Luca Guadagni­no: ​‘I don’t watch ten­nis match­es. It’s quite bor­ing to me’

It’s 6.59am Pacif­ic Stan­dard Time, and Luca Guadagni­no is sat in the pas­sen­ger seat of a packed car, shades bal­anced on dome, and look­ing down into his smart­phone to begin our chat. The last time I spoke to the direc­tor was on the occa­sion of Call Me by Your Name​’s swift ascent to the deserv­ing sta­tus of glob­al sen­sa­tion, and in the spir­it of the film we con­versed while Guadagni­no did his morn­ing walk around his one-time home­town of Cre­ma, paus­ing occa­sion­al­ly to greet passers by.

The sub­ject now is Chal­lengers, a skill­ful­ly-wrought roman­tic melo­dra­ma of the old school that’s set in the world of pro­fes­sion­al ten­nis, where the tense ebb and flow of a men’s sin­gles match between Josh O’Connor’s Patrick and Mike Faist’s Art is com­pound­ed fur­ther by the slow release of details about both of their rela­tion­ships with Zendaya’s injured almost-star, Tashi. It’s a film of visu­al razzmatazz and cheeky humour that’s pow­ered by a trio of stun­ning­ly attuned cen­tral per­for­mances and the kind of char­ac­ter chem­istry that’s def­i­nite­ly not avail­able over the counter.

LWLies: How did you first encounter the script for Chal­lengers and what were your first impressions?

Guadagni­no: I think at this stage of my life, after hav­ing done so much and for so long, it should be clear that I am a direc­tor who likes to find projects instead of writ­ing my own projects. And I feel that in order to clar­i­fy what the direc­tor does, the direc­tor directs a movie and finds his, her, their point of view with­in the bones of a sto­ry or a script. Some­one would say this is the old fash­ioned way of doing clas­sic cin­e­ma. In that sense, how I found the sto­ry is quite sim­ple: I was sent a script by a per­son that I trust very much, [pro­duc­er] Amy Pas­cal. What I found in the script is a very wit­ty, enter­tain­ing and dynam­ic sto­ry that had this great con­cept of ten­nis and rela­tion­ships bounc­ing with­in one anoth­er and one being a mir­ror to the oth­er. To me it felt total­ly cinematic.

When you’ve decid­ed that you want to make a film like that, is it a case of hav­ing to rewrite the script, re-nose it or enhance it to make it work for your sensibility?

A script is some­thing that inspires you and then you start work­ing on it with your writer to pow­er your own vision and that of the writer at the same time. It’s a beau­ti­ful­ly labo­ri­ous process that leads you to what you final­ly feel is the best tool to allow you to start shoot­ing. Remem­ber, a movie is writ­ten three times: a movie is writ­ten when the script is writ­ten; a movie is writ­ten when it’s being shot; and a movie is writ­ten when it’s edit­ed. And so, in that sense, writ­ing is a con­stant­ly unstop­pable process in my life and a con­stituent part of cin­e­ma at all lev­els. For this film in par­tic­u­lar, the last rewrite, which was all there in the final edit, was very close, struc­tural­ly, to what Justin had orig­i­nal­ly conceived.

Did you ever have any youth­ful epipha­nies watch­ing sports about the bod­ies or the image of sports people?

I hon­est­ly did not. You know, like ath­leti­cism and the body in motion, when you see a sport being played, for me it has noth­ing to do with eroti­cism. I also believe that eroti­cism has noth­ing to do with the notion of per­fec­tion. And the oppo­site is true: sports is all about the pur­suit of per­fec­tion. I think the beau­ty of bod­ies doesn’t need to be just erot­ic. The beau­ty of bod­ies can be human; it can be about the sheer excite­ment and the pos­si­bil­i­ties of move­ment – the pos­si­bil­i­ty of the bend­ing of the body into dif­fer­ent shapes. I think there is more that you can see in bod­ies than the actu­al eroticism.

