Justin Kuritzkes

EO

What was it like growing up in the land of the rich and famous?

JK 

I don’t really come from an industry family. My dad’s a doctor and my mom’s a lawyer, but they sent me to this prep school, Harvard-Westlake, where a lot of my classmates were the children of studio heads and actors. My dad’s a gastroenterologist and he has a practice in Burbank. I experienced his connection to the industry, which is that some of his patients were grips who had the Teamster Health insurance, who would go and work at Disney and then go to see him for their colonoscopies. It wasn’t just the above the line world of Hollywood that I was becoming aware of in my prep school life. You could see the whole very complex economy of the business, which I think everybody who lives in LA is aware of to some extent because it’s so pervasive. It’s so omnipresent.

For most people, I think, movies seem to come from places that’s sort of magical or hidden. You don’t really know where the movie factory is and where these images that dictate culture come from. But for me, I met these people and knew that they shopped at Gelson’s. At the same time, growing up in LA made me even more enamored with, not Hollywood, but movies.

EO

That seemed especially true in the mid to late aughts.

JK

Yeah, when original movies were making $500 million. When I was in high school, there was a year, around  2007, where Children of Men, No Country for Old Men, and There Will Be Blood were all in theaters within the same span of time. That was the heyday of that kind of that version of Hollywood. The Rudins and the Weinsteins of the world were orchestrating the action of it all. Filmmaking felt massive to me.

EO 

Were any of your friends parents’ A-list actors?

JK

Yes, I knew those kids. They were around and I was friendly with some of them, but it wasn’t always necessarily the most famous, above the line people who were most influential. I have a friend whose father is a very frequently working character actor. He has been in everything, as in five or 10 minute scenes, and so seeing that life was really interesting to me too.

EO

This reminds me of the conversation I had with Bret Easton Ellis, who also wrote about your school, though it was only known as the Harvard school at the time, and all boys. He told me that Less Than Zero was also about this specific world, and that it details his time at the Buckley School and the culture of the city, his friends, and the queer life he encountered in the 1980s. It was only about that pocket of time, place, and how he met himself through it, before being absorbed by the Bennington of it all. 

JK

Well, that was very much part of my experience, too. I was in a play with Chet Hanks. Going and being at the urinal with Tom in between.

EO

I’m curious how you feel the dots connect for your career. You made plays at Harvard-Westlake and then knew that you wanted to be a playwright, but what about the in-between parts?

JK

I think growing up in LA definitely gave birth to a really deep love of movies. That career felt tangible. It’s not just the industry that felt tangible, but moreover filmmaking—I had friends who knew what the Criterion Collection was as children. Kids who had a credit card would order DVDs and I would get to watch them. At the same time, part of the reason I became a playwright and decided I was going to eventually move to New York and do that for a decade is that I really didn’t want to be a part of Hollywood. In some ways it was a reaction to this feeling that I didn’t want to go right ahead into the film industry and try to work in the mail room somewhere. I wanted people to get to know me and my work as an artist. I wanted to go to New York and be a playwright then come back and try to make it in Hollywood, if ever, though I didn’t intentionally plan on coming back to movies; there was a version of me that was entirely happy just being a playwright for the rest of my life.

EO

What made you feel that way?

JK 

Because I fell in love with theater in high school. We had this one-act play festival where students would write plays and then others would direct them and put them on. We were left to our own devices and had ownership over these things we were making. At the time, I was acting in musicals and was also in the choir.

EO

Was that a part of the general school culture or did it make for a niche existence?

JK

It wasn’t niche, but I never had that experience of high school where there were the cool jocks and the powerless nerds types. Being a theater person was not a shameful thing. At Harvard-Westlake you could be into theater and still be cool. I wrote my first play for the festival and immediately fell deeply in love with playwriting because of the immediacy of it. There was something really intoxicating about how little you needed to suspend disbelief in theater. Also, coming from the world of Los Angeles, I was exposed to an industry that corralled all of these resources into a production to create a document that lasts forever and is frozen in time. There was something about theater coming together quickly, inexpensively, and existing only for one night and then disappearing entirely was incredibly alluring. That the only people who would ever experience a play were the people who were in that room at that given time. There was something really beautiful and intoxicating about that for me.

EO

What got you to Brown?

JK

I went to Brown because of a mixture of things. There’s a student-run theater called Production Workshop. I ended up being on the board there. It’s basically just this little shitty building off the beaten path that students have complete autonomy over. They get a really small budget that they have to fight for every year with the administration. If you’re on the board, you get a key to the building and you oversee everything about it from dealing with the staff, to maintenance, to making sure the lights are not going to blow up, to hiring an electrician to fix the light grid. All of those things fall under your purview. The student board picked which productions were going to happen every year. We would get submissions and then decide who we were going to give a production to. Students would act in the plays and direct them. That was incredible to me. There wasn’t really something like that anywhere else. Most of the theater people in New York who moved through Brown had some deep connection to it. There’s Richard Foreman, who was a big sort of experimental theater artist. Laura Linney also did a lot of work at Production Workshop. That was interesting to me.

EO

What about YouTube?

