667 - The One with Justin Kuritzkes
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Hey, this is John. Today's episode has even more swearing than usual. So if you're in a car with your kids, this is a standard warning about that. ♪♪

Hello and welcome. My name is John August, and you're listening to episode 667 of Script Notes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Most screenwriters dream of getting their first movie produced. Today on the show, we are joined by a guest who just had his first two movies produced and released this year. Justin Gritskas is a screenwriter behind both Challengers and the upcoming Queer. He's also a novelist, a YouTuber, a playwright. Welcome, Justin.

Thank you so much for having me. It's a real honor to be on here. It's so nice to have you here. So I want to talk about this past year because a bunch of stuff has happened this last year. But clearly, the last year is only like the tip of the iceberg and there was a bunch of work that sort of went behind that. So I want to get into the work that got you here. I also want to talk about working with a director, sex on screen because both of your movies are very sexy and notably more sexy than a lot of things we've seen recently. And kind of get a little granular with what's on the page, if that's okay. Yeah.

Great. Yeah. And in our bonus segment with premium members, I want to talk about your videos because in addition to this screenwriter in front of us, you were kind of an early YouTube personality person. You had a character you played. I want to talk about sort of how that tied into the rest of what you're doing or if it even does tie into what you're doing. Amazing. Cool. Let's do it.

Let's get some backstory on you because I'm just meeting you for the very first time. You grew up here in Los Angeles? Yeah, I grew up in the Valley partially, you know, first couple years of my life. I was in Encino and then my parents bled up and my dad moved to Santa Clarita. So I spent a lot of time there and then my mom kind of moved all around the West Side. And your parents were not in the industry. What was your sense of the industry sort of growing up in town? It was kind of a...

weird thing in that my immediate family, like my nuclear family, is very square, which I say lovingly, you know, as a family of like doctors and lawyers from Queens on both sides. But I have an uncle who's a screenwriter and a producer. In features, probably the thing that caught on the most was this movie called 3,000 Miles to Graceland with Kurt Russell and Kevin Costner. It was like about Elvis impersonators doing a heist in Vegas. All right. Nice.

And so I kind of, through him, saw that a life, a creative life was possible from an early age. But then also just growing up in L.A.,

Even though my parents weren't in the industry, I knew a lot of kids whose parents were. And so the industry was not something that felt like abstract. It was very clear to me early on that movies were made by actual people who went to Ralph's and bought their groceries. Definitely. Well, it feels like if you'd grown up in D.C., you'd be surrounded by politics all the time. You'd grow up in Nashville, you'd be surrounded by country music. So even if it wasn't your family's business...

It was part of the atmosphere of the Iran. So when did you first get a sense that movies or writing for movies was a possibility? Because you were writing other things, but when did movies enter into the equation? Well, movies were kind of my first love. Like that was the first thing I was a fan of was movies. You know, I was a cinephile before it was anything. But then in high school, I started writing plays because my school had like a one-act play festival with student-written stuff.

that other students would direct and act in. And through that, I all of a sudden became a playwright and then was just doing that all through college and for like 10 years afterwards. And then accidentally found myself writing a novel, which I thought was like a monologue at first, because that's the way I would start a lot of my plays is just have somebody start talking and

follow the thread of that voice until I wanted to have somebody else interrupt them. And this guy just kept talking for like 60 pages and nothing had happened. There was no story yet, but I liked the guy. So I wrote that as a novel. And then I was in the middle of writing what I thought was going to be my second book when I got the idea for Challengers. And that's kind of how I started writing screenplays. Before we get into Challengers, I want to sort of

put together some pieces that were sort of along the way. So you mentioned writing plays in high school. So you went to school here that was Harvard-Westlake, which is like a good, I don't want to say aggressive, but very academic. I think aggressive is a tough school. It's an accurate description, yeah. In every way, yeah. Yeah. The reputation I always hear about Harvard-Westlake is if you don't have like one thing you excel in, you're going to get sort of lost in the system and the churn of Harvard-Westlake. Is that fair? I don't know. I mean, you know, I really found...

dramatic art there. You know, I found performance there. Um, and I don't think I would have necessarily gravitated towards it if I'd gone somewhere else. But I think really through that, like one X play festival and through the teachers in the drama department who really became like early, uh, mentors for me. Yeah. Yeah. So for me, I had that and that, that was what

pulled me through it. That's great. Now, you're applying to colleges where you're applying specifically to the thing like, I'm going to go write plays? Or was it the programs you're looking into? I knew I wanted to write plays, but I wasn't like applying to theater school or film school or anything like that. I went to Brown and just as a liberal arts degree. I think I majored in philosophy. But I was doing...

a lot of theater while I was there because I knew that that was the life I wanted to live. We haven't had a lot of people on the podcast talking about theater through college. Like, we have a lot of people who, like, went, I know I'm going to write movies, I know I'm going to write books, those kind of things, but what is it like to be, you know, writing...

plays in college? Like, are you put into little groups to put on your one acts? Like, what stuff are you doing as a person doing plays in college? Well, at Brown, there was this real tradition of student-run theater. There's this place called Production Workshop at Brown, which has had people like Laura Linney and Richard Foreman and kind of, you know, a lot of these...

sort of iconic people in film and theater moved through it. And I was on the board of Production Workshop. And we were really kind of left to our own devices. Like, we had our own building on campus. And they gave us a really small budget that we had to, like, fight for every year. But then we just could do whatever we wanted, basically. So...

That was a real early view into producing, too. And the scrappiness of that was definitely something that got ingrained in me.

