis, and what would make tennis even better?"

And for me, the answer to that question was that it would be better if I could know what was at stake on a real emotional level.

And so I always kind of knew that the movie was going to drop the audience into a present day match, and that gradually we were gonna find out why this thing that, on the surface of it, didn't seem to matter very much, you know, it was kind of this low level, no money, no ranking points tournament, but hopefully by the end of the movie, the audience felt like it was more important than Wimbledon, you know, and that was kind of the spirit that animated the whole writing of it.

- Let's go.

[Tennis Announcer] 15,30.

[crowd applauds] [upbeat music] [typewriter ding] - I counted 18 distinct time shifts, so the tennis match in New Rochelle is kind of as the ballast, but the narrative keeps shifting in chronology, sometimes back a few days, sometimes a few weeks, other times 13 years.

- I thought the sort of container of these people's lives was roughly the years between 18 and mid-30s, because that's the lifespan of an athlete.

You know, 18 is when you're born, because that's the moment that they can start profiting off of you, and 35 is when you're dead, because you're useless, you know.

[laughs] Unless you're lucky, and maybe, you know, if you're Roger Federer, and you can play until you're 40, but that's this really brutal, short container where most of what you're ever gonna be remembered for is happening right then, and I think as a writer, that was very interesting to me, and also really scary to me, you know, to think if I were a tennis player, I'd be over the hill, and so it was a movie I started writing right when I was, you know, 31, and so that was stuff I was thinking about, and I thought, you know, "Thank God I'm not a tennis player."

[audience laughs] You know, I knew that a lot of that could be achieved contextually, and one of the first sort of thoughts I had about the way that the movie was going to move through time was that these people spend their whole lives on concrete tennis courts for the most part, you know, courts that look exactly the same, and every time you're on one of those courts, you're on every court you've ever been on.

You know, so every match you're playing, you're playing the match of your life, because this is your life in the same way that my desk is my life, so I always kind of knew that tennis courts would be these time machines, and that the passage of time would be the passage of a ball across the net.

- "Challengers" goes 21 minutes where you're at Phil's Tire Town Challenger, and the audience isn't quite sure why, and then we go back, and for the first time, we see, oh, these two guys, you know, were really close, really young.

Talk about patience.

- I always love when a movie makes it clear to me at the beginning that there's something going on that I don't know yet, but it trusts that I'll get there, because that feels very respectful of an audience, you know, like one of the movies I was thinking about a lot as I was writing "Challengers" was a movie called "Brief Encounter," which is this incredible movie which opens with these two people at a cafe, at a train station, and you can tell that they're meeting, and they need to talk about something very serious and very important between the two of them, but you don't know what it is yet.

You don't know the history of these people, and they're about to get into it, and then this woman sits down next to them who they recognize, who's this nosy person, who's the last person they wanna see, and she starts just engaging in small talk, because she doesn't know that there's this deep history there, and she's ruining their last meeting, and she has no idea.

You don't know all of that, but you get a sense of it at the beginning, and it makes you want to know what the circumstances are.

Why are these people looking at each other like that?

What is it that she doesn't know?

[typewriter ding] - Do you consider "Challengers" a sports movie?

[audience laughs] - Yeah, [audience laughs] it's about sports.

I mean- - Well, let me sort of- - No, no, I know what you mean.

- Yeah, go for it.

- I think it's interesting, because I think we often put boxing movies, for example, in a different category than other sports movies, and I think that has everything to do with just the fact that a lot of boxing movies are very good, and a lot of boxing movies are very deep, close up character studies, you know, and I think that's because of the structure of the sport itself, which is that it's an individual sport where you're not playing for your country, or your city, or, you know, I always found myself having trouble connecting with stories about, you know, we're doing it for America or something, because I don't care, you know.

[audience laughs] I care about what's going on in the heads of these people, you know, and I think when you watch an individual sport like boxing or like tennis, you project so much onto these people because you're spending a couple hours staring at two people's faces, and watching them try to fight each other, you know, fight to the death, so I do think of it as a sports movie, but when I think about the sports movies that I love, you know, aside from boxing movies, I think about something like "He Got Game," you know, the amazing Spike Lee movie where the climactic pickup game is played in the dark, in a park, you know, next to an apartment building, and if anybody was walking by on the street, they would have no idea what was at stake.

It would just look like a father and son playing a game of pickup basketball, but because we know what's going on, we're watching it like it matters more than the NBA Finals and it does, and that to me is much more exciting than a movie about, you know, game seven, because I think you can make a great movie about that, but often I would much rather just be watching game seven, you know, or I'd much rather be watching the U.S. Open, because every moment of that is dramatic, and it's pure good drama, you know?

So if you're asking yourself the question, "How do I bring something to this that the sport doesn't have in itself," you know, then I think that leads you to make a movie like "He Got Game," or you know, hopefully a movie like "Challengers."