JK

YouTube came about in my senior year at Brown. I was doing a lot of theater, but also improv comedy. Sometimes at the Workshop. I was in a troupe. It was more in the UCB school of improv vein. We would do a form called the Harold, which is long-form improv. It was started by Del Close, in the Second City.

EO 

Did you go to UCB in LA?

JK

Yes, as a kid. This would have been when I was 16 or 17 years old. It was before UCB became an institution.

EO

What got you there?

JK

I had friends who knew that was happening, who knew about this form of comedy and experimental theater—I don’t know if it’s still there—but it was on Franklin, off the 101 in Hollywood. Back then at least, it felt you kind of had to be in the know.

EO

I wanted to ask you about Facebook because that kind of was permeating at the time too. 

JK

That was starting to be the way everyone interacted with each other around the time I was in college. I don’t know how much that influenced the YouTube stuff. I think the YouTube moment came out of doing improv and then realizing that you could create characters out of nothing. You didn’t have to plan a character. You could just press record and start speaking as one. Everybody who had a Mac laptop, especially around 2008 or 2010 or whatever, would play around with the Photo Booth app. For me, that app seemed to encourage this facial distortion and to talk as a character in a voice, which is not something I would normally feel called to do.

EO

It’s also funny because the technical mechanism of Photo Booth does itself incite this performative aspect with the 1, 2, 3, 4 countdown into recording. There’s something so psychological about it as a framework, especially coming from being around and embedded in the weeds of the entertainment industry.

JK

You’re live! Yes, when you press record on that thing it feels like the red light is going on. The difference is, and what was exciting about it to me is that on YouTube and on Photo Booth, I was the director, the cinematographer, the performer, the studio, and the network. That especially became something that I really treasured about those YouTube videos. When I moved to New York and I was starting to work as a playwright, I was spending months or sometimes years working on these things that if I was lucky, they would get produced and a couple hundred people would see them.

EO

It’s Saturday Night. How were you spending your college summers?

JK 

I was putting on plays wherever I could. The summer between my junior and senior year I did a show at the New York Fringe Festival, which, I don’t know if you’ve ever been to that, but it’s fucking mess. I was doing stuff like that. I taught playwriting to high school students. My first ever job was interning at a theater in New York sometime between freshman and sophomore year.

EO

Where did that lead you? You did that Edward F. Albee Foundation residency…

JK

I had graduated. I made the first run of the YouTube videos in college. I was really just doing that because putting videos up on YouTube was the easiest way to share them with my friends. And there was, in the back of my mind, some idea that maybe they would take off and people would see them. The interesting thing was that nobody really started watching those until a year after I started making them. It was when a video that I had made in college called Potion Seller got posted a year later on some forum that the videos went viral.

EO

Did you understand the framework of YouTube and its potential?

JK

I did and I didn’t. I made a decision really early on, once those started blowing up, that I was not going to become a content creator. Not because I had anything against content creators, but because I knew the relationship I had to those videos. What I really appreciated about them was that I didn’t want anything from them—they weren’t work for me. I had so much going on in my life around my art that was work, hard work. I wanted to only make those videos exactly when I wanted to make them. I wanted to only upload the ones I actually liked. I didn’t want there to be a schedule or a deadline or anything. I didn’t want to have to ask the question, “How do I make this thing bigger?” I knew that would instantly make them meaningless to me.

I felt extremely protective of the purity of those things because they were so stupid. I needed that outlet. It really freed me by putting everything into perspective. At that time, it was clear that the plays I had been working on with such intensity—hoping that maybe a few hundred people would see them—were never going to be the thing that defined how most people knew me. Instead, it was the videos I uploaded in five minutes that reached millions. I really ended up liking that, namely: the way I thought of myself as a playwright but that most people who had ever heard my name thought I was the potion seller. That was really clarifying for me.

EO 

Did you feel justified being a playwright?

JK

What’s really particular about theater is that, unlike film, if you want to be in theater, the best you can do is read a play. Nowadays, if you want to be a filmmaker or an author, you can find a link to any movie that’s ever been made or a copy of every book that has ever been written. My whole understanding of and genesis as an artist in theater was reading plays from all of history and then putting them on with the people I knew.

EO

What happened after college?

JK

I moved to New York and realized the world of theater I’d been reading about no longer existed. New York was its own very specific ecosystem. In college, I wrote this play, The Sensuality Party. Through that play, I got an agent. Before I even officially moved—coming straight from that residency—I met with him, signed, and thought I was ready to take Off-Broadway by storm. I quickly realized that’s not quite how it works. It’s a subscriber model with a limited number of slots. Theaters aren’t trying to have a hit—they’re trying to keep their subscribers happy.

Basically, Broadway is for-profit, mostly for out-of-towners. The tickets are hundreds of dollars, so people want a sure bet. Off-Broadway, on the other hand, is mostly nonprofit. It’s run by boards, with subscribers they reach out to for renewals and donations. “Here are the plays you loved this year—renew your subscription and we’ll do more of that next year.” A lot of those subscribers genuinely care about experimental work, and many people working at those theaters are coming from a pure place. They love theater, they want to push it forward. But it creates a kind of stasis—things move very, very slowly. It’s almost the opposite of the stereotype of the film industry, where it’s all about the money.

