Luca Guadagnino is a loyal collaborator. He has worked with Timothée Charamet And Dakota Johnson twice, Tilda Swinton four times, but the people he worked with are usually his screenwriter. Over the years, Indiewire has spoken several times with Guadagninos Go-Tos, David Kajganich and Justin KuritzkesEach time to learn more about what it takes to collaborate with one of the film’s most respected and revered filmmakers.
Kajganich is known for having money Guadagnino’s adaptations of “A Bigger Splash”, “Suspiria” and “Bones and All”, while Kuritzkes wrote “Challengers” as a spec manus, to get the filmmaker to later ask him to help imagine the script for Williad. Continue reading below to find out the lessons they learned to work with the subversive yet attractive creative.
Research, then adapt
IN An interview 2018 with IndieWires Jamie RighettiKajganich said that his reimaginating Dario Argentos Giallo classic “Suspiria” began with facts, not imagination.
“I went into just hard research on the history of sorcery, about that kind of esoteric iconography,” he said. “I did a lot of research that was really about how sorcery and fear of witches were really a fear of female empowerment. And how the two things … The feminist movement and this fear of the occult had points where they crossed paths, because they are in a relationship with each other historically, in the sense that it has something to do.
“So I just wanted to try to build something that had a foot in actual research on sorcery and a foot in … the transition and subversive stories of female empowerment,” Kajganich said. “(I was) to just try to find out as practically as possible what a real coven in Berlin 1977 can look like and how it can behave and what their rituals can mean.”
Although horror was natural for this story, Kajganich and Guadagnino did not want to offer Troper.
“Horror is a genre like Traffic in the environment, so when the last girl Trope is used well, it is about the anxiety to be a woman inside the circumstances that are objective or violent towards you,”
Kajganich said. “But in our version, a young woman discovers what is her true identity and what is a source of power that she has control over, which is not only given to her, but that she is the source of.
“She’s not a last girl, exactly, but the mennonite Susie Bannion (Johnson) that you meet in the beginning is not the person you have at the end of film“He said.” I think what I would say if it is, in most horror movies, that the protagonist is just the object of the film’s violence, about the film’s threat. We wanted Susie to be sometimes, and certainly at the end, the subject of the film’s fear. For me, that distinction is pretty good. “
Take the reasonable risk
“Bones and All” is based on Camille Deangelis 2015 novel of the same name and would originally be directed by “The Staircase” and “The Devil All The Time” film creator Antonio Campos. Kajganich was already working on the adaptation and believed that Guadagnino would be perfect, but the busy director did not have time to read the book. When Campos ultimately left the project, Kajganich thought it might be a good time to go through its “Suspiria” partner’s commitment.
“When Antonio dropped, I sent my actual script to Luca and asked him to take a look and he read it and he really thought he knew how to make the movie, so he was back on board,” Kajganich said An interview 2022 with indieview Kate Er.. “It was always my original plan, it only took a while to come to be realized.”
While most people can focus on the story’s central heartbeat, which centers around two cannibalist teens hungry in love (Charamet and Taylor Russell), Kajganich knew that Guadagnino’s feelings would be drawn to the physical logistics in the situation.
“I’m a very practical person and I tend to really appreciate when genre films take a practical attitude,” Kajganich said. “When I Read the Book, I Thought many Times as I was Reading It, in Understand The Fairy Tale Conceit of Consuming An Entire Other Person, But If We’re Really Trying To Ground The World of the Movie, It’s Going To Be Impossible For An Audience Weighs, Regardless of What The Components Are (Too Much). If You’ve Ever Tangled with the Bones of a Thanksgiving Turkey, it’s not something you would ever be required.
This may not seem important in the large schedule in the overall story, but working with Guadagnino taught Kajganich never sacrificing the truth for the dramatic.
“I always think practically, movies lose me all the time when they exceed, I always think, what is reasonable and what is necessary to tell the story?” said Kajganich. “When I thought about how many things an audience could accept as a coincidence or endeavor, my tolerance is low, so I tend to write as few aspirations or as few coincidence as possible.”
Look for depth wherever you can
“‘Challenger’ really came out of this desire to have information about the matches I was watching, ‘Kuritzkes told IndieWires Marcus Jones 2024. The screenwriter became obsessed with tennis during the rivalry in 2018 between Serena Williams and Naomi Osaka, but what fascinated him imagined what would happen in the players’ mind.
“It was really something that I think many people who see tennis do, which is that you transpose a personality to the player from these little crumbs that you get. That’s what tennis commentators do all the time,” he said. “They see someone doing a little movement or something, and they go,” here is what he thinks. Here is what happens in her mind. “And of course it is total speculation, but I just wanted to speculate on a deeper, more dramatic level.”
Kuritzke’s wife, Celine Song, also made a movie about a love triangle with Oscar-Nominee “Past Lives”, who inspired their own curiosity: spoke their films to reality in their own relationship? Kuritzkes said he uses his writing to expand and explore rather than translate.
“All you have is your own life. That’s how you learn about people. That’s how you learn how people cruise, how people are,” he said. “But writing is always a meeting place between these things. You bring with you what you have and you are moving towards somewhere else.”
Let other voices influence your own
Guadagnino was so impressed by Kuritzkes on “challengers” that he led him a project far close to his heart. While he was still in production at Sports Romance, Guadagnino gave the author a copy of William S. Burrough’s “Queer” and offered him the opportunity to customize it.
“I was so completely honored and concerned that Luca would trust me with this movie,” Kuritzkes said in Another interview with Jones in 2024. “And it was really a process of me trying to be a bridge between these two brilliant guys, these two brilliant artists, William S. Burrough’s on the one hand and Luca on the other and really tried to facilitate this meeting place with the two. To be in the middle of it, I thought so, so pleasing.”
Kuritzkes also felt comfortable enough to add his own voice.
“It’s not like one of the novels written for the screen,” he said. “It’s a pretty wild book, but the characters were there, and the story was there, and the point of view was there, the voice was there. It was a process for the meeting place between Burrough’s voice and his point of view, and my voice and my point of view, and then Luca’s voice and his point of view and tried to keep everything.”
Since Kuritzkes had just worked with Guadagnino on “Challengers”, he knew how to write directly to the director’s style.
“I was already thinking about it filmically through his film, through Luca’s vision, which was a really rewarding and fantastic way to write a script because it only shortens the process,” Kuritzkes said. “I finished the first draft of it, and then we could really put it together because it was already a movie he was ready to make, a movie he knew how to do it.”