- And you intentionally sort of make it so we don't know who won this match.

- But it doesn't really spoil much, precisely because of what you're talking about, which is that, hopefully by the end of the movie for me, you come to realize that this is not about the score, and it doesn't matter, and that actually, if we focus on that, it's not only besides the point, but it obscures the point.

[intense music] ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ - That was really the journey of writing it for me was gradually letting the actual score fade away, which is part of why you set a movie at a low level match like this in the first place, because it allows for it to be very clear that the stakes are personal, they're not professional.

[typewriter ding] - You spent, was it a week with Luca, just developing a relationship, but then talking about the script, and can you talk about what he brought to it even at that early stage?

- I had written this on spec, which just means that you're writing it for yourself really, you know, there's nobody attached to it, and nobody knows you're doing it, and then I had finished this thing, and sent it to a bunch of producers, and decided to work with Amy Pascal and Rachel O'Connor, and one of the first things Amy said was, "We're gonna send this to Zendaya and she's gonna say yes."

[all laugh] And they had a relationship because of the Spider-Man movies, and she sent it to Zendaya and she did say yes, and then we needed to make the movie before she was set to go shoot "Dune Part Two."

We had been talking about Luca as somebody who would be a dream for this for a while, but he was technically unavailable, and then once the Zendaya piece came into it, we thought, "Let's just send it to him anyway."

And we sent it to him, and he read it, and he wanted to meet me, and so I flew to Milan, and hung out with him for a week.

A lot of that was basically us feeling each other out and seeing if we could do this very intense, intimate thing together very soon, you know, 'cause that was the other part of it.

We didn't have time for what usually happens when a movie comes together like this, is usually you have a development process, you know, where you're really making, you're tailoring the script to the collaborators that you have before you have a production plan in place.

In this case, we knew we were gonna have to go into pre-production just a couple months after I'd finished the first draft of the script, so that meant that Luca and I knew that we were gonna have to do a lot of work in pre-production to make this feel like a Luca movie, you know, to make it feel like a movie that he was always supposed to direct.

So that first week, the major sort of first conversation we started to have that would influence the direction that I took the script in was that Lucas said this very sharp thing that he felt in every movie about a love triangle, all the corners should touch.

And when I heard that, I thought at first that they all did touch, that these people were very much entwined in each other's lives, you know, and he made it clear that he meant they should touch literally, [all laugh] because that was not in the script yet, you know, all of the dynamics were there, and all of the sort of desire flowing in all directions was there, but there wasn't this moment where it all came together before the end, you know, 'cause I always thought about the end of the movie as the moment where that happens, but he had this intuition that we should find a place for that to happen.

And so the question for me then became, "How do I do that in a way that will feel organic, and feel earned, and not feel like something that we're imposing on the characters, but is something that comes out of the relationship that's already there," and because of the way the movie is structured in this very sort of tight clock, where can I put that that won't throw everything out of whack, you know, and that took a lot of time and a lot of conversations with Luca primarily, but also with the producers, and eventually with the actors, and now that scene is one of my favorite scenes in the movie.

Now it's when I watch the movie, which I don't do often, but when I do, that's the scene I'm excited to watch with an audience, you know, because now I feel like it's such a showcase for what everybody does really well.

- And so was the dialogue already in there in terms of them telling Tashi the story about sort of when they were boys, and the one teaching, that was all added?

- No, I mean, their relationship was there, but that dialogue in particular was not in that scene.

- We were talking about Cat, weren't we?

- Cat Zimmerman.

- Patrick said it's always better if you're like thinking about somebody when you're doing it, and so I asked him, "Who are you thinking about?," and he was talking about this girl, Cat Zimmerman, - Cat Zimmerman.

- And so I thought about her too.

- Wow.

- Yeah.

[laughs] - Okay, and who finished first?

- Oh, I don't remember.

- I think you.

[laughs] - And that was part of me realizing that I had to give that a long runway so that when it happens, it doesn't feel like this random event, you know, but we understand how they got there, which is funny because now I look at that scene, and it's the one part of the movie that feels like a play to me, so it's the one thing that feels most connection to my work as a playwright.

- That scene where kind of things get hot and heavy, and then she just leaves.

- I'm going to bed.

- What about your number?

- I told you I'm not a home wrecker.

- Please.

- And then later on, there's the scene where she's in her Stanford dorm and Patrick's there, and they're talking about a conversation, and Patrick says something like, "Are we talking about tennis?"

And she says, I forget, "We're always talking about tennis," but when she sort of gets disappointed by his answer, she just bails, that kind of callback, just talk about the sort of any intentionality about what it reveals about her character.

- There's often a conversation about it being a sort of sexy movie, and I don't think that if you actually look at the movie, there's no sex scenes.

They're always interrupted, you know.