EO

How many false starts have you had?

JK

A lot. But, at the same time, I think that’s what’s difficult about being in theater, especially in the Off-Broadway theater world. It’s very hard to quantify success because it doesn’t look like something you could explain to anybody who’s not in that world. I joke with my playwright friends, this close knit group who I met at this thing called Playgroup, which is a writer in residence at this theater called Ars Nova in New York. It’s a big deal to be selected for Playgroup, and yet, you get nothing.

EO

You’re shouting it. “It’s a big deal!”

JK

Well, because you have to. When you try to explain it to your family or to your friends who are not in theater, they’re like, “So what is it?” And you kind of are explaining to them,“Yeah, we meet every week and they give us free pizza and beer.” They’d ask, “Do they give you any money?” I’d answer, “No.” They’d ask, “Do they produce your play?” I’d say no, “No. But it’s a massive deal. Everybody wants to be in this thing.” How I would describe my early years in New York as a playwright is that I was always having just enough success to keep me in it. But when I say success, I certainly don’t mean that I was able to support myself as a playwright or live as a playwright. The whole time I was writing plays, really up until I sold my novel, I had a day job.

EO

It was enough to keep the spark.

JK

It was enough to keep me feeling I wasn’t crazy. Not even to keep the spark—the spark is gone. I think the people who succeed are the people who don’t quit, the people who stick around. I’ve heard that before many times, but what that threshold is—of enough success to keep you around—is different for different people. I think a perfect example of what life is as an Off-Broadway playwright is that I wrote The Sensuality Party at 22. I got an agent through it, and by the time it happened in New York at the New Group, I was 25. I knew that this was going to be my first play Off-Broadway. By the time it happened, I was 25 and got paid $2,500 for a four-week run. I needed that money so badly that when they were late paying it, I had my agent chase them down and send a messenger to deliver it to me so I could pay my rent. That $2,500—it was massive. Massive. And it changed nothing for me. It didn’t change anything about my life, having this production.

EO 

What was happening in those more quiet moments?

JK

The beautiful thing about theater is that, because there’s so little reward and capital for anybody, the community is very small. Your heroes, in turn, are very within reach. A really clear example of that is the residency you’re referencing. It’s called the Edward F. Albee Foundation. While it’s technically a foundation, it’s really just Albee’s barn house in Montauk that he retrofitted because he didn’t want to pay taxes on all the money he made from Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?. His accountant told him, “Well, if you set up a foundation, you won’t have to pay all these taxes.” So he set one up, but really, he mostly just invited his friends up to write for the month. By the time I did it, it was formalized and you had to apply. I got to know him very briefly the year before he died. He was a massive inspiration for me.

EO 

How did that place rank? Was it really accessible or was it similar to Playgroup?

JK

It was similar in that it was something you had to be selected for. It drove home the point that, especially in theater where there are so few material rewards, community is central. Being part of this group of people who’ve all decided, for better or worse, to do this with their lives. I know we’re not quite there yet, but to tie it to Challengers, it was something that became incredibly useful to me as I started thinking about the Challengers tour.

EO

How many people were in the residency?

JK

Five at a time. There were three writers and two visual artists for one month.

EO

Tell me about the experience.

JK

What was really precious about it to me is that I was right out of college before my life as a professional artist had really begun. I’ve been doing work since I was in high school and treating it like it was real. And in some cases getting paid for it and having a place put it on. Having been selected for that, even though you don’t get anything from it other than just the invitation to go spend a month at this place, felt like this tremendous vote of confidence by somebody who meant a lot to me. Again, it’s that thing we’re talking about. It was just enough so you don’t quit.

EO

To keep the lights on.

JK

Yeah. To keep the spiritual lights on.

EO

You wrote that novel, Famous People. What was that about?

JK

I wrote that novel. At that point, I’d been working in New York for seven years as a playwright, and I started writing this thing that I thought was a monologue, because a lot of my plays are just monologues. I started writing it in the voice of this kid who was a pop star. I got 60 pages into it and realized that nothing was really happening plot-wise, but I wasn’t bored, and I liked the kid. So I said, “Well, if this is a play and we’re 60 pages in and nothing has happened yet, that means this play is going to be five hours long. But maybe this is a book.” So I just kept going and accepted that I was writing a book.

EO

How was it different?

JK

In the sense that with a play, like a movie, you’re dealing with people’s time in a different way. You’re asking people to sit and take something in, in one sitting. Because of that, you’re very conscious of the audience’s impatience—I think a good book is conscious of that too. It’s aware of the reader’s impatience. But you do have a little more room to take responsibility for their time in a different way. I felt a little freer in the book to go off and explore little corners of this guy’s psyche that I maybe wouldn’t have time for in a play or a movie. Any dramatic or narrative story is, on some basic level, a machine for making the audience want to know what happens next.

EO

What did it feel like writing the book?