Now, someone who's curious about studying film or studying television, they can just go out and see all the movies that are made, all the TV series that are made. How are you learning about plays? How are you learning about other plays that were happening out there? How are you learning about the form? That's such an incisive question because it is this really weird thing when you're studying theater. You're studying it all on the page for the most part.

Most of the plays that were inspiring to me or that I was taking my cues from artistically were things that I had never seen. They were things that I was just reading. I think something that stuck with me from those years of reading a lot of plays was that in theater, there's a sort of standard formatting that you get taught at some point about how a play is supposed to look. But you realize when you read a lot of plays that nobody follows that.

Every play is like an instruction manual on how to read that play. And every play is developing its own vocabulary, you know, and is almost operating as like a way to evoke an idea in you about how to stage something rather than a step-by-step guide, you know. And that was something that originally really daunted me about screenwriting.

because the form can feel so rigid and official. There's something very strict about it. But I kind of realized that part of the work of learning for me how to write screenplays was learning how to find my own language in it, you know, and like treat each screenplay like I have to teach the reader how to read this one. Yeah, we had Greta Gerwig on the podcast talking about her...

her coming out of the mumblecore movement, which was a very underscripted way of making a movie, of telling a story where the improv and the figuring out as you go along was part of the process. And when she actually got to write in screenplay format and realized like, oh, I actually...

I'm responsible for all these things, but also it's cool for me to actually describe in full detail what these things are like and what a character is wearing and what the point is. Put the boundaries on things in a way that plays sort of don't. As I read through plays right now, I do just feel lost in terms of like, where are people in this space? Am I having to imagine this all myself? Because it's just basically the dialogue in so many classic plays. Yeah, well, in a lot of my plays wouldn't even have stage directions. They would just have characters start talking.

you can't do that in a screenplay or else people will just...

put it in the trash can. Absolutely. So talk to us about your first attempts to write in screenplay format. Was Challengers your first attempt to write a script? Challengers was the first script that I finished that I felt good enough about showing to anybody. So let's talk about what you're alluding there. So you had other experiments with a form and what was it about the form that you found challenging, interesting? What broke your brain about it at first? Well, maybe like really concrete example is I wrote this book called Famous People about

which is my novel. And that book is all written in the first person through the language and the voice of this young pop star who's never named because he just kind of, he's writing his memoir and we're reading the first draft and he just assumes everybody knows his name. So he never says it. Yeah. And then I was turning that into a television pilot. That was kind of the first, like one of the first attempts at writing screenplays as an adult, you know? And,

And I can imagine that's a really daunting process because all the stuff that worked about that on the page as a book can't translate directly. No, and you realize really quickly that so much of the experience of being famous, which is this character's life, is that people are screaming your name at you all the time. But I didn't want to give him a name because that was thematically important to me, that he be this kind of every man. He was like...

this idea of a pop star. So I had to figure out ways in that pilot to plausibly move him through the world that he would inhabit without having people scream,

you know, some name at him. And that was a challenge. Yes. But often those kinds of like unreasonable challenges end up forcing you to write in an interesting way. Yeah. We often say that it's the restrictions that sort of provide the shape and the boundaries for what the specific story is you're trying to tell. But even like giving him a name when he, because you have to give him a name for his dialogue. And I ended up just calling him the kid. Yeah. But even doing that felt like,

a betrayal. You know what I mean? It felt wrong to me, but I had to compromise on that level. Absolutely. So you had that experiment. Was that something you were just doing for your own kicks and giggles or had someone asked you to try a little bit of both? I was writing it on spec, but it was like a producer was interested and we were, I was trying to put it together, but yeah, it was mostly for myself and it ended up being something that was really useful and like just getting in the rhythm of writing screenplays. Yeah. Yeah.

So you said you were starting to work on your second novel and when you decided you got this notion for Challengers and you put the book aside and started working on that. Is that accurate? And so what was the spark idea in Challengers? What was the thing like, oh, this is the central idea. This is maybe this is a movie rather than a book. What was it about it that caught your attention? It was 2018. I just happened to turn on the US Open because it was in the middle of it.

And there was this match between Naomi Osaka and Serena Williams in the final. And there was this very controversial call from the umpire where he accused Serena Williams of receiving coaching from the sidelines. And up to that point, I had not been a massive tennis fan or like a sports fan even. Tennis wasn't a big part of my life. I just happened to turn this on.

But immediately that struck me as this intensely cinematic situation. You know, you're alone on the court and there's this one other person in this massive stadium who cares as much about what happens to you out there as you do. And that's the person you can't talk to. Wow. And so immediately it just clicked for me. Well, what if you really needed to talk about something? Yeah. And what if it was something beyond tennis? What if it was about the two of you? And what if somehow it involved the person on the other side of the court? Yeah.

And so that all came like right away, but I didn't sit down to write the movie for a long time. You know, for a couple of years, I was like doing other stuff. But in that time, I became a legitimate obsessive tennis fan, which originally I thought I was doing research, but then it sort of

morphed into like just a new fandom. And it's really, there's a lot of exciting energy about being a fan of something for the first time. You know, it felt like discovering movies for the first time. And just like...

When you meet a young cinephile and they're like, have you heard of this movie, The Godfather or something? You know, I was watching like Roger Federer and Djokovic matches from Wimbledon and being like, this shit's amazing, you know. So yeah, I was doing a lot of research that didn't even feel like research. It just felt like fandom to the point that I almost didn't even want to write the script.

because I knew it would ruin it. Yeah. Did it ruin it? Of course. I still watch the Grand Slams. My love for tennis is not as pure as it once was. For sure. So when did you start writing the script for Challengers and how did you start writing it? Did you outline it? Did you know what the movie was? I just sat down to create scenes. I knew a lot about the movie. I didn't know exactly how it was going to move.

