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      How They Served the Tennis Scenes in ‘Challengers’

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      Painstaking effort went into building the energetic competition moments in Luca Guadagnino’s love-triangle tennis drama. Here’s a closer look at the process.“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.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Television

      What’s on TV This Week: ‘Catfish’ and ‘Welcome to Wrexham’

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      The show, hosted by Nev Schulman and Kamie Crawford, begins its ninth season on MTV. Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney’s soccer series on FX is back for Season 3.For those like me who still haven’t cut the cord, here is a selection of cable and network TV shows, movies and specials that broadcast this week, April 29-May 5. Details and times are subject to change.MondayERIN BROCKOVICH (2000) 8 p.m. on Pop. Anyone growing up with dreams of saving the world can probably find inspiration in Julia Roberts’s performance as Erin Brockovich. She is a single mom down to her last few dollars, but she’s smart and resourceful and possesses highly developed investigative Spidey senses. Based on a true story, this fictionalized movie follows Brockovich as she gets a low-level job at a law firm and finds a cover-up of toxic exposure that is threatening lives. A.O. Scott, in his review for The New York Times noted that after a robust, creative opening, Roberts and the director, Steven Soderbergh, rely heavily on clichés, and Scott ruefully submits to the same technique, writing that the movie “will make you laugh. It will make you cry. It will make you stand up and cheer. ‘Erin Brockovich’ is the feel-good movie of the year.”From left: Cher and Nicolas Cage in “Moonstruck.”MGMMOONSTRUCK (1987) 8 p.m. on TCM. If you’re in the mood for desire on Monday night instead of the fighting spirit of Erin Brockovich, see Cher and Nicolas Cage in this slightly chaotic but ultimately dreamy romantic comedy. Cher plays Loretta, a widow who finds herself falling in love with her new boyfriend’s younger brother, Ronny (Cage). This movie offers “further proof that Cher has evolved into the kind of larger-than-life movie star who’s worth watching whatever she does,” Janet Maslin wrote in her review for The Times.TuesdayCATFISH 8 p.m. on MTV. In an ideal world, anytime someone ghosts you on a dating app, Nev Schulman and Kamie Crawford (and let’s throw Max Joseph into this fantasy for old times’s sake) would materialize next to you and put that person in their place. And for the people who write in to the show — that is basically what happens. “Each episode unfolds like a detective show, with the, host Nev Schulman, summoned to untangle truth from lies, to take relationships that exist only on computers and phones and drag them into our three-dimensional reality,” Maya Salam wrote in a recent feature in The Times about the show, which is back for its ninth season.WednesdayPRISONER IN RUSSIA: THE BRITTNEY GRINER INTERVIEW 10 p.m. on ABC. In March of 2022, Brittney Griner, a WNBA center, was detained in Russia on drug charges. She ended up pleading guilty in a Russian court and being sentenced to nine years in prison. In December of that year, nearly 10 months later, she was released via a prisoner swap for Viktor Bout, a Russian arms dealer. For the first time, she is sitting down for an interview — with Robin Roberts — to discuss her time in prison.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      With ‘Challengers’ and ‘Saltburn,’ Hollywood Movies Embrace Sex Again

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      Studios obsessively focused on PG-13 franchises and animation in recent years, but movies like “Challengers” and “Saltburn” show eroticism has returned.Zendaya, clad in a skintight dress, gyrates on a dance floor in “Challengers,” a $56 million sports drama that arrived in multiplexes on Friday. “It’s getting hot in here,” the hip-hop soundtrack intones, as she closes her eyes and runs her hands through her hair, lost in fantasy. “So take off all your clothes.”The story continues at a motel, where Zendaya, playing a tennis prodigy, begins a ménage à trois with two guys; it fizzles after they become more interested in each other. The plot moves on — to sultry interplay on the hood of a car, in a dorm room, in the back seat of a car, on the wooden slats of a sauna. There is erotic churro eating.“Sex is back!” shouted an apparently elated man at the conclusion of a prerelease “Challengers” screening in West Hollywood, Calif., this month.Trend spotting in cinema is a hazardous pursuit. Think about how many times the rom-com has been declared dead — and alive — and dead. (No, wait, alive.) But this much can be said with surety: Hollywood is hornier than it has been in years.“It absolutely feels like the pendulum has swung back toward filmmakers exploring adult relationships and sexuality in their projects,” said Amy Pascal, the former chairwoman of Sony Pictures and producing force behind “Challengers.”“I welcome that,” she added.Eroticism was common in studio hits like “Basic Instinct,” starring Sharon Stone, in the 1980s and ’90s.Rialto PicturesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘The Interview’ Podcast: Anne Hathaway

