How They Served the Tennis Scenes in 'Challengers'

"Let's not make a tennis film."

That was the director Luca Guadagnino's unconventional approach to "Challengers," the hit movie starring Zendaya, Mike Faist and Josh O'Connor as rival tennis aces, locked in a high-stakes love triangle.

Guadagnino, the Italian director known for his deft eroticism ("Call Me By Your Name"), didn't want it to look like tennis usually does, with a static camera positioned behind the player who is serving, or a wide shot of the court. "That kind of televisual stillness — there's objectivity," he said, "which is exactly the opposite of what I was going after."

Instead, he wanted the action to mirror the characters' complicated and sweaty dynamic — for viewers to feel like they were inside the competition, which is as much metaphor as sport. "We were asking ourselves all the time, are we really giving a kinetic experience, an intimate experience, for an audience? And are we translating that into something that can emotionally resonate?" he said in a recent video interview.

But when production started, Guadagnino was a neophyte: "I was completely ignorant about tennis," he said. Perhaps that's why he was able to envision unique shots, like one that is below the net, or another where the camera is the ball, giving a spinning view as it hurtles across the court.

Revved by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross's techno score, the visuals are naturalism on overdrive. But even with an assist from special effects, the tennis proved hard to shoot; the 10-minute finale game took eight months to produce. It was, Guadagnino said, "a very, very, very laborious movie."

In separate video interviews, Guadagnino, the Thai cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom and Brad Gilbert, the American tennis pro turned coach and commentator, who served as a consultant on the film, explained how they created the vigorous love-set-match moments.

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