But I knew the structure because kind of the impulse to write the movie in the first place was that I was watching a lot of tennis and I started asking myself this question, which was what could I write that would be as good as tennis? Because tennis was so good. And then next to that, there was this question of what would make tennis even better? Yeah.

And for me, the answer to that question was, it would be better if I could know at every moment exactly what was at stake for everybody. If I could have somebody whispering into my ear, here's why this point matters so much. So from that, the structure of dropping people into a tennis match and then gradually revealing why these people were looking at each other like this was so serious, even though it was this low stakes thing, technically. Yeah.

That all felt like a natural outgrowth of my desire to write the thing in the first place. Yeah, because it was your focusing on that moment between Naomi Osaka and Serena Williams, like what was actually really happening in that moment, which you couldn't know, but as the storyteller, you could figure out motivations behind what was really happening in that match. Yeah, and of course, like what happens in challenges has nothing to do with Naomi Osaka and Serena Williams, you know.

the more I like read about actual athletes, the more I'm convinced that they're very boring people for the most part. Just like writers are boring people for the most part, you know.

But from when you first started, you knew that there was going to be a central match that we would be pinging back and forth into. And did you have a grid outline of like, this is how we're moving forward in time? Or did that all come evolve organically? Yes and no. I mean, I knew the container of the time period. I knew that it would be roughly from 18 to like mid 30s. Yeah. Because that's the lifespan of an athlete. If you think of like an athletic career as a mini life,

It kind of starts when you're born, when you're 18, and you're dead when you're useless, when you're 35, you know, or 40, if you're lucky. So I kind of knew that that would be the timeframe of the movie.

But I didn't know when I started writing exactly where I would jump back to when. So let's take a look at some stuff on the page. So this is from the very first page of the script. We'll start with this one. So this is a script we found, which is probably, it's labeled 2021, but this could have been earlier than that. This is the one that ultimately ended up on the blacklist. Yeah, this is the first draft. First draft. So when you say first draft, this is probably the first draft of something you would actually show to a person. Yeah.

Yeah, well, so this movie was weird in that I wrote the first draft of it towards the end of 2021. And then the distance between that and us being in pre-production was like five or six months. Crazy. Which is crazy. Yeah. And that's because I sent it to a bunch of producers and eventually decided to work with Amy Pascal and Rachel O'Connor. They quickly sent it to Zendaya because they had, you know, made all the Spider-Man movies together. She said she wanted to do it.

She needed to make Dune Part 2.

in June. Yeah. So we had to make it before that. So there was no like development process. We went into pre-production with this first draft and then ended up having the, what would have been the development process during pre-production. Yeah. You know. Well, great. Cause we're going to talk about some scenes later on that changed a lot. So I really want to get into this. So let's start with, we often do a three page challenge on the podcast where we talk about the first three pages of a listener scripts and talk through sort of what's working, what's not working on the page. And I

And yours, it starts with set one at the very top. Donaldson, 0-0, Swag 0-0. Exterior, a tennis court in New Rochelle, late afternoon. Would you read through us the character descriptions for these three main people we're going to meet here? Sure, yeah. Tashi Donaldson, 33, black, a former player, sits looking out at the court where two men stand across the net from one another, looking like they are about to fight to the death.

Patrick Zweig, 32, Jewish, scrappy, ranked 201 in the world, has the face of a man who's been beaten down by this sport one too many times. He wears a mishmash of clothes from different companies. He's got no sponsorship deal, though he has somewhat haphazardly ironed to his shirt the name and logo of a random Italian company, Impatto.

Art Donaldson, 33, wasp, good-looking, is the biggest star in men's tennis that the U.S. has seen in a generation. His shocking presence at this rinky-dink tournament is the sole reason why the modest venue is packed with locals, tourists, and anyone living in the vicinity of New Rochelle who is even remotely interested in tennis. He wears a pristine Nike outfit that practically glistens in the hot summer sun. Great.

So we'll put a link in the show notes to this page we're talking through. These three character names, they're all bold-faced. So people can see right now, these are our three main characters. I think it's the only bold-facing you're doing from characters in a script, basically. This is who you're following here. These are chunky descriptions, and there's a lot of stuff in here that's not filmable and yet feels really crucial. And we often talk on the podcast about sort of like what's cheating and what's not cheating. There's stuff here that we can't chronologically

quite know. We can't know that he's the biggest star in men's tennis the US has seen in a generation. We can't know that as an audience watching this. But we're going to find it out soon enough that it's going to become clear as we sort of go through stuff. But you're also giving us physical details that do help us see the difference. We can see Patrick's scrappiness. We can see the difference in clothing level here. So we get some sense of what this is. Let's jump ahead to the four-year consideration script because you made some tweaks to this

I'd feel like you were talking with Amy Pascal and Luca and other folks here, and you maybe make some adjustments to about what you're really going to see. The first description of Tashi is she's two years younger.

