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Interview: Justin Kuritzkes on ‘Queer’ and Speaking Luca Guadagnino’s Language

Kuritzkes discusses his collaboration with Guadagnino on Queer and Challengers.

Justin Kuritzkes on 'Queer' and Speaking the Same Language as Luca Guadagnino
Photo: A24

In a now apocryphal story about the genesis of his cinematic career, playwright and novelist Justin Kuritzkes happened to flip the channel to watch the 2018 U.S. Open championship tennis match between Naomi Osaka and Serena Williams. Beyond just the matchup between two of the sport’s most formidable competitors, he saw something broader in this moment: two people alone, unable to directly communicate, and yet totally linked.

That dynamic inspired Challengers, Kuritzkes’s first screenplay written on spec. That film’s eventual director, Luca Guadagnino, approached him in the middle of production to take a crack at adapting William S. Burroughs’s controversial second novel, Queer. Guadagnino purchased the recently available rights to the novel, which captured the filmmaker’s attention in his younger years to the extent that he tried writing the script himself.

It’s hardly a stretch to see why he entrusted Kuritzkes with the task given that Queer shares with Challengers the fascination with people trying to connect with each other across both a physical and emotional distance. There are less formalized rules around contact governing Daniel Craig’s Lee as he meanders around post-war Mexico City. But that apparent freedom doesn’t make it any easier to negotiate his relationship with Drew Starkey’s Allerton, an alluring yet inscrutable younger man who captures Lee’s imagination from the first time they lock eyes.

Unlike Challengers, which spans over a decade but manages to corral the narrative into the framework of a single fraught tennis match, Kuritzkes’s script for Queer maintains the picaresque journey from the novel as Lee and Allerton careen across Central and South America. But with a layer of removal and retrospection from Burroughs’s autofiction, the film casts an incisive eye toward how Lee’s addiction and infatuation fuel the flames of his connection with Allerton—and how the desire to transcend communication leads to its breakdown entirely.

I spoke with Kuritzkes ahead of Queer’s theatrical release. Our conversation covered how he approached the process of adaptation, his extended creative collaboration with Guadagnino, and where he sees connections between the themes of Queer and Challengers.

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At the New York Film Festival Q&A for Queer, you described expanding the film to speculate what would’ve happened if Lee and Allerton managed to get ayahuasca as “opening the door,” which echoes what Cotter tells Allerton after their trip. Not to read too much into the wording, but was it important to see that parallel of how you might help surface something submerged in the text?

When you adapt something, you’re always giving it a different life. Specifically, when you’re bringing something from literature to cinema, you’re having to step inside of it and embody it in a way that’s different than the demands of something that’s happening in your head. A book is very much a participatory artistic experience where you’re reading something and you’re hallucinating as you read, but a movie is like a shared dream that you’re going to actually build with lots of people. It literally feels like opening the door, walking inside, and rearranging the furniture because that’s what you actually have to do. If you think of a screenplay as not just something that’s supposed to be a meaningful reading experience, but something that’s supposed to be a blueprint, in some way, for hundreds of different people to start to do their jobs, you really do have to think of it as opening a door.

If you were adapting Queer with the knowledge that your script would ultimately be adapted by Luca, were there any elements you encountered in the novel that required you to rethink your approach to be more in keeping with his sensibilities?

The whole time I was reading the book, and especially when I was rereading it again and again to zero in on how I was going to adapt it, I was selfishly thinking about what scenes I would be excited to watch him make. I had ground-level insight into how he makes movies because we were in the middle of making Challengers when I was starting to write this. I was coming from set every day watching him make a movie that I had written before I knew him, and then I was going home and writing a movie that I wanted him to make and had gotten to talk with him about for a good period of time before I even started. From the start, I was writing our movie.

Does that change what goes on the page for the screenplay? I’ve seen some of the pages from the Challengers screenplay that use creative and descriptive language for stage directions. Does that look the same for Queer?

No, it’s all very different, which has something to do with knowing that I was making it for Luca. But also, in every screenplay, you have to discover your own language. Something that’s a carryover from my years working as a playwright is that there’s a sort of standard way that a play is “supposed” to look, but nobody follows that. If you read 10 different plays by 10 playwrights, they’ll all look different on the page, and each play kind of teaches you how to read it. The way that it’s written is supposed to inform how you’re going to perform it. I was daunted when I started writing screenplays about the rigidity of the form because the technical aspect of it can be very off-putting. I started to find on Challengers, and then continued to try to find it on Queer, this way to still find a way to teach people how to read this screenplay within the form of that. Because I knew I was writing this for Luca, I could write with a lot of freedom because I had so much trust that he was going to know how to interpret it in a way that only he could.

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How does that look for more surrealistic elements in the third act such as the choreography? Are you being prescriptive or leaving it open to figure out together because you know it will be a collaborative process?

Some things you have to put on the page very clearly, because you have to let people know what they’re going to try to build and make happen. But, for example, there are beautiful sections in the book where Lee describes reaching out with a ghost hand and touching Allerton’s face, and that’s something that’s happening inside of his mind. But I was excited about the idea of seeing Luca actually bring that to life and externalizing that, which is something that you can only do in a film. I would be prescriptive to the extent that I was describing visually what was going to happen—but leaving a lot of room for the interpretation of what that actually looks like. Especially with imagery that departs from strict realism, you want to treat it as an invitation more than as an instruction manual. You’re inviting somebody to bring all of their art to an idea.

You’ve said that you and Luca speak the same language. What is the vocabulary you share? How do you converse?

