226 | Challengers/Queer Writer Justin Kuritzkes: Asking The Right Questions While Writing

Justin Kuritzkes is having a good year. Two of his scripts, Challengers and Queer, were brought to life by world-renowned director Luca Guadagnino. Despite being about wildly different worlds, both scripts center complicated characters swirling in complicated romantic dynamics. Challengers, our focus of today's conversation, was born out of Justin's newfound interest in tennis, and a fascination with what might be happening off the court between players in an intimate sport. His script instantly attracted Zendaya’s attention, so it’s safe to say he did something right!

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

Meg: Hey everyone, welcome back to The Screenwriting Life. I'm Meg LeFauve. Lorien is out sick today, so our wonderful producer Jeff Graham will be joining in. 

Jeff: Thrilled to be here, as Meg mentioned. We are welcoming the writer of Challengers, Justin Kuritzkes, onto the show. He's having an amazing year.

Meg: Justin wrote two movies that are being released this year, both directed by Oscar-nominated director Luca Guadagnino. Queer, which just premiered at the Venice Film Festival and was nominated for The Golden Lion, stars Daniel Craig as an American expat in Mexico City who becomes infatuated with a younger man.

Jeff: Challengers, which I just mentioned, is what we'll be focusing our conversation on today. It's a romantic thriller set in the world of competitive tennis. The movie stars Zendaya, who also served as a producer on the film. And Justin, we're thrilled to be here. Thanks for being here on the show today. 

Justin: Thank you so much for having me. It's a real honor. I'm thrilled to be here. 

Meg: Fantastic. Well, we can't wait to dive in and ask you all kinds of writerly questions. But before we do, we're gonna do the section of the show that we like to call Adventures in Screenwriting. Basically, how was your week? Jeff, you go first. How was your week?

Jeff: It's been good. I, as many listeners know, because I met you while we were here, I'm up at the Cinestory Retreat, and for those TSL listeners who are here, it was great to meet you in person. 

I think it's an interesting position to be on the other side and sort of be like mentoring writers and talking about their work. And it was, I had one script in particular this year that was very far along. I can tell it had been through a bunch of workshops and was in really good shape. And it was one of those drafts where we were able to get into kind of like the nitty gritty of tone. 

And like, really, it was the question less of like, are we going to break act two? Or like, is this more of a Netflix rom com? Or is this more of a Little Miss Sunshine-style Sundance indie? And like, what tone do you want? So it's interesting to look at your work when it's further along and you are able to ask those questions of like, what does the movie want to be right now? And like, what types of questions should we be asking? 

In this case, it was like, I think the B-story is what needed to be messed up a little bit. There was this thing happening where the movie, I don't want to give, say too much about it, but it's a family road movie, and there's a romantic B-story that's kind of happening over phone calls and texts.

And the family stuff felt kind of messed up and thematically complicated. And the love story was kind of more like, and there's nothing wrong with this, but like the sort of feel good comfort Netflix-style rom com B-story, where we sort of knew what the beats were going to be, we sort of understood the trajectory of that.

And it was interesting talking to the writer about how both of those tones needed to align, even if they were both on the same theme. So, I don't know how helpful this is for you writers, but we talk about it on the show a lot. Your A-story and your B-story need to be operating on the exact same theme. And it's important to make sure that tonally they're doing the same thing as well. 

So if you're feeling some bumpiness in your work, maybe looking at each of those threads is a good place to start. So that's kind of what I've been thinking about this week. 

Meg: I can't wait to talk to Justin about tone. Cannot wait. I’m so excited. All right, Justin, how was your week? 

Justin: My week's been good. I mean, you know, I've been doing a lot of press for Queer mostly, because we were at the New York Film Festival this weekend. And so the whole crew came into town and that was a nice, you know, kind of beautiful reunion with everybody. So it's been a week of like talking a lot. Talking more than writing. 

Meg: How is that for you? Are you the kind of writer who, if you don't write, you start to get, I don't know, edgy, annoyed, or are you, do you like it? Do you like not writing? 

Justin: A little bit of both. I mean, it's like a relief to not have to write, you know, to have an excuse not to. But then you think that's going to be more fun than it is. And you realize that like, actually what you want to be doing is, is work. 