JK 

It felt great. Especially coming from theater, because I knew that what’s really maddening and amazing about writing a book is that you’re completely alone—and when you’re done, that’s it. You just go, “Here’s the work of art.” Whereas when you finish a play, which is its own intense artistic process that you go through alone, you’re done and you still have nothing, because you have to go get somebody to put it on. And not just one person—a lot of people. A movie is even harder, because you have to get hundreds of people to do it, and they have to spend millions of dollars on it. There was something really joyful about writing a book and going, “When I’m done, that’s it.” And the only questions to ask are like, “What’s the cover going to look like?” It’s different from the feeling of writing a screenplay. That’s both a literary document and a blueprint for architectural plans. It’s something you’re inviting hundreds of people to come make. That part of writing just isn’t present in a novel at all.

EO

After that foray, you started writing the script about tennis. Do you feel like you had to go through the experience of writing the book about a pop star to get to a place where you could actually spend time with the mechanics of tennis?

JK

To the extent that having the experience of doing that made it very clear that when I got the idea for Challengers, it wasn’t a book or a play. Maybe if I had gotten that idea when I was 22, I would have thought, “How can I make this a play?”

EO 

What got you to the game of tennis in the first place?

JK

I was writing what I thought was going to be my second book. I was just in the thick of it, and the US Open happened to be on. I have some family connection to the US Open, and tennis has always been a big thing in my family. My mom’s side has been obsessed with it—they all grew up going to the Open in Queens. Both my mom and dad are from Queens.

EO

So you always had a relationship to New York?

JK

Yeah. My grandmother is here and so is my aunt, though they’re not in the city anymore. They’re now in Westchester. But when I was growing up, my grandmother still lived in Manhattan, and I would come visit her. I fell in love with the city during those trips. Then, during the 2018 US Open Final, that infamous moment between Serena Williams and Naomi Osaka happened. It was one of the most controversial matches in tennis history—there were arguments with the chair umpire, the crowd turned hostile, and Osaka won her first Grand Slam under these really strange and emotional circumstances. Watching it sparked something for me. I became obsessed with tennis and started thinking about the sport in a completely different way.

EO 

Why did you know that the idea was a movie?

JK

Movies are all about perspective. It’s all about who’s looking at who and where the audience is being asked to look at and how. It’s all about subjectivity and shifting subjectivity. Something I realized very early on about a love triangle movie is that whenever you’re watching a scene between two characters, you’re always watching it as the third character.

EO

It sounds like the camera is the third person.

JK

That’s a really good point. In that way, there’s no such thing as privacy in a movie. Any love scene in a movie is a love triangle because we are watching it.

EO

How do you interject that kind of subjectivity into writing? And, how much does it inform the writing process?

JK

A lot, because immediately when you get that idea, you start thinking, “What are the three points of this triangle?” The character that really sort of crystallized for me was Tashi. I was imagining who was watching in place of the audience. It was immediately clear to me that the most interesting question to ask was: “Who is the person watching and why isn’t she playing? Why doesn’t she have a racket in her hand? And why is she in the stands?” Something got unlocked for me when I was watching the Serena and Naomi Osaka match at the US Open. I started becoming this massive tennis fan and started just obsessively watching every tennis match I could. Eventually, I was watching Wimbledon between Federer and Djokovic.

EO

Challengers felt like a David Foster Wallace movie.

JK

I’m so touched by that. That was very much in the depths of my tennis obsession. I had read Infinite Jest when I was younger, but that was less influential to me than all the essays about tennis.

EO

The many collections of his literary essays is so beyond.

JK

They’re the best, right? If you’re a tennis fan and a literature fan, it’s like mainlining pleasure. It’s drugs. There’s one essay, “String Theory,” which is collected in the book A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, where the writer follows a guy named Michael Joyce, who at the time was ranked 79th in the world. He goes in a little cocky, thinking he’ll watch Joyce practice and maybe feel like he could hold his own. But sitting courtside, he realizes—no, this guy is a god. And he’s 79th in the world. Nobody knows him, nobody cares, but his game is on another level.

That hit me personally as a playwright, because that’s what it’s like in New York theater. You know these actors—gods to you and your peers—but they’re broke. Unknown. It’s heartbreaking. What that essay unlocked for me was the parallel between tennis players and artists. Tennis, like theater, is deeply unequal: it’s not a team sport, there’s no safety net. If you have a coach or a physio, you’re paying for them out of pocket. Federer has a team. The guy ranked 79th has nobody. But once the match starts, there’s total equality—the only thing that matters is what’s happening between the rackets.

EO

Exactly. It’s all the structure behind the performance. That’s the invisible labor—the time, the resources, the preparation—that you don’t see but that shapes the context of everything.

JK

That’s what Tashi’s going through, right?

EO

Everyone’s caught up on nepotism of it all, but it’s about preparation: having the resources, confidence, and reference points. When you confidently have these constellation points, it changes how you interact with the art and approach performance.

JK

It was important to me that she be more crystal clear about that than anybody in the movie, because she doesn’t come from the same kind of privilege that these two boys come from. She knows better than anyone that tennis, like life, is completely unfair. But at the same time, she knows better than they do that once you’re on the court, once the game starts, your destiny is entirely in your hands. No one can hold the racket for you and play the match. For her, as someone who’s been injured and therefore sidelined, that’s maddening—that who you are and the circumstances of your life inform everything about what got you onto the court. They determine whether you even had the chance to be there in the first place.