We realized as we were in pre-production for Challengers that a lot of the things that excited me about the movie were the same things that excited him. When it came to Queer, how that actually looks is that we had a shorthand. Queer isn’t a script that I would have written for anybody else—or, if I did, I wouldn’t have written it in the same way. Because I knew I was writing it for Luca, I could write a half-page sequence of an ayahuasca trip and understand that he was going to be excited about that and know what to do with it.

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How does it compare to adapting City of Fire for the screen, which didn’t have a specific director attached as you started writing it? Did the process of writing Queer shape your ideas about adaptation at large?

That’s a really interesting question. This was the first time I had ever adapted anything because, prior to this, every play or book and my first screenplay was original. I was really learning how to adapt when I was writing Queer. I think your first job when you’re adapting something is to be a good reader and make sure that you have a handle on what’s important in the book and what are the dynamics. What’s the fundamental part of what’s happening in each scene and, on a larger scale, what’s the fundamental part of what’s happening in the story? Because inevitably, even with a book like Queer, which is very short, there’s stuff that isn’t going to translate directly to film. In order to make those kinds of decisions, you have to at least feel like you have a real handle on what’s going on. That’s how I approached Queer, but I had no method because it was the first time I was ever doing it. I was teaching myself how to adapt a book as I was doing it.

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Reading Burroughs’s novel, I was surprised that the text gives access to Allerton’s thoughts because the film makes him somewhat inscrutable at the start. How were you thinking about balancing and narrowing the perspectives?

Film, to a large extent, is about perspective. The whole experience of watching a film is having your eye be directed and put in the place of different perspectives. The camera tells you who you’re watching each scene as. You’re right that there’s a little more interiority for both of them in the book because that’s just the nature of the book, but it felt to me like the thrust of the movie was really through Lee’s journey of trying to get what he’s looking for with Allerton, which is this communication on the level of intuition or really genuine human connection that’s made difficult, not because it’s not there for both of them, but because they don’t know how to get on the same page. One of the things that Luca has said about the movie, which I think is really beautiful, is that it’s not a story of unrequited love so much as it’s a one of unsynchronized love. I see the movie so much as the two of them trying to get in sync, the sort of terror of actually being in sync, their reaction to that, and what that does to each of them. It’s terrifying to get what you want. That was my guiding principle as I was working through writing the movie.

Both films you’ve written this year involve two men who talk plenty yet each pair can only understand and connect through tennis or telepathy, respectively. Do you think words will ever be enough for men to communicate with one another?

I don’t know if that’s a specifically male problem, words being inadequate for communication. I think something that’s going on in Challengers is that there’s a myth of individualism in a sport like tennis. You have this myth that you’re alone out there. And the truth, as everybody knows, is that you’re not alone out there. Some people have more support in their corners than others. If you’re a guy ranked seven in the world, and you’re playing a guy ranked two hundred seventy-one, you come with a physio, a trainer, a hitting partner, your coach, your assistant coach, everybody. They’re all in your corner, and then they send you out to go fight alone. Yet, at the same time, you’re the only person holding the racket, so you’re alone in some respect. The thing that both movies definitely share is this thread of what you can actually get from another person and what you can’t. The limit of what you can get from another person and what somebody else can do for you, the real feeling of being careful what you wish for is present in both movies, but I think that’s just as present for Tashi in Challengers as it is for those guys.

What relationship, if any, do you have to Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s scoring of the films you’ve written? They’re such interesting complements without blaring the subtext, but do you know what they’ll add to the script?

No, I’m purely just a complete fan of their work. Both of these movies that I’ve had the privilege of making with Luca have been a revolving door of dream collaborators. For me, [it’s] not just their film work, but I’ve been a massive Nine Inch Nails fan since I was a kid, so I was in awe that I got to make two movies with them. Usually, I don’t write music cues into the script unless it’s a needle drop that’s happening diegetically, like on a jukebox or something. But very early on in the process of pre-production for Challengers, Luca was saying, “This needs to be electro-dance music.” I have a really fond memory of us driving in Luca’s car in Boston, blasting EDM, and him saying, “This is the vibe,” and me going, “I trust you!”

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Were you involved in the editing process of Queer, especially in the run-up to Venice when the announced runtime was roughly 40 minutes longer than what premiered? How did it expand and contract over time?

Every movie goes through a process of contracting after the first assembly. From my perspective, and I can only speak for myself, the only cut of the movie is the one that you show to people. That’s the movie, and everything else is just like a natural part of moviemaking. I was fortunate on both Challengers and Queer to be shown cuts of the movies as Luca and Marco [Costa, the film’s editor] were working on them. It isn’t always the case for a writer to have that access to that part of the process. For me, that was a gift because it’s a continuation of something that started on Challengers with Lucas’s generosity toward me as a collaborator. He really allowed me to be around for a lot of it, and for me, that was like going to film school.

What do you make of the title Queer? The characters use it in one way, but even by the time Burroughs published the novel, the vocabulary had started to change as the term started to get reclaimed. Is it an idea? An identity? A point of view?

Well, it’s all of the above. It’s a word that has many different meanings, and as you’ve said, its meaning morphs through time. Queer, at the time that Burroughs published the book, was a slur. Now, queer is a term that people often readily adopt for themselves—not everybody, but some people do. That feels very thematically correct to me, that the word itself has morphed in the time since Burroughs first called the book that. I think it was a very daring title in the 1950s, certainly, which probably had a lot to do with why the book didn’t come out until 30 years later. But I almost think it’s a more daring title today, given the context of what that word has come to mean. Now, I think to call this movie Queer is actually much more punk rock than it was in the 1950s, which feels like Burroughs getting the last laugh in a really deep way.

Marshall Shaffer

Marshall Shaffer is a New York-based film journalist. His interviews, reviews, and other commentary on film also appear regularly in Slashfilm, Decider, and Little White Lies.

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