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“I’ll tell you the moment I knew that Luca [Guadagnino] was the perfect director for this,” Challengers writer Justin Kuritzkes. “He had just read the script and we were talking on the phone and Luca said, ‘I know next to nothing about tennis but I know a great deal about desire.’”
At a panel for Challengers at Deadline’s Contenders Film: Los Angeles, Kuritzkes was joined by director Luca Gudagnino, producer Amy Pascal and actor Josh O’Connor.
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“What I loved about the script so much, is that it’s about three people who desperately don’t want something to happen. And they spend three years fearing that this will happen, and then it does… and they’re okay,” says Pascal. “And I think that’s really wonderful, unusual thing to make a movie about, because it’s such a human experience that we spend our whole lives being scared of something and then the actual event comes about and you learn you can survive it.”
In terms of previous experience with tennis, it turns out the person with the most experience on stage was not a panelist, but actually Deadline’s moderator Pete Hammond. “I didn’t know anything about it, and I know nothing about it now,” joked Guadagnino.
A boot camp was set up for the actors with tennis coach Brad Gilbert, though O’Connor says it taught him more than just the sport. “I’ve never worked out to that extent in all my life, and all of the confidence that brought,” he says, “for me, it felt like Luca leading me to this place of Patrick Zweig full of confidence and forthright. They were the more important aspects of that.”
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Check back Monday for the panel video.
The presenting sponsor for this year’s Contenders Film: Los Angeles is United for Business. Sponsors are Eyeptizer Eyewear, Final Draft + ScreenCraft, and partners are Four Seasons Maui, 11 Ravens and Robina Benson Design House.