There’s actually this amazing book called Levels of the Game by John McPhee. It’s kind of a big, classic piece of sports journalism. It’s structured very similarly to Challengers in that it’s about a match at the US Open between Arthur Ashe and Clark Graebner. It tracks the journeys they each took through entirely different Americas that led to this moment where they’re on the same court playing a high-stakes match. It was incredible to me that these guys could not be more different, and yet when they’re on the court together, they’re in a dance that’s so intimate and exists only between the two of them.

EO

How early did David Foster Wallace come into play for you?

JK

As my obsession with tennis grew, I started revisiting Wallace and reading those essays, mostly just as a tennis fan because they were so pleasurable to read. But they began to seep into the way I was thinking about tennis as a metaphor, and about the ecosystem of the sport. He has that essay, “Democracy and Commerce at the U.S. Open,” that’s about everything other than the match. Seeing tennis as an economy, or as an ecosystem, was really interesting to me and definitely influenced the way I was thinking about Phil’s Tire Town.

EO

Oranges by John McPhee is similar to Foster Wallace, in that it’s not about oranges either.

JK 

Certainly. The thing that John McPhee and David Foster Wallace have in common is that they understand tennis is about structures and systems. That was part of what attracted me to the sport, especially as the setting for an erotic drama, let’s call it. Or a drama about desire. Tennis is a sport where you’re prescribed into these tiny boxes, where there’s a rigidity and a formalism and a codified language around movement. It’s a sort of container. A very tight container for the violence of desire: the desire to win, but also the desire to achieve greatness. To transcend, and to transcend crucially with and against another person.

You can’t transcend alone. When somebody has an amazing basketball game, that can kind of be done alone. The story of your dominance in that game is not so much about what you were doing with the other team or with the other players. But in tennis, the only way you reach that transcendence is if the other person matches your level, if the other person sort of agrees to enter into this dance with you. Yet that violence, or that energy, is all contained within this very tight, formalistic, rigid, almost Victorian structure.

Tennis is very much a duel, which is a similar thing in that it’s two guys who want to fucking kill each other. But if you were a nobleman in the 1700s or whatever, you would have your second there, walk ten paces, turn around, and shoot when they say shoot. There’s something I find really funny and exciting about that contradiction between the intensity of the desire and the rigidity of the container.

EO

Your writing in what became Challengers and Queer is so play-like. These snapshot moments. Everything is live and in motion, no in-between.

JK

I started to see athletes as performers. I started to see a tennis match as a play, as a kind of performance. I got excited by the idea that there’s an audience within the film watching the match, but we have more information about what’s really happening than they do. There’s ostensibly a battle taking place for the public. But what we’re gradually let in on is the real battle, and that’s a battle only these three people—and us—understand. The whole journey of watching the film becomes a journey of being let in on a secret.

EO

And that these things need to remain a secret. That’s what drives them and us.

JK

That’s why, for me, the movie is over the moment the three characters are no longer hiding anything from each other. The three characters are all speaking very directly. All of their cards are finally on the table. Because of that, now we can really play. Now, for the first time in the whole movie, we really are playing. That was the whole point of writing the movie for me.

EO

Looking back on it with more distance, how do you feel about it now?

JK

With a tremendous sense of gratitude. I haven’t watched it since it came out. Even if it shows up on social media I scroll right by it because I don’t want to see it. I love the movie, and I got to a place where I really loved watching it—which is not always the case with my experience of watching my work—but by the time you’re done making something, it doesn’t do anything for you, because all you see are the stitches and the threads of how it was put together. It’s also my first script, so hopefully it’s also my worst. That’s what you always hope—that everything gets better, and that ten or twenty years from now, I’ll have a fondness for it, but that it also makes me cringe a little bit.

EO

The process of making Challengers is really specific—casting Zendaya, having her also produce it, meeting Luca at that moment in his career, bringing in Josh O’Connor and Mike Faist, and Jonathan Anderson doing the costumes. What was that process like?

JK

Challengers was a very specific cultural phenomenon. A lot of that had to do with the people who came together to make it, but also with the fact that audiences hadn’t seen a movie that operated quite like it in a while—or maybe ever. It’s an original adult drama that’s also a sports movie, yet it somehow felt like an event.

What’s strange is that people are still talking about it a year after it was released. It wasn’t a franchise movie. It wasn’t Barbenheimer. It didn’t make a billion dollars. And yet it continues to occupy a place in the culture. Usually, for a movie to remain part of the conversation that long, it either has to belong to a larger intellectual property machine or become an overwhelming commercial and awards-season success. Challengers followed a different path.

EO

How much did you have to review and rewrite the script? And what was that process like when you were working on Queer?

JK

We only had five months between when I finished the first draft and when we went into pre-production, which is very abnormal. We never had a traditional development process, where I could start shaping the movie toward the specific people I was making it with. That’s usually something you get to do—especially with an original script that ends up being made with a lot of collaborators. But for us, all of that happened during pre-production. We were making schedules, meeting with department heads, and budgeting off of my first draft. We cast the movie off of my first draft. We sold the movie off of my first draft.

