The 2019 US Open final was anticipated to be an electrifying moment. Serena Williams, who was looking for her 24th Grand Slam (which would equal Margaret Court’s historic mark), and Naomi Osaka, who aspired to become the first Japanese tennis player to win a tournament of that magnitude on the professional circuit, faced each other.
Osaka comfortably won the first set (6-2), but the second was a different chapter. Portuguese judge Carlos Ramos sanctioned the American for supposedly having received instructions from her coach, something that is prohibited during the development of the match. In the next few minutes he would address her to inform her that he had committed two more violations of the code of conduct: for breaking her racket and for yelling “thief” at her. Williams responded by calling out the tournament managers for the umpire’s alleged “sexist” treatment, while those attending Arthur Ashe Stadium offered their support by booing Ramos.
The Japanese ended up winning the set (6-4) and the tournament. But that day everything was colored by the bitter dispute between the multi-time champion and the match judge. Even the awards ceremony was an awkward moment, with the public expressing their discontent with the result and Osaka bursting into tears on a day that was supposed to be one of pure celebration for her career and her country.
The American playwright and screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes saw that final as a spectator and was not indifferent. Not being a tennis fan, he noticed a dramatic potential in that episode that made him curious. “It caught my attention as an intensely cinematic situation,” he says at a conference attended by Culto.
Kuritzkes began to imagine a dialogue between the two protagonists of that tense match. “For some reason, it just clicked in my mind. Well, what if you really needed to talk about something? What if it were something beyond tennis? What if it was something that was happening between the two of you? What if it were the person on the other side of the network? How would you have that conversation and how could you communicate the tension of that situation using the specific tools of cinema? So, yeah, that’s where it really all started for me.”
That was the fuel to begin writing the script for Challengers, the film – already available in theaters in the country – about the love triangle that forms between three tennis players who met in their junior days, Tashi Duncan (Zendaya). , Patrick Zweig (Josh O’Connor) and Art Donaldson (Mike Faist). They are all fictional characters that were born as part of a creative process that Kuritzkes began on September 8, 2018, in his quest to try to speculate about what happens in the heads of athletes “on a deeper and more dramatic level.”
The project came into the hands of producer Amy Pascal and then convinced Zendaya, who became involved as the protagonist and producer. The Euphoria star was interested even though she “didn’t know anything about tennis. The only thing she really knew about tennis was Venus and Serena (Williams).”
“I just fell in love with the script. It was brilliant. It also made me very nervous, I think because of how complicated these characters are. I think also because I couldn’t define what kind of movie it was. It was very funny, but I wouldn’t say it was a comedy. It had drama, but I wouldn’t say it was just drama. And it had tennis, but it wasn’t like your typical sports movie. So I think that feeling, that it was like all of this at the same time in a beautiful way, was terrifying but equally exhilarating and exciting,” explains the actress.
Italian Luca Guadagnino, the filmmaker behind Call Me by Your Name (2017) and To the Bone (2022), was the filmmakers’ first choice to take on the director’s chair. “When Amy (Páscal) sent me the script, I was working on something else. And she called me every half hour to ask me if she was reading it or not. And finally I had to read it while she worked. The script was fantastic. The characters were incredible. The structure was so cinematic that I immediately and instinctively felt that the artistic effort we could bring together with Amy, Zendaya and Justin would be fantastic,” he says.
From Zendaya’s perspective, Guadagnino quickly understood the material the film was made of. “He understood the type of film we wanted to create. He understood these characters in such a deep sense that we were joking about what kind of lotion she would use before going to bed at night. Those are the little details that make me say, ‘Oh my God, you know this woman. You understand. You see her.’ And he had the same instinct for all the characters.”
The narrative of Desafiantes is articulated around a final of a modest tournament that pits Patrick Zweig and Art Donaldson in 2019, and where Tashi Duncan, now Art’s wife and coach, watches the match from her seat. From that moment on, the film reviews the different moments of union and breakup between the three, when they were teenagers full of dreams and sexual desire.
“It’s very, very difficult to tell a story focused on several different timelines and yet never have it confuse you and the story constantly move forward. Furthermore, it is very rare for commercial films to deal with adult relationships and sex. I was tired of that. So, I thought it was about time people kissed in movies. And there was no better director to bring that to life than Luca,” says Amy Pascal.
One of the aspects that has generated the most fascination is the end of the feature film, a strictly cinematographic moment that, according to Guadagnino, took eight days of filming.
“We basically went from the most general thing to every small gesture. We adapted, until we understood that the final sequence had to begin as a sequence without dialogue that was going to be very clear to everyone in the audience, to understand the emotional increase that was formed there. Its conception and filming took a long time. And then a lot of post-production work.”
2024-05-07 14:48:20
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