Meg: It’s so true. And then do you have the re-entry? What I have is if I have to do press or whatever and then I've got a re-entry to the writer. Now it's like jumping into a cold pool and I'm like, why am I even doing this project? Is it any good? I start to re-question everything. Or are you able to kind of slip back in? 

Justin: No, you have to get back into the groove of it, you know. I mean, I think like for me, I've gotten pretty good at not needing like perfect conditions to write just because you have to write in like on airplanes and in, you know, or in the case of with Challengers and I was writing Queer, like in the scout van, you know.

So like that kind of, or writing edits for Challengers in the scout van. So that kind of stuff I've kind of gotten better at that but I'd always rather be in my apartment working. Yeah. 

Meg: Absolutely. Absolutely. Well, my week is very easy because I just got back from South Africa where I was teaching at a lab. So mostly my week has been, what day is it? What time is it? Is it, can I eat now? Like I don't even know. Nine hours difference is a big jump. 

Justin: I know. 

Meg: It's a very big jump, but I just today am feeling very much normal again. And my favorite part of the retreat was two things. One is, I had really great writers. I was excited by all of their stories. We're going to Zoom again because I just want to know what happens and what are they going to do with them.

And I brought my sister. And it was a wonderful renewal lesson of getting out of your own patterns and your own, you know. Going to Africa on safari, you really break up all your patterns, all of your thought patterns, all of your external patterns, and really just get to be somewhere different in the most full experience.

And it's so good for us. We really do need to do that. I'm not saying everybody has to go to Africa, but you can even do that walking around a park. Like you can really try to break that. Sometimes I don't know, I don't know about everybody else, but I get down into a groove and it gets very narrow and my sights can get very narrowed in.

And sometimes I just need to go out and look at how big the sky is and that there's many more possibilities in the world than we ever could imagine. It's a wonderful reminder. But let's. enough about me. 

Justin: I'm so jealous of that trip. That sounds incredible. 

Meg: Well, Justin, if you ever want to go, I can hook you up. It was very fun. 

Okay, so but I really want to ask you so many questions and like Jeff mentioned most our questions are really about Challengers because we have not seen the other movie, but we can't wait.

So, you know, the script for Challengers ended up on the Blacklist. Can you talk about your experience of writing that script and how and when you know, it started to get heat. Was it many drafts? Was it brand new? Kind of where did all of this come from? 

Justin: Well, the first sort of kernel of the idea came around 2018. I was, I hadn't been a massive tennis fan, and I just happened to turn on the U.S. Open. And I was in the middle of writing what I thought was going to be my second book. And I started watching this match, and it was a match between Serena Williams and Naomi Osaka in the final. And there was this very controversial call where the umpire accused Serena Williams of receiving coaching from the sidelines. 

And not having been a massive tennis fan up until that point, I had never heard of that rule. But immediately it struck me as this intensely cinematic situation, you know. That you're this person under a tremendous amount of pressure. And there's this one other person in this massive tennis stadium who cares as much about what happens to you out there as you do. But that's the one person you're not allowed to talk to. 

And so immediately I started to think, well, what if you really needed to talk with them about something? And what if somehow it was about something deeper than tennis? You know, deeper than what was going on right now. And it was about your lives and about the two of you. And what if it somehow included the person across the net? And so that all came in that first sort of moment. And then I was already thinking about the movie then, but I didn't know much else, you know.

And so I started watching a lot of tennis at first just as research. But then this thing started happening where tennis was the only thing that was holding my attention. You know, it was better than everything I was watching at the movies and better than everything I was watching on my computer. And it's not because those things are boring, but it's just because tennis is so good.

And I found myself becoming like a legitimate sports fan for the first time in my life. And so I started to ask myself a question, which was, 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, well, it would make tennis better if I could know at every moment exactly what was at stake for everybody.

And not just the kind of stuff that a commentator could tell me. But the deep, dark, the real stuff. And so I was thinking about this movie and I put off writing it for a long time because I didn't want to pollute my, like, tennis fandom, you know. But then finally, towards, I didn't want to turn it into work. But then finally, towards the end of 2021 I sat down and I wrote what became the first draft of the script. 

And then I met with producers and ended up deciding to work with Amy Pascal and Rachel O'Connor. And the first thing they said was, we're going to send this to Zendaya. And from the moment that Zendaya read it and wanted to do it, it all moved really quickly. And we were in pre production like five months later. 

Meg: Wow. 