People are always about to do something, and then they don't, or they can't, and it was really important to me, as I was writing it, that the most intimate site, the most intimate location was on the tennis court, that that was the place where they would really understand each other and really have a conversation with their bodies, and so I think it was important that they not have that release anywhere else, and that the audience not have that either, so that there was something on the court that they could only get there, and they could only understand each other fully there.

[typewriter ding] - How do you think about the use of callbacks in a screenplay, and there's several in "Challengers" that I'd love to hear your sort of, how this came about.

One would be the signal of the ball and the tennis racket.

- The thing with the ball and the tennis racket was actually one of the first images I had in my mind of the movie, and I didn't know what the context was, but I knew that that was going to happen, so I then had to figure out how to plant that, and how to make it satisfying when it happens.

So having something like that in mind, it's kind of like having a punchline for a joke before you know the setup, you know, and I think a lot of writing is like that.

A lot of writing is about, you don't get to choose what comes for free, you know, so then the thing you have to work on is also not something you get to choose, and in this case, that came for free, this thing, but then I had to figure out how to make that land, and how to make that mean something to an audience.

- The two hugs, so you have this, you know, over intense, over exuberant hug at the beginning, and then the hug at the end where you start to see like the reconnection that it goes back to the earlier hug.

- Yeah, well these guys have had this very particular relationship where they've essentially grown up together, you know, and they're kind of more like brothers than they are like friends, because, you know, I really started thinking about Patrick and Art as orphans.

You know, they come from these nice families, nice by which I mean wealthy, you know, I don't know if they're nice families, but they come from privilege, these two guys, but they've been shunted off to this elite tennis academy to go be raised on tennis courts, and so they grow up with each other, you know, and when they lose that, they're losing something very significant, and meanwhile, Tashi is somebody who does have a family and a very strong family, and one that she's expected to support.

You know, she's gonna be the person who lifts her family up into a completely different realm of living, and then that gets taken away from her, and so those kinds of familial dynamics between the three of them were very important to lock down.

- You're going to Stanford, right?

- Yeah, how'd you know that?

- I just accepted my offer, and they mentioned you.

- Really?

- You're not going pro?

- No, not yet.

- Why do you waste your time playing college tennis?

- Baby, I need to steal you for a second about the trophies.

- Ah, okay.

I have to go take pictures, so it was nice meeting you both.

- Yeah.

- Yeah.

[laughs] Okay.

[upbeat music] - How did you think about those two themes of race and class of how you wanted to weave them into the story, but maybe in a more subtle way?

- Sports are a place where class dynamics are just unavoidable, but what's ironic about that is that tennis is this very gentile sport where there's a very steep barrier to entry.

You know, it's a very expensive sport, and again, it's an individual sport, so, even within tennis, there's the haves and the have nots at the professional level.

So I found it interesting to have this character, Patrick, who's, in the context of professional tennis, a have not, you know, he can't afford to have the physio, and the hitting partner, and all these people traveling with him.

- Or a hotel room.

- Or a hotel room, yeah, right, or a car, and Art can.

Art can fund a whole army of people to get him ready for the game, but at the end of the day, they both have to get on the court and they're alone, right?

All that stuff goes away, but of course it never goes away either.

You know, there's a myth that tennis is an individual sport, but when you watch tennis, the whole time they're cutting to the box, and you can see who's got a lot of people in the box, and who doesn't, and so it was interesting to me to have a character like Patrick, who is extremely wealthy, or comes from extreme wealth, but who's living as this journeyman, you know, down on his luck guy, especially because I knew that that would drive Tashi crazy.

[typewriter ding] - When you get to the point where Art goes over the net and they're this embrace, and then you start to see these smiles, and it's almost like recognition of a reconnection.

Talk about the ambiguity, and to what degree are you thinking that we might lead to the conclusion that the two men are better positioned to move on in their relationship?

- You know, I think when it comes to endings, I like to reach a moment of something, you know, like a revelation or intensity, and then we're done, because at that point, I've gotten what I want from the movie, you know, I don't necessarily need an explanation, I don't need an answer.

They're people who are born the moment you meet them, and they're dead the moment that the credits roll, and so you don't, at least I don't, feel like a responsibility to tell you everything that's ever gonna happen to these people afterwards, because if I wanted to tell you that, it would've been a very different movie, you know, so if you think about a movie as a sort of container of energy, it's not so different from a sports match in that way, you know, and you get to set the parameters of when that experience is done, and when we leave these people.

[typewriter ding] [Narrator] You've been watching "On Challengers: A Conversation With Justin Kuritzkes" on "On Story."

"On Story" is part of a growing number of programs in Austin Film Festival's On Story Project, that also includes the On Story radio program, podcast, book series, and the On Story archive, accessible through the Wittcliff Collections at Texas State University.

To find out more about On Story and Austin Film Festival, visit onstory.tv or austinfilmfestival.com.

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