She's wearing sunglasses now, which became iconic, became very, very important. The description of Patrick is a little bit different between the two. So he's now ranked 271 in the world. We've gotten rid of the beaten down by the sport too many times. We still have this idea that his clothes have no sponsorship deal. In the original version, he's ironed on, in both cases, he's ironed on this logo for Empato. Yeah. What else do we notice in the difference between art is...

pretty much the same here. You're still giving us, you know, sort of this story of why people are here that's not quite filmable, but we're going to figure that out over time. Yeah. Yeah. Looking at these two pages, do you remember typing any of these changes? Every one of them. Yeah. Of course. I mean, it's the difference between... I think a screenplay is always two things. It's always supposed to be a meaningful and exciting reading experience, but then it also becomes...

this very practical document that serves as an invitation for hundreds of different people to do their jobs. Yes. And when you get into pre-production with the script, you're really starting to realize that you have to put everything in there that someone's going to create. Yeah. And then that gets informed by the knowledge and the artistry that everybody else is bringing to it. So, for example...

the sunglasses. By the time I had done these changes, we had already done the costume fittings. And Jonathan Anderson, our costume designer, and Luca had put Zendaya in these amazing sunglasses for this opening scene.

And so I wanted to put that in the script to make sure we didn't forget that, you know, those were going to be there because she was also going to have business with them and take them off and, you know, kind of signal where she was at emotionally through what she was doing with her sunglasses. Yeah. But in a way it was like this...

Yeah, 100%.

So making the ages slightly lower made it so that we could cast people plausibly. And then what else changed? I mean, 271 in the world, that's a note from our tennis consultant, Brad Gilbert, who's like a, if you follow tennis, he's kind of a legend in the tennis world. He used to be Andre Agassi's coach. Most recently, he coached Coco Gauff when she won the US Open. And that was just a matter of, you know,

When I explained to him and when he read the script, the position of Patrick in the world of tennis and like how down on his luck he was, Brad was kind of like, well, 201 is not that bad. Yeah. You know, but 271, then you're getting into the territory that you want this guy to be in where it costs more to drive to the tournaments than it does to win the tournament. Yeah. You know, and that was really the scrappy world of...

the lowest rungs of professional tennis that I wanted to show with Patrick. Well, talk to us about your tennis expert here, because reading through the Blacklist script, the tennis is good. I totally believe the tennis. I was probably written as a person who's been watching a lot of tennis. But what were some of the things that the tennis expert could say about like, okay, the 201 versus 271? What are some other things along the way that became important? I mean, there's like countless things, but I'll tell you like some of the ones that are at the top of my mind.

For example, I had in the Blacklist script, the first draft, that two weeks before the US Open, Art was at the Winston-Salem Open. And Brad read the script and went, the schedule wouldn't work out. It's too close. So Atlanta would work. But Winston-Salem, he wouldn't be able to drop out and get a wild card in this other tournament. So stuff like that is big. But then...

probably the most useful thing that I did with Brad is that before we went into pre-production, Brad and me and this guy, Mickey Singh from ESPN went through every point that gets played in the script. And Mickey's job is to notate highlight reels. So he breaks down points as like a,

basically so that the editors for the highlight reels know what to do yeah and Mickey went through the script with me and broke down all my points and Brad would critique them and go you know he wouldn't go inside in there he would go inside out okay

Or he'd go down the line or, you know, stuff like that. Now, were these people also involved on set in terms of like figuring out the tennis that was being played and sort of the simulation of the actual matches? Well, Brad was like essential for all of that because Brad was also the person who found us our tennis doubles. You know, he was the person who brought those guys to Boston and then had the...

real tennis pros play through the points so that Luca and our DP and me could go around and Luca could shot list. So we really treated the tennis in the movie like we were shooting fight sequences. Yeah, totally. You know, like an action film. You know, when you watch the movie and Luca's doing like a hundred setups for a tennis point, that's all storyboarded. Yeah. And that was only possible because we had these real tennis pros playing through everything. So Brad was amazing for that. And then

Also, connecting us with like real lines people and umpires, you know, everybody you see in the movie who's working the match is that's their job. Great. You know. That helps. Yeah. Yeah.

So let's go to a scene that didn't change as much between the two drafts, but also I think gives a good example of you have a scene on a page, but then actually as you shoot it, things just drift and change a bit. Great. And here we actually have audio that we can play. Amazing. This is a scene early on in the movie, and Patrick Zweig is trying to check into a hotel, and his credit card is being declined. Let's take a listen. I've been driving all day. I'm exhausted.

You know, if we gave out a bed to every tired person who walked in here asking for one, we'd be a homeless shelter, not a business. Listen, I'm a tennis player. I know the tournament down the road. Oh, that thing at the country club. You get $7,000 if you win, and you get money just for qualifying. I just...

I need a place to stay tonight so I can rest before my first match. I'm sorry. I need a card on file. What if I signed a racket and gave it to you? Sir. Sir, I don't know who you are. Look at this guy. He's a disaster. I don't know. I think he's kind of cute. Carl, his mouse, the racket alone is worth like $300. $300.

Hey.

All right, so we're looking at a scene that's on page 10 of the original script, so in the blacklist version. Could you read just scene 13, sort of get us set up for where we are? Yeah, like the... Interior, yeah, yeah. Interior, roadside motel, New Rochelle, same time. Patrick is standing at the reception desk in a soul-crushingly sad motel lobby, the kind of place you pass on the highway and wonder who stays there. It's about as far as you can get from the fancy hotel room we just left. His card has just been declined. Fantastic.

Fantastic. So really great descriptions of what this feels like. You've, of course, broken the cardinal saying you said the word we in the description, which is we fully applaud. People will say that you should never say we, of course. Yeah, I never got that memo. We is fully appropriate. We as an audience, as a movie, we're just out of place and now we're here. Craig and I both strongly believe in sort of saying we here, we see, we are. Me too. Yeah, so it makes sense. So the scene that is in the...