Justin: So the, and the Blacklist of it all kind of happened right as we were about to sell the movie. So it was all, you know, the pieces were all coming into place and then it got put on the Blacklist too, which was like this incredibly meaningful thing to me. But yeah. 

Meg: Spectacular. So spectacular. And it's so, I can understand why that happened because you wrote such great parts for those actors that I can see why suddenly someone like Zendaya is like, yes, I'm in, you know.. I think that we as writers have to remember that these have to be great parts and you really did it.

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Meg: We'll see you soon. Happy holidays.

I also loved listening to your mind work there in terms of you kept asking yourself questions. You know, so many times as writers, we try to like piece things together, like what could happen in a story. But you, your brain immediately went down to those much deeper questions about character and what if, and what would make this work better than tennis?

Like I love listening to the questions that you're asking. I'm, I bet you were prepared then to go in and talk to a producer, because they usually ask those questions, right? In terms of–

Justin: They do, but you know, the weird thing about Amy and Rachel is that they were like, we didn't really have a traditional development process in the way that you sometimes can get stuck in, because they were already, from the get go, talking about this as a thing we were actually gonna make, you know.

And Amy's kind of one of those people that just says, like, we're going to give it to Zendaya and she's going to do it. And I'm like, okay. You know, like, does she have a say in this, you know. She's just like, yeah, no, we're going to send it to her. She's going to say yes. And then she did. So, you know.

Meg: Now did Zendaya and did your director have, they must've had notes. Did you do any kind of more traditional development with them? 

Justin: Of course, we, you end up, you know, anytime you write something on spec, and then you bring other people into that process, especially when it comes to the director, you want to create space for them within the thing that you've written, so that it can feel like a movie that only they can make, you know.

And with somebody like Luca, that's especially important because he's a, he's got such a distinctive filmography and such a distinctive cinematic vision that for this not to feel like it belongs there within that canon of his work would be a real disservice to both the movie and to him.

But because of the sort of crazy timeline of the, this movie coming together. All of that, what would have happened in the development process was happening in pre-production. So we were already talking about this like a thing we were going to do, you know. And then any of the work that I was doing leading up to that was really practical work about like, this is a thing we're going to go shoot in a couple months.

Meg: That's amazing. I want our listeners to know, it's rare. 

Justin: Yes, it’s really lucky. Yeah, no, it's very–

Meg: It's rare. 

Justin: Yeah.

Meg: And spectacular. And yet earned because of, I'm sure, the storytelling in the script. Is there anything you can talk about, and if not, that's totally fine, that Zendaya or the director really dug into that you as a writer had to kind of grapple with?

Justin: I can talk about lots of that. I mean, you know, the main sort of thing that Luca and I discovered in our early conversations about the movie when, you know, we were talking about this being a thing that he was going to do, was that he had this great insight that he phrased as: in every love triangle, all the corners should touch.

And that was one of the first things he said to me about the movie. And when I first heard that, I sort of thought, well, yeah, they do, you know, they're all these people, are also completely entwined in each other's lives and they, there's erotic energy flowing between all different points of this triangle. And it's not just one directional. 

And Luca said no, I don't mean metaphorically. I mean, literally, they should literally touch, because that was not in the first draft of the script. And so I was completely thrilled by that idea and really excited by the cinematic potential of finding that moment.

But then the question for me became, how do I build that into the story and the characters that's already there so that it doesn't feel like something I'm imposing on them, and instead feels like something that's organic, and it's coming out of who they are, and that feels like it was always there, and was always meant to be there.

And so we spent a lot of time talking about that. And then finally, I landed on putting this scene in the hotel room where it exists in the movie today. But to find that I had to make sure I gave it the proper runway, you know, and gave it the proper space so that it felt earned. And that, that took some time to figure out, but that was something that would not have come out of a process that didn't involve Luca pushing me towards that.

Meg: And you can see the director also giving that runway, right, in terms of how those boys are constantly bumping shoulders and like there, there's a physicality to them together and her and how he's staging it all, I can see. 

How much of that was in the script. Like when you say you had to, can you think of any scene that you thought, okay, to earn that hotel room scene, I need this moment or this scene. Because we talk about earn a lot on this show, but when I meet the more emerging writers who listen, they don't actually understand sometimes what we mean by earn. So it would help if you could give us a pre-scene to get to that hotel scene. 