EO

Did anything shift for you in how you approached story or structure, coming from plays into writing a movie like Challengers?

JK

They’re really different. The thing that’s the same is wanting to be a writer. More than that, it’s the way you like a story to move, which is just a goofy way of talking about a writer’s voice, or the kinds of characters that feel worth your time, or what kinds of structures excite you. All of that felt pretty similar to how I would approach a book or a play. The structure of Challengers is very literary in that way. The way time bounces around is distinct, but in a book that’s natural. When a novel moves backward in time, you don’t think of it as a flashback. It’s just part of the stream of time, part of a character’s development. Movies tend to have a more dominant expectation of moving forward in a linear fashion, so whenever a film disrupts that, it can feel a little jarring.

What felt different about screenwriting was how unforgiving it is. A screenplay is a machine for making the audience want to know what happens next. Every page has to earn its place. You’re always battling for real estate and contending with the audience’s impatience, whether you’re satisfying it or intentionally playing against it.

The other challenge was formal. A screenplay is incredibly rigid. Plays and novels can look radically different on the page, but a screenplay has to function as a production document. I had to find freedom within that rigidity. What finally made it click for me was realizing that, just like a play or a novel, a screenplay teaches the reader how to read it. You establish a vocabulary. A goofy example from Challengers is that instead of writing “cut to” or “smash to,” I would sometimes just write “thwack.”

EO

What?

JK

Yeah. What “thwack” allowed me to do was talk about how a transition feels rather than describe it in technical terms. I realized that the way we were going to move from one time period to another was going to be through the journey of a ball across the net. Basically, the whole movie was treating tennis courts like time machines. Every tennis court looks the same, and these characters spend their whole lives in different locations, but they’re always on the court.

EO

It’s the craziest shit to me, where you’re literally traveling to Spain to play tennis on a court.

JK

To go do the same shit you’ve done in Connecticut. What fascinated me about film is that every element has its own logic. The script has its own logic. The camera has its own logic. The music has its own logic. The way the movie is shot and directed has its own logic. They’re all operating simultaneously, and somehow they come together into a single moving thing. Because everything has its own internal logic, you’re not really thinking about how any one part is working. You’re thinking about what the language of the film needs to do.

As I mentioned earlier, a screenplay is a visual document. You’re not just writing descriptions of what’s happening or what the characters are saying. You’re trying to make the reader feel like they’re watching the movie. Film is all about perspective and what the camera chooses to highlight, so you have to strike a balance between directing the reader’s eye and leaving enough space for the director, whether it’s you or somebody else, to imagine the movie for themselves. That’s the ultimate goal.

Part of what I appreciated so much about Luca as a director is that his approach to cinema reminded me of what excites me about theater. The artificiality of theater is inescapable. You can see the whole time that you’re not actually there. You see the stage and the set changes clicking into place. I went to see Charli XCX a couple of weeks ago, and so much of the experience was watching her do a costume change or watching the screen come down and the projections start. That’s part of the show. She’s in this glamorous outfit and there’s a cameraman in cargo shorts and Nikes following her around. Watching that dynamic is part of the art. There’s a real harmony to all of the elements in Luca’s movies and a real seamlessness in the way they come together. But he also wants you to be aware of the individual parts and, to some extent, of the artifice. That actually helps me engage with a work of art more than when a work is trying to pretend there is no artifice.

EO

Challengers feels queer to me in a way that Queer almost doesn’t. Queer struck me less as a film about sexuality than as a detailed map of intimacy, desire, longing, and projection. There’s so much artifice and spirituality in it—not because it’s adapted from a novel, but because of the ways the characters construct and perform versions of themselves for one another.

JK

One of the main difficulties of adapting a novel for the screen is that with film, as opposed to a written text, you get so much information at once. There’s what the actors are saying, the setting they’re saying it in, what the camera is choosing to highlight at any given moment, and what the soundtrack is doing. Part of your job when adapting a book is to contextualize the scene, ground the thing that’s happening, and locate it visually so you can give the director a jumping-off point to do that on a much larger scale. Queer is a much more straightforward movie.

EO

So now you’ve adapted a book and wrote an original script. How did those two distinct experiences inform or change your process?

JK

All my plays and books are original. I had no context for what it meant to translate somebody’s work from one medium into another. It was Queer where I taught myself how to do that. That experience had a really profound impact on the rest of my work as a screenwriter because I’ve done a lot of similar work since its release. I recently wrote this movie called City on Fire that was adapted from a novel. It’s for Austin Butler. That was an experience a lot like Queer where I took a book that already had characters, a story, a situation, and translated it to film.

EO

But it’s also different, because you also have a shortcut in working with Luca across both projects.

JK

100%. I was writing Queer while we were on set for Challengers. He brought me the project, I said “yes,” and I started writing immediately because I knew who I was writing it for. I was writing Challengers in a void, just as a movie I wanted to see, and I had no idea who was going to do it with me. In contrast, I wrote Queer specifically with Luca in mind. That didn’t mean he was over my shoulder watching what I was doing; I was really left to my own devices. But because I was coming from set every day and watching him make Challengers, I was writing Queer inside the way Luca thinks about a scene. I had already internalized how he was going to shoot it.