Chal­lengers depicts the kind of pres­sure and the strain that bod­ies under­go when engaged in sport. There is an injury one of the char­ac­ters suf­fers in this film where I was remind­ed of a bit of Sus­piria where bod­ies are cracked into odd shapes.

There is a lit­tle bit of that. I remem­ber, when I was quite young and I was start­ing doing my stuff, I was very frus­trat­ed with much of the cur­rent cin­e­ma around me, cer­tain­ly with the cin­e­ma that I would see being made in Italy. There was no con­cep­tion of bod­ies at all. And I’m talk­ing about con­tem­po­rary cin­e­ma. And so I made a point that I had to be real­ly deal­ing a lot with the fragili­ty, the tac­til­i­ty and the sen­su­al­i­ty of bod­ies. But I think it’s a mis­take for a film­mak­er to see a body as sole­ly sen­su­al: there is also move­ment, inter­ac­tion, phys­i­cal­i­ty and the clash of bodies.

Know­ing your love of the nov­el ​‘Brideshead Revis­it­ed’, I won­dered if that had been an inspi­ra­tion behind you doing this film? Par­tic­u­lar­ly as a wider explo­ration of those clas­si­cal love tri­an­gles and the pre­sen­ta­tion of a rar­efied world.

I always think that some­how, in Chal­lengers, Tashi moves every­thing. She shifts the dynam­ics. And yet, she is, in a way, cre­at­ed by Art and Patrick. And in ​‘Brideshead’, the pro­tag­o­nist, Charles, is obsessed with find­ing his back to Sebas­t­ian and Julia, and that results in tragedy. I think in our film, it’s less about the tragedy. But the idea of the reflec­tion and the idea of being dom­i­nant in a rela­tion­ship and the fate that brings, it is some­thing that could be seen as par­al­lel in many things, pos­si­bly even my own life.

Were any kind of lit­er­ary inspi­ra­tions that drew you to this script? 

I’m sure I must have real­ly gone through a long list of ref­er­ences with Justin, the cast, with Amy and every­body. It slips my mind right now. I think the thing that I was most drawn to was dynamism and mak­ing sure the movie was hyper­ki­net­ic. I was inter­est­ed in the emo­tion­al flow, in the visu­al flow, in the gaze of the cam­era and how it deals with the sto­ry. So for this film I was dri­ven by visu­al lan­guage more than any­thing else.

Your films tend to be a lit­tle more lacon­ic, so from a visu­al per­spec­tive did you find this a very dif­fer­ent process?

No, absolute­ly not. It was shot in 41 days – quite a brisk shoot. I had a won­der­ful film crew in Boston. And Say­omb­hu Mukdeep­rom is my good friend and an amaz­ing direc­tor of pho­tog­ra­phy. We both love the idea of rais­ing the bar in terms of the types of films we do. I did very exten­sive rehearsals with the cast, which I nev­er do. I did exten­sive sto­ry­board­ing of much of the movie. And I did a lot of work with mod­els where I could see how to cre­ate the visu­al lan­guage before we were on set.

Who got to see the mod­els? Was that open to every­one or was that a kind of pri­vate thing for you?

Me and Say­omb­hu and my AD and mem­bers of the pro­duc­tion. I’m not very pri­vate when it comes to work. The idea of a film­mak­er shield­ing peo­ple from his or her process is exot­ic to me. This is a col­lec­tive work. I do believe it’s a type of work where the vision of the direc­tor has to be the dri­ving force and the end result. But only if you allow beau­ti­ful crews and col­lab­o­ra­tors to con­tribute their ideas, and you do not feel dis­em­pow­ered by oth­er people’s perspectives.

The ten­nis scenes in the film are wild and almost sur­re­al in their kineti­cism. Were you at all inspired by, or did you take any cues from, actu­al TV ten­nis coverage?