Justin: Well, I mean, you can think of that whole section in the first act of the movie that starts with them, when we first sort of drop into them as kids at the Junior U.S. Open, leading up into what happens in the hotel room and then finally playing the match for her number. The whole, that whole section then becomes build up to this thing that's going to happen, you know.

And I think what was good about deciding to put that moment where all of the corners of the triangle touch there is that it happens at this time in their lives when they don't know the implications of what they're doing. You know, it's very innocent. And it's, they just all met each other or the boys just met her, you know? And so they don't understand how tangled they're all going to be. At this moment, it's still something that's happening out of naivete and just like the freedom of them being young. 

Meg: Which I loved because they really were enjoying it, you know.

Justin: Exactly. Exactly. 

Meg: As competitive as it was and the tension rising and the sexuality rising, it still felt playful and adventurous. I love that part of it. In developing their characters as individuals, do you have a particular process? I did watch, in getting ready for the show, because I'm such a big fan, I did watch a couple of interviews that you've done and I had not originally seen the Potion Cellar.

Justin: Oh man. 

Meg: But of course now, I'm obsessed with all of those. I just think they're so genius and if our listeners don't know what I'm talking about, you must Google The Potion Seller and see what Justin did in terms of taking the camera kind of that can make your face twisted and disfigured. And then you created characters and these memes and they're genius.

And you mentioned that you like having, when you do characters, you like thinking of a sentence that defines the character. This has kept me up all night because I think that's so smart, and yet I don't know if my brain could do it. 

So, in developing these characters or even the character for the new movie that is coming, do you do that for your film characters as well? Try to think of a sentence for each of them, or is it a different process? 

Justin: It's a little different because, you know, with those YouTube videos, I almost think of it like you know, I come from theater and the process to land on a character for that is not dissimilar from the process of like doing mask work or clown work or something, you know, or like improv.

That's kind of, and that comes from repetition and from language and embodiment in that way. With a film, how I knew Challengers was a film is that the idea presented itself to me visually. You know, and it presented itself to me as this geometry between three characters. So I kind of saw these people on a tennis court locked in this triangle.

And the question was, like, how did they get there? And why are they looking at each other the way that they're looking at each other? You know, and being sort of gradually let in on the mystery of that, or being led into the secret of that. Cause that made me think about movies like Brief Encounter or something, you know. Or kind of where you're dropped into a situation and then you gradually come to have knowledge about it.

So I think more than thinking about any of the characters in Challengers from a defining sentence or a defining bit of language, I think I thought of them from a defining position on the court. 

Meg: In your exploration when you first started writing, did you kind of continue that thought process of okay, we're going to learn, I'm going to learn, these characters are going to tell me who they are? How do you approach building the characters now that are on that triangle?

Justin: To an extent, yeah. I mean Tashi was probably the character that started to form first because I could tell that she was watching this match as if she were playing, but she wasn't. So why wasn't she playing? You know, why was she, why had she been relegated to sitting there and what would that mean for her, you know?

And what were the circumstances of her life that would make that painful you know, and would make that charged? And then who could these two guys be that would create the sort of maximum tension of her watching this? So that was sort of how that came about. When it came to figuring out, like, where exactly we were going to go in the past, I didn't know when I started writing exactly what scene I was going to jump to.

But I kind of knew the container of time, which was that we were going to meet these people when they were 18, and we were going to end up with them when they were in their 30s. And that's because that's the lifespan of a professional athlete, you know, you're kind of born when you're, it's like this mini artificial life that's really brutal in how short it is. 

Because you're born when you're of age legally and they can start making money off of you. And then you're dead when you're useless, which is when you're like 35, you know, or if you're lucky 40 so that's the sort of like ruthlessness of that and what that would do to three people who are at different points in this you know, in the world of this professional sport. That felt like a really interesting thing to explore to me. 

Meg: Absolutely. 

Jeff: As you talk about this, you know, 18 or like 15 year window that professional athletes have. 

Justin: Yeah.

Jeff: You brilliantly like take us through that whole chronology, that whole chapter, but you're jumping around. My co producer, Jonathan, I think counted 32 chronological cuts as you're jumping back and forth. How did that happen? Like, did you discover that early? 

Justin: Well, I kind of, the structure of that presented itself to me in the desire to write the movie in the first place, which was that, you know, it came from this place of, seeing this situation and thinking, how could I, what would make this more dramatic for me, you know.