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      This is the debut of The Interview, The New York Times’s new weekly series, featuring in-depth conversations with fascinating people. Each week, David Marchese or Lulu Garcia-Navarro will speak with notable figures in the worlds of culture, politics, business, sports, wellness and beyond. Like the Magazine’s former Talk column, the conversations will appear online and in print, but now you can also listen to them in our new weekly podcast, “The Interview,” which is available wherever you get your podcasts. Below, you’ll find David’s first interview with the actress Anne Hathaway; Lulu’s first interview, with the Israeli opposition leader Yair Lapid, is here.Listen to the conversation with Anne HathawayOn the debut of ’The Interview,’ the actress talks to David Marchese about learning to let go of other people’s opinions.On one level, Anne Hathaway’s new movie, “The Idea of You,” which arrives on Prime Video on May 2 and is directed by Michael Showalter, couldn’t be more straightforward. It’s an adaptation of Robinne Lee’s hit romance novel about Solène, a divorced 40-year-old mom played by Hathaway, who winds up in a relationship with a much younger man — a singer in a boy band, played by Nicholas Galitzine. Warmhearted and with unabashed mainstream appeal, the film is a return for the New Jersey-raised actress, who has fruitfully spent much of her time lately playing thornier characters in indie films, to the kinds of charming fish-out-of-water tales that first helped bring her to stardom, like “The Princess Diaries” and “The Devil Wears Prada.” This time, though, instead of being the plucky ingénue thrust into a glamorous, high-pressure situation, Hathaway is playing a character who’s coming into a new world a little less starry-eyed, and with a firmer sense of self.But “The Idea of You” also works on another, more complicated, even self-referential level. It’s a movie about a woman pushing against societal expectations and getting a lot of grief for it, which is something Hathaway, 41, knows about. More than a decade ago, around the time she won an Academy Award for her work in “Les Misérables,” the online commentariat turned on Hathaway for … who knows, exactly? Some strange groupthink kicked in that caused people to pile on her for seeming like an inauthentic striver — or something. Other than as a case study in the inexplicable and random cruelty of the internet, the whole phenomenon, described at the time as Hathahate, makes even less sense now than it did then.Since that time, Hathaway told me when we talked twice last month, she has been learning to let go of other people’s opinions and expectations of her as an actress, a celebrity and a human being. This has made her work even more compelling to watch and made her more guarded as a public figure. “I really like expressing myself through my work,” says Hathaway, who after so many years and so many great performances is still figuring out the best way to play the puzzling real-life part of a famous actress.There are a bunch of things that are intriguing to me about the new movie. One of them is that there are a few of what I took to be Anne Hathaway psychological Easter eggs sprinkled throughout the film. I’ll get to those, but first: You haven’t done a romance in a while. Can you talk to me about why you wanted to do “The Idea of You”? It’s such a softball question, and I can feel my brain complicating it. More

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      Watch Mike Faist and Josh O’Connor Spar Over Churros in ‘Challengers’

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      The director Luca Guadagnino narrates a tense scene between the two characters.In “Anatomy of a Scene,” we ask directors to reveal the secrets that go into making key scenes in their movies. See new episodes in the series on Fridays. You can also watch our collection of more than 150 videos on YouTube and subscribe to our YouTube channel.Churros have never tasted more bitter than in this scene from “Challengers.”In this sequence, which takes place at Stanford, the character Art (Mike Faist), who is attending the university, reconnects with his dear friend Patrick (Josh O’Connor), who has left education to become a tennis pro. Not present in the scene, yet hanging over it, is Tashi (Zendaya), the woman at the center of their complicated triangle.At this moment, Tashi is dating Patrick, but in this scene, Art is trying to throw a wrench into the relationship. The sequence takes place at the university canteen where the two are chatting over churros. Narrating the sequence, the director Luca Guadagnino said that what is playing out is “a game of rivalry sparkling between these two young boys over Tashi, but at the same time, a jealousy that ignites the relationship also because, probably, these two guys are also jealous of one another.”That tension is played out in the way that Guadagnino shoots the sequence, holding on a long two-shot as the friends discuss Tashi, then cutting when Patrick realizes the game of manipulation that Art is playing.“The main guideline in thinking of this movie and the mise en scène was the classic old Hollywood screwball comedy kind of grammar,” Guadagnino said. “Those great movies were all using, in a beautiful way, the stillness of framing to let the performance breathe in all its ambiguities, in all its unspoken conflicts.”Read the “Challengers” review.Read an interview with the stars of the film.Sign up for the Movies Update newsletter and get a roundup of reviews, news, Critics’ Picks and more. More

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      ‘The Royal Hotel,’ ‘Zola’ and More Streaming Gems

