“Let’s not make a tennis film.”
That was the director Luca Guadagnino’s unconventional approach to “Challengers,” the hit movie starring Zendaya, Mike Faist and Josh O’Connor as rival tennis aces, locked in a high-stakes love triangle.
Guadagnino, the Italian director known for his deft eroticism (“Call Me By Your Name”), didn’t want it to look like tennis usually does, with a static camera positioned behind the player who is serving, or a wide shot of the court. “That kind of televisual stillness — there’s objectivity,” he said, “which is exactly the opposite of what I was going after.”
Instead, he wanted the action to mirror the characters’ complicated and sweaty dynamic — for viewers to feel like they were inside the competition, which is as much metaphor as sport. “We were asking ourselves all the time, are we really giving a kinetic experience, an intimate experience, for an audience? And are we translating that into something that can emotionally resonate?” he said in a recent video interview.
But when production started, Guadagnino was a neophyte: “I was completely ignorant about tennis,” he said. Perhaps that’s why he was able to envision unique shots, like one that is below the net, or another where the camera is the ball, giving a spinning view as it hurtles across the court.
Revved by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s techno score, the visuals are naturalism on overdrive. But even with an assist from special effects, the tennis proved hard to shoot; the 10-minute finale game took eight months to produce. It was, Guadagnino said, “a very, very, very laborious movie.”
In separate video interviews, Guadagnino, the Thai cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom and Brad Gilbert, the American tennis pro turned coach and commentator, who served as a consultant on the film, explained how they created the vigorous love-set-match moments.
Invisible Games and Pool Sharks
Guadagnino began by storyboarding, “which I never do,” he said. He also had a miniature court built, moving the figures by hand as he channeled Jean-Luc Godard, an avid player who used the game as a motif in his films. “I had him in my mind all the time,” Guadagnino said.
Another inspiration came from Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1966 film, “Blow-Up,” in which the characters play an invisible match, miming as if they had rackets and balls. The “Challengers” cast effectively did this too, since many of their games were visual effects.
One scene Guadagnino referred to directly came from Alfred Hitchcock’s 1951 thriller, “Strangers on a Train” — “for me, the greatest tennis match seen onscreen,” he said. “You have that amazing shot, that we cheekily homaged, where everyone is looking at the match and the only person who is not looking at the match is the lead,” who’s staring intently ahead as the camera zooms in. In “Challengers,” that moment is replicated with Zendaya, playing a tennis phenom turned coach, as the spectator focused on her husband (Faist) battling his frenemy (O’Connor).
For Mukdeeprom, watching tennis movies only revealed “that they are facing the same problem that I am,” he said, laughing. He also screened Martin Scorsese’s “The Color of Money,” from 1986, which is about pool sharks, but the sensibility was similar. “We talk more about the ambience of the movie, the setting itself, than the tennis,” he said.
So Did They Actually Play Tennis?
Yes and no. The cast trained together for six weeks at a country club outside Boston, coached by Gilbert with help from his wife, Kim Gilbert. Faist had played in high school, which both helped and hurt. “The hardest thing for Mike was, his character was defined to have a one-handed backhand,” Brad Gilbert said. “He had a two-handed backhand — he had never hit a one-handed.”
Gilbert also devised how the sets would go, choreographing volleys to meet Guadagnino’s requests for a particular rhythm. The crew quickly realized it would be impossible to have real play that precisely matched Justin Kuritzkes’s script, especially in repeated takes. Their solution: Remove the rackets, and the ball. The actors held only the racket handle, whooshing the air with professional intensity. The rest was computer generated.
Tests That Failed; Legs That Didn’t
Guadagnino’s idea for a ball’s-view shot led to a chain of questions — what was the trajectory? How fast would it go? — and many preproduction tests, said Mukdeeprom, as they initially hoped to create it without visual effects. They tried versions without the net or with a bounce; they had their dolly crew, which moves the camera, run at top speed. It wasn’t fast enough. “And the movement looked weird, it didn’t look natural,” Mukdeeprom said.
Other setups had easier real-world solutions: For the under-the-net shot, the cinematographer built a platform for the actors, with the camera below, and a carefully plotted horizon line to center viewers.
The filmmakers themselves were often staging on the court. In one moment, Faist’s character is leaping over the net as Guadagnino was on the ground beneath, peering with his viewfinder. “Thank God for the athleticism and the gentlemanship of Mike Faist,” Guadagnino said. “He jumped over me in the nick of time.”