Blacklist, it's the same basic content, but it's not the same lines. Things are in some different orders. Why I picked this scene is because it's clear that this is

is your film a comedy i think it's funny it's funny it's funny but it's not like hilariously haha funny it's not it's not joke funny yeah yeah but it's funny and this is an example of like the movie is funny like you're putting people in situations that are familiar and uncomfortable and this is getting a car declined and it's we understand what he's trying to do and we also see the comedy around it right

So this is the original version. Now let's take a look at the fore consideration, which is not quite the scene that we just heard either. There's some changes that must have happened after that point.

The addition of the guys who come in later on, the couple who come in later on, which in the four-year consideration, they don't have dialogue, but it looks like they got some dialogue on the day. I mean, it's insert dialogue. So stuff that I had written for them on the day or before the day, but yeah. I don't know what your philosophy is with that, putting that kind of stuff in a script. But I think for the flow of reading a script, it often doesn't feel right to put that kind of stuff in there because it's not the

the main drive. Yeah. And what's so interesting is that because we're pulling this out of the four-year consideration script, it's a question of should the four-year consideration script be accurately reflect the actual movie that's on the screen or what the intention was? And there's no clear consensus on what it's supposed to be. It's a very particular kind of fake document, right? Because a shooting script is a script. It's a practical document in some way, but that doesn't often translate the best

to the best reading experience. 100%, because there were scenes that were added, omitted, there's all these blank little pieces. Yeah, there's stars all over the place. It's gross. Yeah. But then if you think of the ideal sort of four-consideration script would reflect like if scenes moved around, those scenes should move around in the script too so it reflects that. And so in this case, that couple that was added in or the other changes that happened, what do you remember about sort of why those things shifted and how they shifted? Well, the couple was something that

You know, Luca is always trying to give texture to everything. And there's always, even in a relatively straightforward scene in any of his movies, there's always like five things going on. And he shoots a lot of inserts of a prop or of a piece of set dressing that you wouldn't think should be highlighted. But then because it is, it all of a sudden puts the whole scene into this different context. Yeah.

So those guys, when we were building the world of that motel, we were talking about who could be populated in there. And he offhandedly said, there should be a gay couple road tripping across America. And I took that and wrote those lines for those guys with it. And then...

I think I had COVID when they shot that scene, so I wasn't on set. And then when they were editing it, I wrote some more like ADR lines for them for when they're off screen, where they're complaining about, you know, this place doesn't look like the description online and all of that. It's like a little pocket of a movie where you remind yourself that there's a world going on that doesn't care about these characters, you know? And for somebody like Patrick...

That kind of stuff is especially important because so much of his experience of moving through the tennis world is that nobody gives a shit. And he's always inconveniencing people with his existence because that's what it's like to be ranked 271. Yeah. Let's talk about this scene and its importance.

overall in understanding Patrick and his sort of motivation because like it feels like it was a scene you could cut but if you did cut it we would understand less about him and what's nice about the scene is like he has a clear motivation he's trying to get a room for the night and yet it ties into his bigger motivation which is basically I need to be part of this tournament I need to win he's already envisioning himself winning this thing or at least placing high enough that he's going to have the money to do this thing it tells us a lot about him in a short this is a one page and change scene yeah

I mean, if it's a movie about two sides of a rivalry or two sides of a match, where those people are coming from is really important in establishing what's at stake for each of them and the sort of texture of them ending up facing each other.

So I think also with Patrick at this point, you don't know that he comes from wealth either. So it's a kind of bait and switch in some way in that you think, oh, this is a really down on his luck, broke guy. Yeah. And then you learn later on that actually he could end this misery in a second if he just called mom and dad. Yeah. But maybe this is true for you too, that like you get...

inspiration from unexpected places and genres that you wouldn't think about. So like with this movie, even though it's a sports movie...

With Patrick's story, I was thinking a lot about Inside Llewyn Davis. Oh, yeah. I was kind of thinking of Patrick as like the Inside Llewyn Davis of tennis. First time I saw Oscar Isaac was in that movie, yeah. Yeah. So good. Yeah, there's something about that guy because he has so little of a handle on his own life. He's always like pissing off everybody who shows him kindness. Yeah. You know?

You mentioned Inside Llewyn Davis, but what other movies resonated for you with this? Because I was thinking broadcast news in the sense of like, there aren't a lot of movies I can point to that are three handers where it's like, it's not just this main couple, but it's the interplay of the three of them. What were the other things or touchstones for you?

Carnal knowledge and just Mike Nichols' work in general was a real touchstone for me with this, you know, closer to some extent. And then there's the great sort of history of movies about love triangles like Ita Mamatambien or The Dreamers or Band of Outsiders or Jules and Jim, which came in to some extent in terms of like sports movies.

I think the ones that ended up meaning the most to me when I was thinking about this movie were movies like He Got Game, where if you think about the final game of that movie, it's a game between two guys who, if somebody was walking by on the street and they saw them playing, they would think this was just a pickup game between a father and son, if they even knew that much. They would have no idea that their whole lives were at stake.