So I always knew I wanted to drop the audience into a match in the present day and then go back in time and come back to the present day. And each time we would come back, we would know more, you know, about how we got here and the match would mean more to us until finally, by the end, hopefully the match means a lot.

But honestly, when I was cutting, when I was in the middle of writing and figuring out where I was going to come, cut back to, I often didn't know what had happened in the past until I got there, you know. And then I would go back and rewrite the future to make sense based on where I felt like we needed to go in the past.

And then sometimes it would line up perfectly and it wouldn't have to be adjusted. But it was, yeah, it was a weird way to write. 

Jeff: It feels like a metaphor. It feels like a chronological tennis match and the structure of the piece. And I do think there's something to be said that your structure should be a metaphor for the themes you're talking about. And I don't know if that was something you were thinking about. But that struck me while I was watching it, structurally. And I don't know if, you know, that makes any sense. 

Justin: Yeah, no, it makes a lot of sense to me. I mean, I think that was something that is not too dissimilar from the way I would write a play or a novel, you know, I would often have a frame that's in one timeline and then flashbacks that are in a different timeline.

Just because that, which is not a particularly strange thing in a book, for example. You know, I think it's maybe a little stranger in a film or it's less common in a film. But yes, I mean, I think the pleasure of tennis when it came to thinking about a movie is that tennis has a naturally very rigid structure, more rigid even than most other sports.

You know, there's something extremely repressed about tennis because it's such a game about, uh, restricted movement, you know, even when it comes to the way a point begins the ball has to land in this very small box, you know, or else it doesn't count, but then once the ball is in play, this wild, chaotic violence takes over and so that.

If you think about tennis as a container of energies and as a container of antagonistic energies, that's not so different from what a plot is or what a story is, you know. It's a container of the chaotic energy, often combative energy of life. So that felt like there was a natural relationship there. 

Meg: Yeah. That's really so insightful. I love, again I'll just say it probably a hundred times today, but I just love the way your brain works.

So within that chaotic energy being contained. You know, often I can say, or would feel very confident saying this is what this movie is about. And yours is so complex in such a beautiful, layered way. I mean, it seems to be about power but I don't know that is really quite right either. 

I don't know that we always have to define what things are about because I certainly felt it. I certainly experienced it. But because this movie is so much about the relationships, like you said, of that triangle and what emotionally, thematically is it about for you? What was interesting to you in terms of that triangle and the dynamic between people?

Justin: I mean, I similarly have trouble saying what anything's about, you know, because ideally it's never just about that. You know, ideally it's a, it becomes a sort of, like a place where you can think about a lot of things. But I do think that something I noticed as I was less, even as I was writing it, than as we were rehearsing it, I realized that you know, on the surface of it, it's a movie where people do a lot of things that could be cruel or manipulative to each other. That might be how you read it. 

But when you actually look at their intentions, it's often the case that they're trying to be kind. They're trying to do what they think is best for the other person. And that's not necessarily always in a nice way, you know. But all of these characters often when they're doing something that is like the most, will be the most heartbreaking for the person they're doing it to or will feel like the biggest betrayal, it's almost always because they think that's what that person needs, you know. And they might be wrong, but.

Meg: Do you think that is the same and again, spoiler alert, though you all should have seen this movie by now because it's great. Do you think it's the same for their final, shall we say, hookup? I don't know if that's the right word. Because it's not quite a hookup, is it? Their first, their last encounter in the car. 

Justin: With Tashi and Patrick, you said? 

Meg: I'm sorry, Tashi and, they're in the car, is it?

Justin: Yeah, with Josh O'Connor's character, with Patrick. 

Meg: Yes sorry. 

Justin: No, you're good. 

Meg: I'm just interested in her choice as the character there, in terms of intention. Because on one hand, I could read it as, you know, she does like to dominate and have control and power. And he's a character who will absolutely not let her do that often. But she's also got this excuse of, will you throw the match? Will you throw the match? I'm trying to protect my husband. 

So is it both of those things? Do we not need to define those things? Is it a third thing? I'm not, I just wanted to talk to you about that moment. 

Justin: Well, hopefully it's the tension of all of those things. You know, I think, yeah, there's always what the character says they want, what they think they want, and what they really want, you know.

And we have different access to what, we have, we can have, we can be confident about what those things are at different levels at different points in a movie, you know. And I think that moment is one of those where on one level, Patrick might read it as you're trying to ask me to blow your life up for you, you know. 

