‘Challengers’ Screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes Sets Eyes on New Highs in ‘Queer’

When screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes puts pen to paper, some of the first words he writes are about what the characters are wearing.

In his debut screenplay “Challengers,” he remembers writing about Art Donaldson’s (Mike Faist) pristine white head-to-toe tennis uniform and Patrick Zweig’s (Josh O’Connor) mishmash of clothes.

In the case of “Queer,” his second collaboration with film director Luca Guadagnino, “one of the first things I wrote is the way the suit is fitting on Lee, because it tells the whole story of how his day has been going, and how his life in Mexico has been going,” he recalls, sitting cross-legged at the Corinthia hotel in London wearing a white T-shirt and a navy A.P.C. overshirt.

The film is based on William S. Burroughs’ semi-autobiographical novella of the same name. Set in Mexico City in the 1950s, the novel is about American expats who live within a couple blocks of each other, which the screenwriter describes as a “time capsule.”

Daniel Craig plays William Lee, a heroin addict who has a daily routine of strolling around his dusty neighborhood and drinking at his favorite bar. The film is told through his perspective, an active decision that Kuritzkes took in order for the audience to experience the character’s “longing and desire for connection.”

At the Ship Ahoy, his favorite drinking den, Lee spots and takes a liking to a regular visitor, Eugene Allerton, played by Drew Starkey.

Lee takes Allerton to the depths of Panama and Ecuador hunting for yagé, otherwise known as the hallucinogen ayahuasca. Lee is hoping the drug will bring them closer emotionally.

Kuritzkes says he battled with what story he was going to tell. He had read Burroughs’ letters to Allen Ginsberg, and dived into his books “Naked Lunch” and “Junkie,” a precursor to “Queer.” But he didn’t want to end up telling only Burroughs’ story.

“Lee’s character is, in some sense, an alter ego for Burroughs, but it’s also a completely fictional persona. There was this negotiation I had to do as I was writing, which was how much of Burroughs’ life can inform this character, and how much of it will start to feel like we’re trying to tell Burroughs’ story, which I wasn’t interested in and Luca wasn’t interested in,” he says.

Kuritzkes later added his own interpretation to “Queer,” as well as borrowing elements from the author’s life.

In the book, Lee and Allerton get close to finding the ayahuasca, but that door is quickly shut.

By contrast, the screenwriter had the two characters take the hallucinogenic in order to examine how the dynamic between them would shift.

“Luca and I were excited by the idea of whether they would react in the same way or whether, ultimately, it would solve anything for them. [We wanted to explore whether] this moment of telepathy, which is what they’ve been seeking for the whole movie, would actually resolve anything or make it any easier to get in sync with each other,” he adds.

There is another intriguing scene where an armed Lee tries to shoot a shot glass that’s sitting on top of Allerton’s head. That was how Burroughs ended up killing his wife, Joan Vollmer, in 1951.

“What’s really different about screenwriting is that a story usually comes to me visually because you get a lot of information about a character before they’ve opened their mouths,” he explains.

Kuritzkes added that scene because it’s an event that haunted the writing of “Queer” for Burroughs. “It actually forced him to accept that he was a writer in the first place. In other words, he wouldn’t have become a writer if it was not for this horrible thing,” he contends.

The voice of Lee is so pronounced in the novel that Kuritzkes’ biggest task was figuring out a way to externalize all the depth without all of the language — though he did infuse the film with the Beat Generation phrases and vocabulary used in the book.

One way of doing that was through the use of the word “queer” for the title of the film and its use throughout the character’s dialogue with each other. 

When the book was written in the 1950s, the phrase queer had many meanings, but one of them was a slur. When the book was finally published in the ‘80s, not much had changed.

“I think it’s even more radical to call a book or a movie ‘queer’ now than it was in the 1950s and in some ways, it feels like Burroughs is having the last laugh. No matter when this story gets out into the world, it’s always going to resonate in all of these different ways,” says Kuritzkes, who cares a lot about the message the film sends out.

Every sentence he put into the film is considered — so much so that designer Jonathan Anderson, who worked on the costumes, has adapted the line “I want to talk to you… without speaking” onto a hoodie for a capsule collection based on the film.

Kuritzkes says his writing is rooted in discovering the truth, and ultimately that’s about having conversations.

“I didn’t realize the connection between [my] two films ‘Challengers’ and ‘Queer’ is that they’re leading to a climax where people are having a conversation without language,” he says.

He’s not quite sure what’s attracted him to the theme of love that’s out of sync other than it being “inherently very cinematic, because cinema is so much about the things we can’t say and pushing up against the limits of language and about the limits of connection.”

“It’s always interesting to watch characters who are desperate to say something to one another having to find a brand new language [to do it in],” he adds.

Kuritzkes grew up interested in fictional characters and sweeping ideas such as love or war, which are the subjects of his next two projects: “Sgt. Rock” and “City on Fire.”

He will be reuniting with Guadagnino and Craig on the former, which follows a World War II American sergeant going to battle in Europe. The latter film stars Austin Butler, who plays a street soldier turned commander with ambitions of building his own dynasty.

Meanwhile, Kuritzkes’ own childhood dreams are coming true. 

Growing up in Los Angeles, he was completely in love with Stanley Kubrick’s movies and the French New Wave movement. “Movies were really my first love and that was before I was a fan of anything,” he says.

Kuritzkes recalls that from an early age he wanted to be a writer. He would write novels, which were really just the titles of the novels and he would draw covers for them, but in high school he fell in love with theater and decided that he was going to become a playwright.

The first play he wrote was about a guy whose brother is a serial killer. “It wasn’t even so much the content of the plays themselves that was exciting to me. I felt like for the first time that if my life was about being with these people [the characters and actors in plays], then that’s a life that’s worth living to me,” he says.

Kuritzkes has dabbled in all kinds of writing. He released his first novel “Famous People” in 2019. Midway through his second book, he came up with the idea for “Challengers.” He saw the plot in images rather than words.

He wrote the script for “Challengers” on spec, and it was picked up by producers Amy Pascal and Rachel O’Connor, who had shared it with Zendaya. She later starred and coproduced the film.

“Luca was one of the first people we ever talked about and he was this dream director [for it]. On a whim, we sent it to him and then I was on a plane to Milan — we spent a week together just kind of figuring out whether we could work together and be in the trenches together,” says Kuritzkes, who watched Guadagnino’s “Call Me By Your Name” five times at the cinema.

He calls collaborating with the Italian director “really easy” and praises him for his fluency with the language of cinema and heavy involvement with the sound design, costumes, interiors and building the characters’ psychologies.

“His films more than anything are full of iconic characters, from ‘I Am Love’ to ‘Suspiria’ — I adored all of the technical mastery, but primarily I came away not being able to stop thinking about these characters, so I felt really comfortable sharing my characters with him,” Kuritzkes said.

They’re quickly becoming a cinematic double act along the lines of French director Jean-Pierre Jeunet and the screenwriter Guillaume Laurant, who together have worked on “Micmacs,” “The City of Lost Children” and five-time Academy Award nominated film “Amélie.”