And I think for me, that's always so much more interesting and dramatic than a movie about the NBA Finals. Yeah. Because if I wanted to experience the drama of the NBA Finals, I would just watch the NBA Finals. And it's going to be better than a movie about the NBA Finals. You know? Yeah. So yeah, stuff like that. Bull Durham. Bull Durham was another great reference because you have... And another great three-way triangle movie. Absolutely. There's a sexual component to it that feels specific. Yeah. Let's talk about...

talking about three bisexual encounters, a scene that's not in your Blacklist script, but it's sort of iconic in the movie itself, which is the teenagers all get together in the boys' hotel room and they have their kiss. Yeah. And so what is the origin of that scene? Well, so Luca read this script. Amy was on board. Zendaya was on board. Luca was like this dream director for us. And we sent it to him and he read it and we talked on the phone and

towards the end of 2021. And then like a week later, I was on a plane to Milan to just spend some time with Luca and see if we could like be in the trenches together right away, you know, because we knew that that was how we were going to have to make this movie. We were going to have to really go be comrades right away. During those first days in Milan, we were talking about script. And one of the first conversations we had was that Luca said this thing that was really phrased

which is that in a love triangle, all the corners should touch. And when I heard that initially, I thought, well, yeah, they do. These people are all like,

very involved in each other's erotic and emotional and psychological lives. Like they're really deep in each other's shit, all these people. So they're touching, you know. He's like, no, literally touching. Yes, exactly. Luca was like, no, no, no, literally. And the moment I heard that, I was like electrified by it. I thought it was an incredibly exciting idea. But my task then became finding a way for that to happen that felt organic and earned and

and that felt like it was coming out of the characters and the situation that was already there and not like something that I was imposing on them, you know, for sensationalist sake or something. So then it became a process of like figuring out where and how and what kind of runway I would need to give that so that it felt like it had always been in the movie. Yeah.

I thought it had always been in the movie. And so as I was reading through the Blacklist script, I kept waiting for like, okay, well, they had this scene at the party and this and like,

why did they omit that scene? It felt missing. So it felt like you already had the runway there. You just hadn't put the plane on there to take off. Yeah, well, and that came out of lots of conversations with me and Luca and then with our producers. And eventually when I landed on putting the scene there and having it be an outgrowth of when they first met each other when they were kids, it felt so natural. Yeah. You know?

And it was like a 20-page addition to the script. It's about seven pages is the actual... That actual scene, yes. It becomes a hugely important part of a big chunk of the early section of the movie. Yeah. And we should note that your Blacklight script is 128 pages, but the final shooting script is quite a lot shorter. Yeah. So obviously some stuff got cut. Yeah. But this was a huge addition. So let's talk through this addition and sort of like, did you just go off and write up a scene and send it through and...

This is the plan? What was the conversation? Well, so when I was in Milan, I wrote a first pass at that scene in a different place. And Luca and I were both really excited about the scene. But the more we looked at it, the more we realized that where I had put it, it's kind of like a bomb that you're dropping in the movie. And it can really throw into...

the sort of delicate structure of the rest of it, you know? And we knew we didn't want to change that. We wanted to keep the structure of the movie as it was. Yeah. So I needed to find a place to put this that didn't throw everything out of balance. And this finally felt like the right place for that. Great. Had you tried to put it earlier or later? Like, where were you trying to slide it? Uh,

Yeah, and I could see why that wouldn't work. It feels like what's good about the scene is that it has that teenage energy. It has that Ito Mamatambien energy, which is like they're very horned up. There's a woman here who's willing to, you know, be there with them. Well, yeah, what's important about it being where it is is that they don't know or they don't have the tools to know the consequences of what they're doing. You know, they don't know the implications of...

what this is going to do to their lives together. Yeah. Because it's coming from this place of innocence and from this place of genuine excitement and curiosity about each other. And they don't have a sort of adult judgment. Yeah. You know, of each other or of themselves. And so it was also exciting realizing if I put the scene here,

Because part of my hesitation with having the scene in the movie, you know, even though I was excited by the idea of it, part of my hesitation with it for people who have seen the film is that I always thought of the ending as the kind of consummation of their relationship. Yeah. You know, that that was finally the moment when they all come together. And I didn't want to take the wind out of that. Yeah. I didn't want to zap the energy out of that.

And every other place I thought about putting this scene felt like it did. But somehow putting it at the very beginning made that feel like a return. It makes it feel foundational. Exactly. It's part of the journey that they're going on. Yeah, exactly. They had this thing. The scene itself feels like a play. It feels like you could actually stage this as a little one-scene thing. Yeah. It's three characters in a room. They're having a conversation. There's...

there's developments, there's things that happen along the way. At any point, someone could pull the ripcord, but they don't pull the ripcord. Right. So it feels like your playwriting background sort of kicks in there. It's also just a really long scene. And did you get any pushback from movie people, from the Amy Pascals of the world, like, this is a really long scene? No. Okay. No, Amy was amazing in that respect. Yeah, she really wanted the scene to be as whatever it had to be. Strangely, we had no pushback. And then...

I think the way that Luca ended up shooting the scene, it's still intensely cinematic. Oh, yeah. So this is your first collaboration with Luca, but then you ended up going on and doing Queer. So talk to me about the transition between Challengers and Queer and how those two things came to be. Well, so we were on set for Challengers and...

working very closely together, you know, me as the writer and him as the director. And one day Luca gave me the book for Queer and just said, read this tonight and tell me if you'll adapt it for me. So it's a novella. It's a short... It's about 100 pages. It's a Burroughs book that was published much later than it was actually written. So it's set in 1950s Mexico, but came out in like 1985. Yeah, exactly. He wrote it in the 50s. It got published in the 80s.

And Luca had read it in the 80s when it came out in Italy as a teenager. And he had been wanting to make this book into a movie since then. And so, you know, I felt this like tremendous honor, but also this tremendous responsibility to write him the movie he had been dreaming about. Which is like heavy. Yeah, absolutely. But yeah, I read the book that night and immediately said yes.