But on another level, she's really trying to hold her life together because in her mind if he doesn't, if he loses tomorrow, she doesn't know how she can stay with him and she doesn't know how he's going to be able to carry on in his life, you know, and in their marriage. And so she's doing the worst thing she could do to him, but also she's trying to be incredibly kind to him. And what you think her real intentions are, that's up for, you know, whether she even knows what her real intentions are that's up for people to think about.

But yeah, those are, that's the kind of tension within a character that's interesting to me. 

Meg: Right, right. And did you write in the script things like they're in a windstorm, when, for that sequence? Or is that something the director brought in? Just that the specificity of that felt very thematic and intentional, but didn't know who.

Justin: That was, the windstorm was something that we sort of landed on in pre-production. I mean, you have to write that into the script so that the different department heads who are going to be responsible. 

Meg: No, of course. But I didn't know if it was something the director brought to you and said, I want this to be, you know, a windstorm or was it something that you as the writer were using metaphorically?

Justin: No, it was something that Luca had an intuition about. And then the question for me with that became, how do we thread the windstorm into the script so that when it's happening, it doesn't feel like it came out of nowhere, you know. Because I don't even know if wind works like that in New Rochelle, you know, but we're not totally concerned with that.

But yeah, it was a sort of an inkling he had that the movie was reaching a place of of tension that needed a release in the form of a windstorm.

Meg: When you were talking about that, her character is having multiple things going on and at some point, the audience can decide for themselves.

But Zendaya certainly as an actress, but also as a producer, I would assume that as an actress, she's deciding for herself what that is. Or do you feel like it was still left open in rehearsals and they're discovering it? At what point did it have to have any kind of solidity for her?

Justin: I mean, you'd have to ask her what like was going on in her mind when it came to approaching that. But I know that one of the real benefits of this movie is that we had like three weeks of rehearsal where we got to work through the whole script as if we were rehearsing a play, which was something Luca had never really done before.

But for me coming from theater, that was a great way to drop into making a movie because it kind of didn't matter who everybody was or the scale of the thing we were doing. We were just people in a little rehearsal room in Boston. And we got to just do table work. And so questions like that would come up all the time and we would talk through often in ways where we had conflicting opinions about it. So that was a very kind of special bedrock for us to have as we went into production. 

Meg: I think that's so spectacular that you guys had that, especially with a star of her level because they're so busy. 

Justin: Yeah. 

Meg: But it helps that she's the producer, right? Because she can say, we need this space. Did she help you get that time?

Justin: She helped with everything like that, you know. I mean, this was really, she was a very active member of the production team in that way and was at the production office all the time and, you know, in production meetings and yeah. And had very specific ideas, not just about stuff like that.

But even I remember, you know, a really pivotal conversation we had about costumes where she had this insight about Tashi that you know, there's a way that we're used to seeing the wives and girlfriends of professional athletes dress, which is often very, like, visibly fashion forward. You know, like very flashy and very trendy. 

And she had this insight, which was that, well, Tashi is somebody who didn't come from wealth at all and grew up studying these people. And so her taste would be impeccable. You know, she would not she would not dress like the wives and girlfriends of a famous footballer or something. You know, she would dress like somebody who always belonged there because she'd been waiting to be in a position to have that kind of life, you know. And that was like, of course. 

But so stuff like that was always coming from her, which was brilliant. It was a real benefit. 

Meg: I love that. She sounds as smart as I hope she is.

Jeff: I have a question, Justin. At the beginning of our conversation, you were talking about how you were a little afraid to step into this pool of tennis because you didn't want something you love to get tied up in the muck of what can feel like work as a writer. 

Jeff: But can you talk about the conflict of something you love becoming your work?

Justin: Yeah. I mean, in the case of Challengers, I think it did end up morphing the way that I watch tennis, you know. Because once you turn it into work and then you're, you go through this process and you're done with it, I can't watch it from the sort of pure place that I used to, you know. I still keep up with the scores and I still watch all the grand slams and, you know, I live in New York and I try to go to the U.S. Open and like, I'm still a tennis fan. But I can't really be an obsessive in the way that I was because now I see it as something I was doing as research to make this world feel rich, you know. 

