Tennis Maestro Brad Gilbert on Making ‘Challengers’ a Phenomenon on and Off the Court
On December 5, the IndieWire Honors Winter 2024 ceremony will celebrate the creators and stars responsible for crafting some of the year’s best films. Curated and selected by IndieWire’s editorial team, IndieWire Honors is a celebration of the filmmakers, artisans, and performers behind films well worth toasting. We’re showcasing their work with new interviews leading up to the Los Angeles event.
Ahead, tennis icon Brad Gilbert tells IndieWire how his unforgettable collaboration with this year’s Impact Award winners — Luca Guadagnino, Justin Kuritzkes, Amy Pascal, and Rachel O’Connor — helped turn the movie into a global phenomenon.
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I was really happy with the work that Mike Faist, Josh O’Connor, and Zendaya put in to make their characters come to fruition on “Challengers.” They put in the work, and it was a great experience with all of them. And Luca’s vision! Tennis for all of them wasn’t something that was really on their radar. For them to make this project what it was, it was fun being a part of.
Screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes learned a lot about tennis during the pandemic, which is crazy that it was four and a half years ago already. He didn’t really know much about tennis, and when his grandfather passed away, he became really passionate about tennis and began to study it and write the script.
I wasn’t familiar with Luca. I was a little bit familiar with producer Amy Pascal because my daughter, Julie Gilbert, was working for her. Obviously, I watched “Call Me By Your Name,” but I was focused on what I needed to do, and you could see early on that Luca is a visionary in how he sees things. They kind of changed the script quite a bit on the fly.
I spent about six weeks in Malibu and L.A. before we got to Boston to shoot the movie. The cool thing was we had been almost two months in Boston with the team. I got to help Mike start before we got to Boston. Josh had never played, and he was working on a film in Italy [“La Chimera”], so he arrived last. All three of them put in the hard yards. Zendaya is incredibly focused, determined, and she’s a pleasure to work with. She’s so dedicated and I would say very humble.
Mike was coming from “West Side Story,” where I think he had to starve himself for that. Luca wanted him to be a lot stronger, like a tennis player. Not too bulky, but he wanted him to be ripped. He had to go from low 140s to 175, and literally, at 5:30, he’d go to this diner, and he’d start every morning with an eight-egg omelet. We had practice start 7 to 9, then he’d go right to working out. They would have prepared chicken and rice for him at 8:30. He had to work hard to gain this weight while training.
Josh, who was probably high 170s and a pretty big guy, 6’2 1/2,” they didn’t want him getting any heavier. He almost had to watch his calories. Besides our practice, working out in the gym, learning our points, and them going to doing their acting and their scenes, it was a full day, Monday to Friday, for those guys for a solid seven weeks before we even started shooting the movie.
Amy had my daughter read the script, and they were already deciding to go forward. At that point, on board were Amy, Rachel O’Connor, and Luca, and Zendaya. They didn’t have anyone who knew anything about tennis at that point, and my daughter happened to mention, “My dad is the tennis guy. You should talk to my dad.” In 2022, I had a Zoom with them, and we did another Zoom, and the next thing you know, I was on the project, and that’s when I got together with Zendaya and got her working out in the gym in L.A. and we started practicing. I had to write the points because Justin had how he wanted things — such and such wins this or that — but we had to develop the points. From there, once we got to Boston, Luca said, “I want it to be shorter, I want it to be longer.” There was a lot of tinkering, but it was a very interesting process.
It was a really fun experience, and it was a new experience for me, and now I’m working on another film. It’s called “The Dink.” It’s a Ben Stiller comedy, tennis but mostly pickle.
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