And then kind of after saying yes, figured out how I was going to do it. Yeah. Those are good experiences. When you know you have to do a thing and then you figure out, okay, as you're doing it, you're building the plan to do it. Yeah. What was the writing process for that? Because he obviously, he loved it. He must have had...

have come in with some ideas of sort of like what was important for him, but he also needs to give you the space to actually write a movie movie. So what was the process? It was really different from Challengers, obviously, because that was, you know, a movie I wrote on spec before I knew Luca, before I knew any of the people who made it with me. Queer, before I even started putting pen to paper, Luca and I got to talk about it a lot. Yeah. You know, because we were on set together, we were hanging out a lot, and we would just talk about queer and the cinematic possibility of the book. So we got to work out a lot of...

the sort of vision for how this was going to be different from the book and how it was going to honor the book before i even started writing and then i started writing the bulk of the scenes while we were on set for challengers and then really finished it right after we wrapped and so like challengers it's you know had a lot more on-screen sex than we're sort of used to in movies these days and i sort of want to talk about that because in both cases

we're sort of used to seeing sex on streaming series. We're used to seeing sex on our own TV screens. We're not used to seeing it in a public place. And so, seeing challengers on the big screen with an audience, it was fun because people are sort of gasping, like, oh my God, I can't believe this thing is happening. And there's that nervousness of like, oh my God, sexy things are happening on this big screen while I'm around all these other people. It's like, we

be so uncomfortable to see it with your mom sitting next to you. I was at the premiere next to my stepmom. Yeah, absolutely. So good stuff. It's perfect. Was your stepmom also at Queer? The screening for that? She was, yeah. I didn't sit through. Yeah, yeah. So that's a challenging one. Yeah. But talk to us about what your instincts are about terms of showing sex on screen and sort of

in both cases, what I liked about what you've done in both movies is that you're showing sort of the awkwardness and sort of the transition moments between we're all in our clothes and now we're actually doing this thing. It's not cut to and now we're underneath a sheet. Yeah.

Well, I grew up starting to really watch movies in the 90s when there was a sort of tradition in like action movies of the sex scene would happen and the music would start to play and it would have no dramatic point. Yeah, a little saxophone, yeah. Yeah, a little saxophone, you know, or take my breath away or whatever. And, you know, so sex scene almost just felt like it was a montage that was like a placeholder, you know. And that feels completely like cinematically dead to me. Yeah.

But in the case of both Challengers and Queer, it was really important to me that any intimacy that was on screen was always revealing of character. That like drama was happening there. There was something at stake for people.

Because then it feels essential. It feels like the movie is still going on. You're not watching a break from the movie. Definitely. So as long as that's the case, then anything is worth taking the time to show. Yeah. You know, but otherwise it's not. Some of my movies have sexual content. Like, Go has some sexual content and that's fun. And...

It's always so awkward to write and discuss and sort of have the conversation about like sort of this is what I see happening here. This is how it's all going to play. And then you have to have the conversation with the director about it and then with the actors about it, sort of like how this is going to play. But what I think is so important about what you're describing is the characters have agency within the scenes. The characters are making choices within the scenes. It feels like it's a natural thing that would have happened next. And yet they're still alive. They're not just like robots going through it. Yeah.

and that's tough. Well, but in terms of writing the description of it, I agree it's completely embarrassing to write that, but at a certain point you have to feel like, well,

I'm going to ask people to perform this. Yeah. You know, and I'm going to ask people to light this. And, you know, and there's going to be a guy holding a boom mic for this, you know, and like Luca's going to have to shot list this. Yes. So if I'm asking all of those people to very practically make this happen, I can't take comfort in being vague on the page. It's not just like...

but it's irresponsible. It is, yeah. You know, it's like really irresponsible to give people a vague sex scene and go have at it, you know. There was a script I was handed early in my career to do a rewrite on and it was a movie that was about like, that had cars throughout. There were a bunch of car racing and car chases in it. And at a certain point, like halfway down a page, the screenwriter of that script would say like, and now it's like the coolest car racing

car chase you've ever seen. I won't bother describing it because it wouldn't do it justice, but it's really, really awesome. And you have abdicated your fundamental responsibility here. Yeah, it's like, fuck you, man. What do you want us to do? We have to go into production with this. Yes, absolutely. We need to know what is actually happening here. Yes. And so I think both in your tennis and in your sex scenes, I respect that they're telling you what's really going to happen. And obviously, everyone can bring their own expertise to it, but you get to see what is actually going to happen.

happening on screen well yeah but I mean that's the dance you always have to walk in a screenplay which is like give enough information that people can see the movie in their minds when they read the script because the movie is happening visually so if you don't put that information in you're not writing the script but also leave it open enough that people can bring themselves to it and you know their own artistry but that's a thing that took a while for me to figure out and it is something I'm always negotiating every time I'm writing something yeah

We have one question from our listeners, which I thought was especially appropriate for you. So, Drew, could you help us out here? Yeah, of course. Jeremy writes,

My absolute worst case scenario would be writing a character trying to seduce someone. How do you get your characters to employ social graces or charms that you yourself don't have?