But there was a time in my life when like, I would be on the ATP website and I would just look at, like, how much money the 171st ranked player made that year. And that was interesting to me just as a fan, you know. Like, it was, beyond even, like, thinking that was me researching Patrick's character. That was just, like, I just wanted to know, like, what, how much money that guy made, whether he's doing all right, you know, what he needed to do to make ends meet. 

Because that's part of the experience of being a sports fan, is that you sort of enjoy sports on this meta level, you know. Every true sports fan is always also talking about the business of sports and the politics of sports you know. So, yeah, that part of it is no longer as alluring to me but you know, that's the price you pay.

Meg: Yeah and you got an amazing movie out of it. So we're all lucky. We're all lucky that you ruined it for yourself. 

Justin: Yeah. 

Meg: So I loved how you talked at the beginning about the first thing that came to you was a cinematic image of these three people in the court. Did you also, or when did the idea of the end, and again, spoiler for our listeners, that cliffhanger end of the last shot and the last point. 

Can we talk about that a little bit and how, when did that come and why was it important to you that it not be answered and it's such a great choice. 

Justin: Well I knew, I didn't know the exact ending as I was writing, but I knew really early on in the process that Patrick was going to signal to Art using his serve. You know, that Art’s tick and Patrick's weird serve and then doing Art’s serve was going to be this major turning point in the movie. And I kind of had that in the back of my head, like, as I was just beginning to write the first act of the movie. So I knew that was something I was going to plant so that it could pay off later.

And then once I got to the ending, I didn't know that I wasn't going to resolve the match in terms of the score. But when I got there, I realized that I no longer cared about the score, and that hopefully the audience doesn't either, because the match itself doesn't matter anymore. These guys are really playing tennis again, you know, and in a way she is too. And all of their cards are out on the table. They're not hiding anything from each other anymore. 

And so for me, at that point, the movie has reached its peak and it's over. And so it felt almost like if I were to declare a winner at that point, it would not just be beside the point, but it would obscure the point.

So from the moment I realized that was the ending, I became pretty militant that was going to be the ending, you know. And then, yeah, that I was going to protect that ambiguity about the official score of the challenger match. 

Meg: I thought it was all, in terms of us talking about earning it, it was so well earned too. In terms of Tashi's character at the beginning talking about how she feels about tennis and when she's playing tennis and that kind of, yeah, feeling, which was much more articulate than in the movie. But that it was planted so early so that you could have it at the end and bring us all into that moment so clearly. I thought it was really genius. 

Justin: Oh, good, that means a lot. Thank you so much. 

Meg: We like to talk to our writers cause we get these questions all the time from our listeners about your writing habits. How and when do you write? What your process is? Do you, now right now you're in press, so of course you can't, but let's say we are done with the press, the Academy Awards are over, whatever's going to happen and come here, knock on wood, I don't want to jinx you. 

What is your normal writing process? And it sounds like you write plays, novels, and screenplays, so that's even more unique. How do you approach it all? 

Justin: Well, the approach isn't so different between a play or a novel or you know, it's a formal difference, obviously. But the approach to character to story is pretty similar. And I think I had a lot of time figuring out who I was as a writer before I ever started writing screenplays. 

But the actual like, day to day level, it really depends on what's going on. You know, I think part of what I've had to, just out of necessity, get good at in the past couple of years is writing in hotel rooms, you know, or writing in cars or on airplanes.

You know, I wrote Queer for the most part in a hotel room in Boston while we were shooting Challengers. And that's not my ideal writing. If I, if you could, if I could choose like the perfect writing conditions, it would not be the Omni Hotel in Seaport, you know. That would not be where I would want to be.

Meg: That's not the dream. 

Justin: That's not the dream, or, you know, that's not what I would love to be doing. But yeah you kind of, the writing becomes its own space and its own home, you know, where, wherever you are. But most of the time I'm just writing at home, you know, and I kind of, it's pretty, it's pretty boring. Yeah. 

Meg: Do you outline? Do you, do, I like sometimes I just free write scenes to learn who the characters are and let them tell me. Do you have any process or does it really depend on what you're writing? 

Justin: It's project to project. I mean, with Challengers, I had thought about the movie for a long time before I started writing. And so, I had a lot of different bits of writing that wasn't organized into something like an outline, but was in different places on, you know, on my computer, on post it notes, or, you know, in notebooks. And I kind of had all of that ready. 

