Long before Challengers was a twinkle in anyone’s eye, screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes was playing around in Photo Booth and uploading videos to YouTube. The most famous of these is “Potion Seller,” in which a medieval-sounding man asks a potion seller repeatedly for his strongest potion before he heads into battle. It has been viewed over 12 million times since its upload in 2011, and we now know at least one of them was director Luca Guadagnino.
Guadagnino had no idea about Kurtizkes’ YouTube career when he first agreed to collaborate on Challengers, the screenwriter told The A.V. Club at the Writers Guild Awards on Saturday night, but he has certainly seen “Potion Seller” since. “We were in his office in preproduction, and he was interviewing crew members on Zoom,” the writer told us on the red carpet. “He was interviewing someone to be the sound mixer, and I was in the background. And she saw me and recognized me. She didn’t know I had written the film, but she recognized me as Potion Seller. And Luca said, ‘What is Potion Seller?’ And I showed it to him there.” Did he enjoy it? “You’d have to ask him,” Kuritzkes demurs.
Elsewhere in the conversation, Kuritzkes offered some insight into why the film was set largely in 2019. Yes, there was the obvious elephant in the room that they wanted to avoid—COVID—but there were other practical reasons for labeling the year 2019 that Kuritzkes says took precedence over that. “If you need to hand this over to dozens of different department heads who are going to create their teenage years, they’re going to have to know what year that is, right?” He says. Kuritzkes goes on to say that athletes have a fairly narrow timeline of when they can be athletes, so setting the finale in 2019 allowed the beginning of the movie to take place in 2006. “I was really thinking about it as the lifespan of an athletic career,” he says. “It begins when you’re 18 and they can start making money off of you, and it ends when you’re in your 30s and you’re useless.” Tashi Duncan would agree.