I mean, is there any­thing visu­al­ly inter­est­ing about that? Hey, I’m going to say some­thing that I shouldn’t say, but I’m not a great ten­nis watch­er. I don’t watch ten­nis match­es. It’s quite bor­ing to me. Actu­al­ly, the way in which ten­nis is shown is rather undy­nam­ic as you have to be objec­tive. The game is objec­ti­fied as a way to help view­ers under­stand what’s hap­pen­ing. But for this film the ten­nis had to be very sub­jec­tive. And who’s the sub­ject? The sub­ject is the movie.

What about sports movies then?

I mean, we were real­ly think­ing about a lot of things. There is a great fury in the dynam­ic of a few Mar­tin Scors­ese films from the 1980s that I thought about while mak­ing this movie, par­tic­u­lar­ly The Col­or of Mon­ey and Life Lessons. And I was def­i­nite­ly think­ing a lot about the strate­gies of Alfred Hitch­cock, when it comes to the way in which an inter­ac­tion is cul­ti­vat­ed through visu­al means, which in turn cre­ates tension.

There’s a great ref­er­ence to the ten­nis scene in Strangers on a Train in Challengers.

Of course! But I would say that the thing that, now that I go back with my mem­o­ry, real­ly was amus­ing for me when I read the script, I said, ​‘I think this is a script that Mike Nichols would have prob­a­bly loved to make.’ So I thought, how do we cre­ate a movie that is a great dra­ma, and could also be a great com­e­dy of man­ners, in the mode of Nichols.

When you were doing the press for Bones and All, you described the char­ac­ters as ​“fucked up” and I won­der if you stand by that?

You know, they are tan­gled up in so many neu­roses and have so many needs to exert con­trol over, for them­selves and oth­ers, that, yes, even­tu­al­ly this makes them fucked up. So I do stand by that.

You seem to have this very intu­itive way of spot­ting actors and plac­ing them as the char­ac­ters in your movies. How did you land on Zen­daya, Josh and Mike?

When I got the script, the great Amy Pas­cal had been smart and had giv­en it to Zen­daya as well. And she was very inter­est­ed. She loved the char­ac­ter. She loved the script. So, I said to Amy, ​‘Oh, that’s fan­tas­tic because that’s a per­fect idea.’ And so when I met Zen­daya, we matched straight away and we pro­ceed­ed to work togeth­er. And remem­ber, she’s also the pro­duc­er of the movie. Josh O’Connor I always want­ed to work with since I saw God’s Own Coun­try, and then I met him through a friend, Jonathan Ander­son [cre­ative direc­tor of LOEWE], who is also the cos­tume design­er on the movie.

So when I got the script, I felt this role was for Josh, which for him is against type because Josh has nev­er played a char­ac­ter that is so out there like this. This char­ac­ter is unapolo­get­i­cal­ly smug with this kind of hyper con­fi­dence. With Mike Faist, I dis­cov­ered him from see­ing Steven Spielberg’s West Side Sto­ry. And I real­ly loved his per­for­mance in that film. I mean, I real­ly loved it. I found him to be, lit­er­al­ly, the total artist: he can sing; he can dance; he can act. And he’s excel­lent at all three. And so for me, it was a no- brain­er. I just thought, ​‘That’s our Art’. There was some­thing about it that could be per­fect for the sheer ath­leti­cism that we had to accom­plish with Art. He’s a big cham­pi­on, but at the same time, a sort of trag­ic fig­ure of com­pres­sion and regres­sion. Mike is such a great actor that I knew he could embody those contradictions.

I find the cast­ing of Mike inter­est­ing because, in many ways, Chal­lenges could be a musi­cal. Could you talk a lit­tle bit about the sound, how you worked with Trent Reznor and Atti­cus Ross on the sound­track and how you arrived at this pump­ing tech­no score?

While mak­ing the movie I thought it should be as grat­i­fy­ing and as uplift­ing as drink­ing, for the first time after many months and on a scorch­ing hot day, a glass of ice-cold Coca-Cola. That’s what I want­ed the feel­ing of this movie to be. And it’s about the feel­ing, not the prod­uct. When I spoke to Trent and Atti­cus, who had cre­at­ed this very beau­ti­ful, ele­giac score for Bones and All, I said that here we need a dri­ve, a pulse. Music that can run par­al­lel to the char­ac­ters’ per­for­mances and their move­ments. I told them to make the kind of tech­no music that would have the audi­ence danc­ing in the cin­e­ma. And that’s exact­ly what they delivered.

