“Tennis is an amazing sport to think about a love triangle because it’s so deeply charged erotically," says Justin Kuritzkes, screenwriter for the new film Challengers, starring Zendaya. "Tennis is a game that’s so steeped in repression, but also in wild abandon. There’s all these rigid rules and prescriptions of movement and boxes that the ball has to fall into. It’s all so tightly organized and yet, once the ball is in play, physics takes over and it’s wild chaos. You see these two people responding to each other in an almost instinctual and subconscious way. So, it felt like there was a lot of energy in tennis that was exciting to me cinematically.”

In this episode of the Write On podcast, Justin talks about using tennis as a metaphor for relationships, the complicated choices his characters make, and the challenges going from playwright to screenwriter. 
 
“It’s really useful to have some knowledge of yourself as a dramatist or as a storyteller before you go into writing a screenplay because screenplays are so unforgiving. If you’ve already been working as a playwright or novelist, you’ve got an advantage there. The main thing I was focusing on writing Challengers was that I wanted to feel like I could see the movie on the page because it was a movie I really wanted to watch…You can’t tell if something is good as you’re writing it. You can’t tell if something is going to be a safe bet for anybody to make. All you can tell is if the movie is alive to you. If that’s true, there is a chance that the movie will be alive on the page for other people, to the point where they’ll want to make it with you,” he says. 

To hear more from Justin, listen to the podcast. 

“We had to go back to the ratings board five times. It was a long journey. You have to laugh sometimes, because we had some really grotesque imagery in our film. We even have a demon phallus in the film and nobody was worried about that. It was really the image of the vagina that was getting us that rating,” says Arkasha Stevenson, director, and co-screenwriter for The First Omen, about initially getting an NC17 rating from the Motion Picture Association. After much back and forth, the film is now rated R. 

The First Omen was written by Tim Smith and Arkasha Stevenson with Stevenson also directing. The film is a prequel to the classic horror film The Omen (1976) and stays true to the narrative that brings Damian, the antichrist, into the world. But keeping faithful to the original film proved to be challenging in a number of ways. 

“Because we grew up on The Omen,” says Stevenson, “it has such a special place in our hearts. We knew that it has such a special place every horror fan’s heart, too… We didn't want to tarnish anything, so trying to find a balance where we were trying to create something new, and have our own world, and characters and messages within that, but also pay homage to the original omen, and also have tie-ins and callbacks – it was interesting to try and figure out how to have a conversation with the original film,” she says.

We also discuss how the film explores the theme of control over women’s bodies and how the current political climate factored into the story considering abortion is such a hot-button issue. To hear more about the writing of the film and how Stevenson and Smith came to the project, listen to the podcast.