How a Frank Lloyd Wright building inspired the kinetic editing of ‘Challengers’

When Marco Costa joined Luca Guadagnino‘s “Challengers,” the editor was excited because he loves tennis and plays a little himself. “But Luca said to me, ‘My movie is not about tennis. It’s about people,'” Costa tells Gold Derby (watch above). “It was right. This is not a tennis movie. This is not a sport movie, but it’s a movie about people.”

Indeed, tennis merely serves as the court (no pun intended) on which the sexual politics play out. Tashi (Zendaya) is a former prodigy whose career was derailed by a knee injury. She now coaches her husband Art (Mike Faist), a six-time Grand Slam champ who’s been struggling. To get his form back, she enters him in a Challenger, where journeyman player Patrick (Josh O’Connor), his former BFF and and her former boyfriend, looms on the other side of the draw. Their final match serves as the framing device as the film moves through the trio’s 13-year history.

Since “Challengers” is not a tennis movie, it wasn’t cut like one either. You won’t find long rallies observed from the baseline in here. Costa employed quick cuts, sharp angles, tight close-ups, and drawn-out slo-mo exchanges, frequently ping-ponging back and forth between the three points of the love triangle to create a dynamism and nail-biting tension that’s less about who’s going to win the match and more about what each character would do next. Guadagnino, naturally, gave Costa a non-sports point of reference.

“He said, ‘I want a modernist editing,'” Costa recalls. “And I really didn’t get what he meant because what are you into? And he showed me a picture of a building, a modernist building designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. It was fantastic. He said, ‘I want my movie edited like this.’ It was incredible because you can see the geometry, you can see the different layers. Sow when I saw the picture, I completely understood what Luca wanted to add, what kind of language, what kind of shape. Because we tried a lot to make shapes in the movie because actually the movie is based on the shape of the triangle.”

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Costa applied this off the court as well. During Tashi, Art, and Patrick’s first conversation at the Adidas party in 2006, the film cuts to Tashi in between shots of Art and Patrick. “And then, in a specific moment,” Costa notes, “we decided to cut from Art to Patrick because it’s a triangle where all points are connected and linked.”

The film plays with form the most in the final act when the match reaches its climax. Part of a rally is shown from the POV of the tennis ball itself as it’s being pummeled back and forth between Art and Patrick, while another portion is shot from underneath the court. Guadagnino and the visual effects team put together the ball POV sequence, and Costa cut together the whole thing without Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross‘ thumping electronic score or any temp music so the tennis could be the focus.

“For me and for Luca, there is an idea of dance behind the way Luca staged the tennis sequence because you can see they are dancing. And you remind me of another reference I used for this movie: ‘Cabaret’ by Bob Fosse,” Costa says. “Because the tennis sequence, for me, is like a dance, and of course, the music that also kind of makes sense beneath the court shot. The tennis court, for me, is a dance floor. And also it’s like the net is like a mirror. So we create a lot of complementary action, complementary movements between Art and Patrick. So if you look, some precise moments in the movie, you can see that one actor, one character complete the movement of the other.”

The biggest moment of “Challengers” comes right before that unhinged rally. Serving down match point, Patrick is about to throw away the match, as he had promised Tashi the night before, but just as he’s about to start his tomahawk service motion, he pauses. In a long slo-mo, he places the ball in the neck of the racquet to serve, signaling to Art, just like 13 years earlier, that he had had sex with Tashi. It’s a moment that the audience can see coming right before it happens — and one that Costa wanted everyone to savor.

“We were waiting for this moment, so we decided to take a lot of time,” he says. “I mean, we need to focus in this moment. We need to enjoy this moment. So we didn’t decide to speed it up but to enjoy every frame of this new motion and to see the expression, how Patrick’s expression changed, and how the expression of Art changed. And also Tashi. I really loved that moment.”