But then at a certain point, you just have to start getting into it and then that kind of takes over, you know. And I'm doing research as I'm going and, you know. You kind of do research as things come up, you realize you don't know what you don't know. 

So yeah, there's no, I haven't like landed on a system, so to speak, you know.

Meg: And there, and is there, I bet you're still asking your questions though, right? Even as you're writing, I'm guessing like, why, oh, wait a minute. Why would she do that? Or are you still, right?

Justin: Totally. Yeah, I mean, the fun part of writing is when the character starts surprising you, you know.  When it feels like you're not approaching them from a top down place where you're giving them instructions, but they're sort of starting, you notice that they want to move somewhere and then you follow them. And that's when writing feels like really enjoyable. 

Meg: It's the best part, isn't it? 

Justin: It's the best, but it's bleeding and to get there is a lot of work.

Meg: It's a lot of work. This has been amazing. I know you've got a hard out. I'm sure you're so busy. So we're going to quickly jump to the end here. We could talk to you forever.

Justin: I feel the same way. This was really fun. 

Meg: So we're just going to, we're going to be disciplined. We're going to be disciplined. And we always ask our guests the same three questions. So we want to make sure we get to this, which is, to start, what brings you the most joy about writing? 

Justin: My favorite part is when you feel something start to click into place, you know, in your mind. When the thing sort of starts to make sense to you and you can see the whole movie, you know, when you feel like all of a sudden this is no longer just a thing you're working on, but it's already a movie, you know. That's a really incredible feeling. And that has to do with kind of what I was talking about when characters start to surprise you, you know? 

Meg: Yeah, absolutely. 

Jeff: So the flip side to that is what pisses you off about writing? 

Justin: It's a great question. There's so many things to choose from. Well, I think you know, there's this thing I sort of started to think about, which is that, like, it never gets easier. You know, like you keep thinking that like, the next script is going to be easier than the last one, because you've done this a couple of times and then it's not. And in some ways, it's harder because now you know, too much, you know.

But I think that what does get easier is that you know that you've felt this way before and you finished it anyway, you know. And if it went well, you have some proof that like, it worked out. And that can give you courage, that sort of knowledge, you know, that proof. 

But what I realized when I was writing Challengers, which was my first, you know, screenplay that I finished, was that even if you don't have the proof, at some point you needed to find the courage when you had no proof, you know, 

Meg: or even when you have the opposite proof.

Justin: Yeah. Or when you have the opposite proof.

Meg: You still have to, those characters need you.

Justin: So that courage is always available to you, you know, no matter where you are in your, on this particular project or where you are in your career, that courage is always something that you can access. Because anybody who's ever finished a script found that courage somehow, you know, so it must be available to you. 

Meg: So beautiful. Thank you. Last question we're going to be asked by our co-producer, Jonathan. 

Jonathan: If you could have a coffee with your younger self, what would you, what advice would you give them?

Justin: Probably a version of what I just said about courage. I would probably say that. But no, I would say that like, you don't know what's, you don't know what's going to, you don't know what's going to work out, you know. And you don't know, even when you think that this is the thing that's working out, you may be a few projects away from it, you know.

And it's very hard to tell. It's very hard to think of your life on a schedule like that. Or like you can compare it to some like rubric that is standardized. But there's no sort of standard path through living this way. Because when you choose to live this way you're rejecting a standard path. You know, that's the whole point of it.

There are plenty of jobs you can get where you know exactly how many years of school you need to do and exactly how many years of training. And then you can mark, like a clock, exactly where you should be in that life. And the whole point of choosing to do this is that you're choosing to not live like that, you know.

But yet a lot of the times, especially when you're young, you try to still impose a sort of like imagined order onto it. And that's just like complete bullshit. So why do that to yourself? 

Jonathan: I'm 35. So apparently in the tennis world, I'm dead. 

Justin: I can say definitively, it's too late for you to play tennis professionally.

Jonathan: Dang.

Justin: I'm sorry. But beyond that, I can't tell you anything about your life or career. 

Meg: Justin, thank you so much for being with us. It's been a really deep and inspirational pleasure for us to get to walk around how you see things and how you process. It's really, it's been amazing. Thank you so much. 

Justin: Thank you so much. This was really fun. 

Meg: Thanks so much for tuning into The Screenwriting Life. Check out our Facebook page for more support and an incredibly wonderful community. And remember you are not alone and keep writing.