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      Female-centered buddy comedies, rom-coms and Outback thrillers are among the under-the-radar recommendations for your subscription streamers this month.‘The Royal Hotel’ (2023)Stream it on Hulu.Kitty Green’s follow-up to the taut drama “The Assistant” is a feminist riff on the ’70s classic “Wake in Fright,” in which two Canadian tourists who have run out of money in Australia take on a gig as bartenders at a grimy watering hole in the middle of nowhere. “It’s a large mining area,” they’re told, so “you’re going to have to be OK with a little male attention.” For 90 tightly-wound minutes, Green mixes bleary naturalism and baked-in dread, as these modern women are exposed to the handsy, winking Neanderthal clientele, and the bar turns into a ticking time bomb. Julia Garner and Jessica Henwick are empathetic in the leads, while Daniel Henshall is all quiet menace as the establishment’s most boorish regular.‘When You Finish Saving the World’ (2023)Stream it on Netflix.Finn Wolfhard and Julianne Moore in “When You Finish Saving the World.”Karen Kuehn/A24The actor-turned-filmmaker Jesse Eisenberg recently received raves (and an Oscar-friendly fall release date) for his sophomore feature “A Real Pain,” so it’s a fine opportunity to check out his debut film. The “Stranger Things” star Finn Wolfhard is terrific (in, essentially, the Eisenberg role) as a self-important teenage singer-songwriter who tries to get political to impress a girl. Julianne Moore is his mother, a humorless scold whose coldness and impatience are seemingly understandable, as her son is such an insufferable boor. But the more Eisenberg mines the complexity of this toxic relationship, the more we understand and even sympathize with these two difficult people, and lock in on Eisenberg’s exploration of the moral stickiness of trying to do good in a narcissistic world.‘Plan B’ (2020)Stream it on Hulu.From left, Victoria Moroles and Kuhoo Verma in “Plan B.”Brett Roedel/HuluWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Challengers’ Review: Game, Set, Love Matches

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      Zendaya, Josh O’Connor and Mike Faist play friends, lovers and foes on and off the tennis court in Luca Guadagnino’s latest.You can always feel the filmmaker Luca Guadagnino trying to turn you on — he’s a zealous seducer. His movies are sleek divertissements about ravishing people and their often sumptuously rarefied sensibilities and worlds. I tend to like his work, even if it can be overly art-directed and feel too (excuse the verb) curated to stir the soul along with my consumer lust. I am moved when a father tenderly comforts his son in “Call Me by Your Name”; my most vivid memories of “A Bigger Splash” is its striking setting and a dress that Tilda Swinton wears.Guadagnino’s latest, “Challengers,” is about a continually changing love triangle involving two besotted men and a sharp, beautiful woman with killer instincts and personal style. Largely set in the world of professional tennis, it is a fizzy, lightly sexy, enjoyable tease of a movie, and while someone suffers a bad injury and hearts get broken (or at least banged up), for the most part it’s emotionally bloodless. Even so, it’s a welcome break in tone and topic after Guadagnino’s Grand Guignol adventures in “Suspiria,” a take on a Dario Argento horror film, and “Bones and All,” about two pretty cannibals hungrily and moodily adrift.Written by the novelist and playwright Justin Kuritzkes, “Challengers” is fairly straightforward despite its self-consciously tortured narrative timeline. It tracks three tennis prodigies — friends, lovers and foes — across the years through their triumphs and defeats, some shared. When it opens, the troika’s one-time brightest prospect, Tashi (Zendaya), has been retired from playing for a while and is now coaching her husband, Art (Mike Faist), a Grand Slam champ rapidly spiraling downward. In a bid to reset his prospects (he’s a valuable property, for one), he enters a challenger tournament, a kind of minor-league event where lower-ranking professionals compete, including against injured higher-ranking players.That match takes place in New Rochelle, N.Y., an easy drive from Flushing, Queens, and the home of the U.S. Open, which Art has yet to win. It’s while in New Rochelle that he and Tashi dramatically reconnect with Patrick (Josh O’Connor), the errant member of their complicated three-way entanglement. A rich boy who cosplays as poor (well, at least struggling), Patrick met Art when they were children at a tennis academy. By 18, they were tight friends and perhaps something more; the movie coyly leaves just how close to your imagination, even as it fires it up. It’s at that point that they met Tashi, then a fast-rocketing star.Soon after the movie opens in 2019, it jumps to the recent past (“two weeks earlier”) and then starts bouncing around back and forth in time like a ball flying over the net, with the New Rochelle match serving as the story’s frame. (The 2019 date may be a nod to an epic men’s final at Wimbledon that year in which, after nearly five hours, Novak Djokovic beat Roger Federer.) Turning back the clock can be a cheap way to make movies appear more complex than they actually are. Here, though, as the story leaps from past to present — from when Tashi, Art and Patrick were feverishly young to when they were somewhat less young — time begins to blur, underscoring that the passing years haven’t changed much.All three leads in “Challengers” are very appealing, and each brings emotional and psychological nuance to the story, whatever the characters’ current configuration. They’re also just fun to look at, and part of the pleasure of this movie is watching pretty people in states of undress restlessly circling one another, muscles tensed and desiring gazes ricocheting. Guadagnino knows this; he’s in his wheelhouse here, and you can feel his delight in his actors. With the cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom, he shows them off beautifully, caressing them in light so that they look lit from within. Even during the fantastically staged and shot — and very sweaty — New Rochelle match, they glow.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More