Queer is the latest film from Luca Guadagnino. It is an adaptation of a William S Burroughs novella and tells the story of William Lee (Daniel Craig), a gay man living in 1950s Mexico who falls in love with a newcomer. The film is written by the novelist and playwright Justin Kuritzkes who wrote the script for Guadagnino’s smash hit, Challengers. We spoke with Kuritzkes to find out about adapting  the script and working with Guadagnino for a second time.

 

You were working on Challengers when Luca asked you to adapt the script for Queer. Was the draw working with Luca again, the chance to adapt Burrough’s work or a combination of both?
It was both. Anything that Luca asks me to do, I’m incredibly honoured by. It’s been an incredibly joyful thing to get to work with Luca so any opportunity I have to do that again, I’m always pretty keen to do it. In the case of Queer, we were on set for Challengers, and Luca told me that this was a book that he had been wanting to make into a movie for 30 years. There’s this book that meant a lot to him, and he handed it to me and said, read this tonight and tell me if you’ll adapt it for me. I went home and read it that night, and I immediately said yes, even though I had no idea how I was going to turn it into a film on the page; the idea of Luca making this movie was just too exciting to me. And so, I felt like if there was anything I could do to help make that happen, I just had to do it.

Adapting something that means so much to a filmmaker is a lot of pressure. Were you daunted?
I felt this tremendous sense of honour that he would even think of trusting me with it, but also this tremendous sense of responsibility, not just to Luca, which was my primary responsibility because he’s my friend, and I wanted to give him this. I wanted to make it possible for him to make this movie he had been dreaming about, but also this responsibility to Burroughs and to people who love Burroughs. Burroughs is a person who means a lot to a lot of people. So, it was incredibly daunting. The only thing that made that not paralyzing was that I was so excited by the idea of Luca making this movie that I started to very selfishly write scenes that I was excited to watch him direct; the energy of that excitement pushed me through any fear that I had.

Did you have to do a deep dive into all of Burroughs’s material or solely focus on the novella?
A mixture of both. My first job was to just be a good reader or try to be a good reader and try to really figure out what was essential in the book so that I could feel free enough to adjust things if I needed to. And then, of course, I had to go back into Burroughs’s whole canon and read everything. We made this decision really early on that we were not making a William S Burroughs biopic. We were making a movie about this particular character presented in this particular book. There was this constant negotiation that I was doing as I was writing, which was balancing fidelity to the book with wanting to get a full picture of who this character is and needing to bring in some of the things from Burroughs’s other work or from his life, in order to make William Lee feel full.

The novella doesn’t have an ending. Was it liberating for you to be able to go anywhere you wanted with the story?
I think what was exciting about that about the choice we made to end our movie the way we did, is that it felt like the book kind of opened a door and then quickly closed it.  Luca and I were both really excited by the idea of opening the door and walking through and seeing what was on the other side, you know? I knew that I was going to go there even as I was writing the earlier sections of the screenplay that are more or less faithful to the book. It ended up colouring the whole process, and that was incredibly exciting because, all of a sudden, I got to a point in the screenplay where I wasn’t translating something literary into something cinematic. I was just writing from the pure place of cinema.

The final act of the film changes direction without revealing too much. How do you approach writing that on the page? Is it a case of more writing down ideas? I imagine it’s hard to technically script something when it becomes surreal.
It’s a balance you’re always dealing with in every screenplay, which is that, on the one hand, you want to write something that’s going to be a meaningful and exciting reading experience and make people feel like they’ve watched the movie. And on the other hand, you’re trying to write something that’s going to serve as a very practical document that hundreds of people are going to use to do their jobs every day. In the case of the ending sequence, you need to give people an idea of what they’re showing up for. At the same time, I was able to draw on a lot of the approaches that I would use in a play or a novel. The stage directions in a play are not always a step-by-step instruction manual. They’re often meant to evoke something and to serve as an invitation for people. Knowing that Luca was going to be directing this movie, I felt really confident in writing sequences that I wouldn’t ever hand to any other director. I knew that if I gave that to Luca, he would not just step up to the challenge of it but take a massive swing at it because that’s the only way he knows how to make a movie.

As this is your second time working with Luca, do you have a shorthand now?
Challengers was a movie I wrote on spec, just because it was a movie I wanted to see, but I wrote it before I knew Luca or Zendaya or anybody I worked on that movie with and then through writing that script, I got to meet all of these incredible people, but Queer, I knew from page one that I was writing it for Luca. What that amounted to was that I was writing scenes that I was excited to watch him direct,  and really writing scenes that were through the lens of his cinema, which was something I was getting a very close hand experience of because we were on set for Challengers while I started writing Queer. It was this really amazing experience of coming home from watching Luca direct and helping Luca make this movie all day and then writing a movie that I was like, selfishly, really excited to watch him make.

Was it hard to have your brain in two places at once? Did you ever find your Challenger’s brain meeting your Queer brain and getting muddled in the middle?
Probably, but in a way, it’s a relief when you’re on set for a movie to have something else to focus on when you come home because it’s such a totalising experience, and in a way, I found it really useful to have something to have another project to occupy my brain.

What is it like to have two incredibly creative people together in your household? Are you trading scripts and dialogue over breakfast? How does that dynamic work? [Kuritzkes is married to Celine Song who wrote and directed the Oscar nominated Past Lives].
We’re each other’s first readers, and we’re each other’s harshest critics, and we try to really support each other as best we can. We keep our work very separate, but we do that so that we can be there for each other in the way that we want to be. Anyone would become a better writer by living with Celine Song, so, yeah, I’m very lucky for many reasons.

Words – Cara O’Doherty

QUEER is at Irish cinemas from Dec 13th