“Justin is a wunderkind,” says prolific Italian director Luca Guadagnino about on-the-rise screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes throughout a joint interview at a Los Angeles lodge.
Kuritzkes penned each of Guadagnino’s movies launched this yr: “Challengers,” the glossy drama chronicling a love triangle amid the aggressive world {of professional} tennis, and “Queer,” an adaptation of legendary writer William S. Burroughs’ postwar, Mexico Metropolis-set novella a couple of homosexual American expat and his drug-infused relationship with a youthful lover.
For Kuritzkes, an achieved playwright, “Challengers” represented his first foray into screenwriting. He’d performed tennis as a baby however give up after realizing there was a ceiling to how good he might turn out to be. His ardour for the game was rekindled solely a few years later when watching a controversial 2018 match between Serena Williams and Naomi Osaka.
Mike Faist, Zendaya and Josh O’Connor star because the central figures in a love triangle in “Challengers.”
(Credit score: Metro Goldwyn Mayer Footage © 2023 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Footage Inc. All Rights Reserved.)
Conversely, Guadagnino had little curiosity within the topic till he learn Kuritzkes’ take.
“Tennis is full of rules, and I refused to understand them,” Guadagnino says. “But in reading the script for the first time, which was very specific about the actual rules of the game, I realized how brilliant the writing was, because I could understand and follow everything.”
However Kuritzkes’ position in “Challengers” didn’t finish after the director signed on. As a part of his cinematic observe, Guadagnino has his screenwriters by his facet all through manufacturing. “It’s very rare for a writer to be included in that way,” says Kuritzkes. “It’s a testament to the generosity and the confidence of somebody like Luca to have his writer there the whole time. And what it ended up being for me was like going to film school every day.”
Working with Kuritzkes all through the whole filmmaking course of — even throughout modifying — is the one approach to carry to life the very best model of the script, Guadagnino believes.
“As one of the elements that constitute a movie, screenwriting is alive until the end. And the end for me is when an audience watches the movie. The process doesn’t end with the delivery of a script that a studio, a producer or a director deems right,” the director explains. “Because making a movie deals with many unanswered questions on the page that might need another question to be posed to the pages in order to achieve the most precise, inspiring, intuitive translation of what has been put in that screenplay.”
It was in the course of the taking pictures of “Challengers” that Guadagnino handed Kuritzkes a duplicate of Burroughs’ slim e book. Again then, Kuritzkes was acquainted solely with Burroughs’ extra surreal works “Naked Lunch” and “The Yage Letters.”
“Luca said, ‘Read this tonight and tell me if you’ll adapt it for me,’” recollects Kuritzkes. “Having known Burroughs’ other work, I was really shocked to find that ‘Queer’ was this very linear, straightforward love story between these two very complicated people.”
“I knew that my task was to write Luca this movie he had been dreaming about,” Justin Kuritzkes says of “queer,” starring Daniel Craig.
(Yannis Drakoulidis / A24.)
Guadagnino first found Burroughs’ “Queer” at a bookstore in Palermo, Sicily, when he was 17. “I was this very lanky and solitary, feverish, strange boy spending a lot of time in this bookshop,” he recollects. “I saw this book titled ‘Diverso,’ which means ‘different.’ I felt different all my life. I paid for it, went home and I read it, and I was like, ‘Whoa, that’s me.’”
“Queer” was Kuritzkes first time adapting preexisting materials. However the great sense of accountability he felt got here not from the textual content itself however from figuring out the importance “Queer” had for Guadagnino, who had been attempting to show it right into a film for a very long time.
“I knew that my task was to write Luca this movie he had been dreaming about, and that’s very heavy,” Kuritzkes notes. “After I said yes, of course there were a lot of moments of doubt and a lot of moments of fear.”
“And then you hand me the script like a month later, and it was miraculous,” Guadagnino tells Kuritzkes. “The book is also a comedy, and there is a picaresque quality to it that Justin made a brilliant adaptation of, because it’s a romantic movie, but it’s also very funny.”
Director Luca Guadagnino (Marcus Ubungen/Los Angeles Occasions) Los Angeles, CA – November 13: Director Luca Guadagnino and author Justin Kuritzkes who collaborated on two movies this yr: The tennis-set love triangle Challengers and the William S. Burroughs adaptation, Queer. 4 Seasons Lodge on Wednesday, Nov. 13, 2024 in Los Angeles, CA. (Marcus Ubungen / Los Angeles Occasions) (Marcus Ubungen/Los Angeles Occasions)
Kuritzkes’ method in was realizing he might relate to the much less flattering qualities of the narrative’s protagonist, William Lee (performed onscreen by Daniel Craig). “He felt like a person I could reach out and touch, whereas the persona of Burroughs felt a little more distant to me,” he says.
Since he watched Guadagnino direct “Challengers” whereas writing “Queer,” Kuritzkes was tailoring the screenplay to the director’s creative sensibilities. “I thought, ‘If I hand this crazy scene over to Luca, he’s going to figure out a way to do it. He’s going to figure out a way to make it iconic and essential.’ And so that opens you up to write things you wouldn’t otherwise,” Kuritzkes says.
One such occasion occurred with a psychedelic drug scene that was minimally described on the web page, however Guadagnino turned it into an experiential sequence. “I could never have predicted from one line in a script that that’s what would come,” says Kuritzkes.
To his remorse, the 2023 writers’ strike prevented Kuritzkes from being on set in the course of the manufacturing of “Queer.” This partnership, nonetheless, nonetheless has a promising future. Says Guadagnino: “The ambitions within Justin are so large and expansive that is a pleasure for me to nurture them with more material.”