Could you tell me a lit­tle bit about the rehearsals and how you cul­ti­vat­ed the extra­or­di­nary chem­istry between the leads?

It’s the duty of the direc­tor to cre­ate an imper­cep­ti­ble ener­gy that ties not only the actors togeth­er, but the char­ac­ters too. A direc­tor is a man­ag­er. A direc­tor is an organ­is­er. A direc­tor needs to sub­tly and invis­i­bly make sure things go the way they need to go. That’s why I invite peo­ple, I take care of peo­ple, I host peo­ple, I pam­per peo­ple and a lit­tle bit, I manip­u­late peo­ple to do what they need to do. But it’s good manip­u­la­tion, I think. At the same time, it’s about trust. It’s beau­ti­ful to see the per­form­ers in this movie be so trust­ful and to give them­selves over to the process. And the most impor­tant thing is about mak­ing sure that the intu­ition that the cast brings is allowed to shine on the screen.

This is Jonathan Anderson’s first film cred­it as a cos­tume design­er, and how did you go about bring­ing him into this world?

He’s a good friend of mine, he’s one of the great­est design­ers in the world. When I asked him if we would do it, he said, yes. It was a great priv­i­lege to have his wis­dom, his intel­li­gence, his humour in the process of mak­ing Chal­lengers. It’s not just about gar­ments, it’s about a per­spec­tive – he was so smart and generous.

There’s one par­tic­u­lar­ly great t‑shirt that both Josh and Zen­daya wear with the slo­gan ​“I Told Ya” on it. What’s the sto­ry behind that? 

That is a t‑shirt that Jonathan found. It was once worn by the late John F Kennedy Jr. That t‑shirt so per­fect­ly defined both the smug­ness and the irony of Patrick.

Chal­lengers is the sec­ond film you’ve shot in the US after Bones and All, but where you filmed rur­al land­scapes in that film, this is very urban. What’s your approach to cap­tur­ing such a dif­fer­ent archi­tec­tur­al backdrop?

I think every­thing is about land­scape in every movie. And it’s about the fig­ures in the land­scape. It doesn’t need to be a beau­ti­ful land­scape. It has to be a land­scape that can reflect a greater pic­ture, a greater idea, or maybe the dynam­ic of the char­ac­ters. Shoot­ing in Amer­i­ca is always a great respon­si­bil­i­ty. The very act of film­ing the Amer­i­can land­scape allows you to be part of an imagery that is defined by the canon of Hol­ly­wood cin­e­ma. So how do you enter that canon? And how do you try to make it per­son­al at the same time? But if you ask me, ​‘Where would you choose to shoot your movies?’ I would always say, ​‘At home,’ because I want to be home.

There’s a cheek­i­ness – some might even say a bawdi­ness – to some of the humour in the film.

[laughs] All I will say on this mat­ter is that, some­times, a chur­ro is a chur­ro is a chur­ro, or a rack­et is a rack­et is a rack­et, and a ball is a ball is a ball. Okay?

One ele­ment that seems to tie up all your films is this notion of unre­quit­ed desire and some­times not being able to get what you want, and that feels like it’s present here too.

To be hon­est, I don’t think it’s about peo­ple want­i­ng what they can’t have. It’s about peo­ple want­i­ng what oth­er peo­ple don’t want to give. For me, it’s very impor­tant to know that, when you want some­one, it’s because the oth­er per­son is some­how, maybe, uncon­scious­ly send­ing back a mes­sage. I think that’s not very pop­u­lar to say nowa­days. But I think it’s more about the pos­si­bil­i­ty of the pos­si­ble than the pos­si­ble itself. I think it’s always about what is the time on the two watch­es? Are they in sync or not?