When I was writing Queer, I was really trying to write Luca his dream movie. That was my motivating factor. I was trying to create the conditions for this friend and artist who I love to do something that I really felt he needed to do. Which is not to say I didn’t bring my own mark to the script—inevitably you do.

EO

It’s also very different from Call Me By Your Name, which is much more language-oriented. It’s more play-like in how it manifests.

JK

Totally. But that’s also a very different book than Queer. The thing that’s missing from our conversation about Queer so far is William S. Burroughs. His vision of that story doesn’t totally lend itself to a film adaptation because it is so much about the richness of his language. You have to find a way for the film to achieve the feeling of his language, which is a delicate dance. He creates a kind of tapestry. When you read a William S. Burroughs book, you’re entering into a different mode of seeing the world. So much of that is about the way that his mind works.

EO

What I find interesting about both Queer and Call Me By Your Name is that neither feels nostalgic to me, even though they’re period films.

JK

Completely. Sometimes you watch a period film and it tries to soften the dissonance between the past and the present by, for instance, using a certain kind of score, trying to make the camera invisible, and having the actors talk in a very staged way. Queer is not interested in that.

EO

It reminds me a little bit of Sinners.

JK

That’s a really interesting comparison. Sinners is very upfront about the fact that it is a period movie and that it is being made now. That’s what I’m talking about with theater, and why Queer reminded me of what’s exciting about theater. If you go and see A Streetcar Named Desire, most productions are going to try to make you “forget” that we’re not in the 1950s. I think that’s ridiculous because I’m sitting there with a computer in my pocket. Somebody next to me has a vape. We’re watching these people pretend, and we’re supposed to pretend along with them, that we’re still in the ’50s. If we want to do Streetcar, you have to find a way to make it make sense that we’re doing it right now.

EO

The thing that I found so totally affecting with Sinners is the fact that it was like, “No, this is a movie being made.” Sinners is about the power of filmmaking, whereas Queer, to me, was about the mechanics of film, what it means to love film, and showing how you can change it.

JK

Another way of putting that is that Queer is a film that lacks a rigid container with regard to the characters’ movement. There’s not the same inexorable logic to the story. In Challengers, the end is present in the beginning. To an extent, Sinners operates in the same way. There’s only one way out of that barn.

Queer has that logic too. But what makes it feel looser than Challengers is that it concerns the relationship between two people. Everything else is free. They’re stuck in a very claustrophobic container, but that container can go anywhere. In Challengers, that container has to stay right there on the court. They’re stuck in the same triangle.

EO

Watching Queer felt almost like astral projecting. The film moves through time and space in a way that feels more psychological than physical. In terms of understanding how you’re making these films, has the work gotten harder?

JK

Yeah, it does. It always gets harder because you know more about what you’re doing, and you never want to repeat yourself, or retread the same territory, or make the same moves somatically. You’re constantly having to find new ways to get yourself excited about the medium. Anytime I’m writing a movie, regardless of whether it’s original or an adaptation, I have to convince myself that it’s the movie I most want to watch at that moment. Otherwise, it just feels like a job. The whole reason I did this in the first place is that I didn’t want to feel like I had a job.

EO

What were you thinking about when you were making Queer?

JK

When I watch Queer, I’m thinking about being on set for Challengers because that’s the context in which I was writing it. So in a way, even though the movies are very different, they have that sort of brotherhood or sisterhood. With Challengers, I was writing from a place of not being sure it was ever going to get made. With Queer, I was writing from a place of knowing the only way it was going to get made was if this one guy did it.

EO

How has that changed what you bring to new projects?

JK

Writing for a specific director is one kind of experience. Usually, by the time I’m actually putting pen to paper, I will have had a lot of conversations with that person and tried to suss out what makes them tick, what excites them about the thing that I’m writing. That way, by the time I’m done with the script, it’s already something they understand how to get inside of. But that’s not every job. I’ve written a lot of scripts now where I don’t know who the director’s going to be.

EO

In the context of the whole development and creative process, who do you understand yourself to be?

JK

I never see myself as anything other than the author. That position is wholly informed by the fact that I was once a playwright. It’s not to say that I don’t think the director is also the author; rather, it is just that I take real ownership of my scripts. As a screenwriter, you occupy a particular position because you’re the only person in the whole process of making the film who gets to do it alone first. You get the first stab at making the movie on the page by yourself. I think a lot of people understand a screenplay as an outline for a film, or an idea for a film, or a suggestion for a film.

That’s not what it is. A screenplay is a film. You’re making a movie on the page. I approach it the same way I would approach a play. I’m making a play on the page. I imagine the whole evening of theater on the page. Of course, somebody’s got to go make it and, depending on who that somebody is, it’s going to be different. With that said, it’s still going to be my play. I think that’s not an attitude that’s encouraged among screenwriters. But for me, it’s the only way I know how to approach my work. It’s the only way I can motivate myself to do good work.