And so I can think of both. In Challengers, there's a lot of discussion, debate, and sort of trying to pull persons to one side or the other. And then also in Queer, Daniel Craig's character is trying to seduce Drew Starkey's character and fumbling and really having a hard time sort of knowing where he's at with that. So let's think about what are the challenges of figuring out that negotiation from inside a character's point of view? Like, how are we doing that? Well, I mean, with Challengers, I think,

It's a movie that essentially only has three characters, which I think was a carryover from my experience being a playwright for so many years. That, you know, you kind of get it ingrained in yourself that you should only write parts that you feel really great about asking somebody to show up a hundred times to perform, you know, which is why there's so many plays with only three or four characters. So when there's a movie with only three characters, the whole movie operates on...

the different ideology and philosophy and way of moving through the world of those people and how they rush up against each other and, you know, sometimes sympathetically and sometimes antagonistically. And I think ideally before you even start writing dialogue,

you know enough and the audience knows enough about where everybody's coming from so that by the time they open their mouths, we already know their point of view. We already know what's at stake. We already know why they're in opposition. For me, that's why I spend a lot of time describing what somebody's wearing in the opening page of a script because you get a lot of visual information for free in a movie, you know, right at the top.

that sets you up so that when a character opens their mouth, even if they're saying something as banal as the kind of things you have to say in tennis, like, let's go, or come on, because that's the limit of sports vocabulary. Because you've done all this work that's not about dialogue, that dialogue means something and you know where they're coming from when they say that. I think...

It's really tough in a movie to work through who somebody is through dialogue as a starting place, you know, because you just don't have the space for it.

So ideally in every scene, like by the time somebody is talking, that's the last piece of information we've gotten about who they are. I think you're exactly right. It's that you can't know what the dialogue is until you actually really know what's happening behind the scenes. What are those inner gears that are turning? Way back when, when I did my very first TV show, which was a disaster, mind you, but actually I did for myself that was really, really helpful was of the five main characters, I

I would write like paragraphs about sort of how they thought about a certain topic. I would give a topic and I'd just write sort of in their voice like how they thought about that topic. And it gave me a sense of like how their brain works, what their priorities are, what their intentions are when discussing a thing and got me closer to what their voices are, what their speaking voices were like because I understood what their philosophy was like.

behind the scenes. And then when it has the characters in scenes together, it felt natural for them to be going back to their principles and sort of how their brains work that's creating that dialogue. The challenge is you both want it to feel completely different

understandable how they got there and still surprise your audience. You still need them to say things that are interesting and provocative and surprising. And so it's making sure that people don't just feel like they're on their rails, but they really are, they're live and in that moment. And that's the balance that Jeremy, I think, is struggling to find.

Yeah, that's what's difficult about screenwriting. That's the hard thing about screenwriting, yeah. So I feel you. That's something I think every screenwriter is always dealing with. And you don't get to choose which parts of it come easily to you. But I think screenwriting is one of those forms where...

It's all right if some part of it is really difficult for you because everybody has one part of it that's really difficult for them and they're all equally important. I think dialogue is actually less than 10% of a screenplay. For me, I'm thinking a lot more about structure than I am about dialogue.

And maybe that's because structure is harder for me and dialogue is easier. Yeah, and we've had a lot of people in your state who are in the same situation or they can write dialogue all day but they really struggle to figure out how stories fit together. Other people who are really good puzzle writers

pieces fit together but it's harder for them to sort of individualize different characters' voices. It sounds like Jeremy's in that second bucket but that doesn't make you a bad screenwriter it just means that some stuff's harder for you than others. Not at all and there are moments writing where I would trade a great dialogue scene for being able to figure out a structural problem that's been plaguing me for like three weeks. And so we don't get to choose our fate in that way.

It's time for our one cool thing. My one cool thing is really unimportant, but this is something you may have noticed as you were driving around Los Angeles this week, is sometimes you pass by a strip mall or mini mall and the signs look like they were on fire, like they've been burned. They're brown and yellowed and like, what happened? And so I got curious, so I googled and it was actually kind of hard to find the answer, but like

I actually now know what's happening is that it's not the lighting behind it. It's the actual, the vinyl and the plastic that they're printing on. They're printing on a cheap plastic. Someone put a link in the show notes to this Australian article that's talking about sort of like what's actually happening to those signs. And it's basically, it's just sunlight damage that is

raking them apart but now that i've mentioned it if you're in los angeles or some other sunny environment you're going to see this constantly where yeah and where it's just like it's cheap signs and it's actually a fairly recent phenomenon so it's if you like signs they've been up there for like 10 years like the way they used to make signs was more craftsmanship absolutely and so they swapped out to a cheaper sometimes a cheaper plastic and it's just disintegrating and so now you know what's happening with all the weird burnt brown signs in los angeles wow i

I feel like that's a really real thing that the way things used to be built was better. I mean, that's been true forever. That's like, you know, just a product of globalization. Yeah, absolutely. Somebody found a cheaper way to make those signs. It's like, oh, great. It looks really good. And not realizing like, oh, it's going to fall apart in a year. Of course. But then we'll just have to, they'll have to order more signs. Definitely. Keep the gravy train going.

Just what we have for us. My one cool thing is a podcast that's run by some friends of mine called Know Your Enemy. They're pretty left-leaning journalist guys and they do deep dives on conservative thinkers throughout the years. Sometimes it's

very contemporary people who are, you know, a part of making really major decisions that will have big ramifications for people right now. And sometimes it's like really far in the past and doing a deep dive on the theory of some important conservative thinker. And I've found that really useful for myself. All right. So know your enemy. Know your enemy. Fantastic. That is our show for this week. Scriptions produced by Drew Marquardt, edited by Matthew Cholet, who also did our outro this week.

If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask at johnaux.com. That's also a place where you can send questions. You'll find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaux.com. Also, we find transcripts and sign up for our weekly-ish newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have t-shirts and hoodies and such. They're great. You'll find them at Cotton Bureau. You can sign up to become a premium member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the backed episodes and bonus segments like the one we're about to record on YouTube and other video things. Justin, thank you so much for coming in. Thank you for having me.

Thank you.