Unless I’m doing a rewrite job to help somebody. There are instances like that where my job is to help somebody do what they have already set out to do. That can be its own fun. But if I’m writing a script from page one, I have to feel on some level like it’s my movie. I don’t know how to take responsibility for it otherwise. Which, again, I say not to diminish the role of directors or producers or actors, because it is just as much their movie. But before it’s anyone else’s, a movie is a screenwriter’s movie.

EO

What have you learned now that you’ve been on the inside, in terms of making movies and working on scripts? What is Hollywood like now for you?

JK

When you’re just watching movies, you feel like there’s a movie factory. People talk about movie studios like they’re corporations that make products. The truth is that sometimes a movie studio does work that way. But, for the most part, it’s all individual projects that are their own worlds. Every movie is its own small business that is built to self-destruct. They’re created and funded and pitched and then thrown up on their feet before imploding once the movie comes out. It’s not a business that you’re building for longevity. It’s a business that you’re building only to get you to the point of getting the movie done and then releasing the movie.

That is something that being on set for Challengers really taught me. The moment Challengers felt real to me was when I showed up to the production office and I saw that there was an accounting department, and that there were people who were part of Challengers LLC whose job was to write payroll checks. It hit me that I had written something without thinking about how it was going to happen practically. Now all of a sudden, there’s a multimillion-dollar business that has been erected on top of this thing that I imagined.

EO

What do you want from the film industry now that you’re a part of it?

JK

I want to make all kinds of great movies. The challenge is that every movie requires its own set of miracles for it to actually become real. I just had an experience working on a movie that ultimately didn’t get made. When I was in the middle of making that, I was talking with somebody else who had made a lot of big superhero and action movies. They told me that a lot of times the signal factor in deciding whether a movie is going to go into production or not is the moment the money’s ready, which I found really surprising. Even if the script isn’t ready, even if the cast isn’t ready, the movie’s going to go. And then people are going to very rapidly and feverishly make all the other things work so that they can meet the money.

There’s no rhyme or reason. That stuff is pretty random, and money can disappear in an instant. I’ve started to say that I don’t really believe that a film is happening until I see the trucks pulling up. Up until that moment, and even a little bit after that moment, the movie could just disappear. It’s not like having a job where there are certain guarantees about what’s going to happen and when. It’s really chaotic, and you have to really get comfortable with that chaos and live inside of that chaos. The randomness and seeming lack of meaning or logic when it comes to why certain things happen and why other things don’t can be really maddening. It can also be really freeing. It’s up to you how you want to process that for yourself. You have to develop your own relationship to it or else you’re going to go crazy.

EO

How has success changed you and your desire?

JK

If I write a script now, there’s a good chance that people are going to read it and that I can get it in the hands of the people I want to get it in the hands of. People also approach me to write scripts for them, which is crazy. Before I wrote Challengers, I couldn’t even get a play produced. One of the real benefits of being a playwright for a long time is that nobody gets to write “playwright” on their tax forms because basically nobody gets to live as a playwright. It’s not even a profession for playwrights that are having incredible success. I never made the mistake of associating my identity with my job in that way. I’m a writer. I’m medium agnostic. Right now, I’m writing films.

EO

One of the strange things about getting older is realizing how few things actually happen. In your twenties everything feels possible. As you get older, so much faith is required because you’re also carrying around so much more disappointment and disillusionment.

JK

This is trite, but I think it’s true that you can’t believe either side. When you’re not successful, you can’t believe that’s who you are. And when you are successful, you can’t believe that’s who you are either. Both are toxic. Both are untrue.

My first play that I got paid for happened when I was 15. I didn’t get paid a lot of money, but it was the first time anybody paid me anything. My point is that I’m 20 years into a career as a writer, and people are talking to me like I just got here. In a sense, they’re right. Challengers was the first thing I made that was seen by a lot of people. It allowed me to really live as an artist. But I’d been living solely from my writing for years. I had written a book, sold it, and was writing another one. For a lot of people, Challengers is the beginning of my career. For me, it’s one chapter in a much longer story.

I would’ve benefited from knowing in my twenties that it might take a few big breaks before your real big break. I thought The Sensuality Party was going to change my life. Every time I start something, I still feel like it’s the first thing I’ve ever written. I still feel like it might not work. Up until the last couple of weeks of writing a script, I’m nervous the whole time that the thing was a mistake, that it won’t make sense, and that I’ll fail. I’ve had experiences recently—only possible because of Challengers—where someone’s already paid me to write, or a big actor or director is already attached. That comes with its own kind of pressure. But that pressure doesn’t compare to the pressure I put on myself to make something good. What’s really at stake when I sit down to write is my time, my life. Is this how I want to spend the next few months?

The biggest difference now is that when I wrote Challengers, no one was watching. No one even knew I was writing a screenplay. I didn’t have a film agent. I’d never written a film. Everyone was surprised when I handed in a screenplay. I got to do it in complete isolation, and I probably won’t get to do that again. That’s something to adjust to. But I think it’s true for most people who write seriously: writing is always a lonely space. It doesn’t matter how many people ask what you’re working on, or how public your career is. You’re still going to be in a room alone. That’s the only real constant. Whether it’s a superhero blockbuster or a small indie, you’re still going to be sitting in a room with the same feeling—just you and the page.