Deadline’s Read the Screenplay series spotlighting the scripts behind awards season’s buzziest movies continues with Queer, the ambitious adaptation of William S. Burroughs’ never-completed novel. The A24 drama starring Daniel Craig reteams the Challengers duo of writer Justin Kuritzkes and director Luca Guadagnino.
Queer had its world premiere in August at the Venice Film Festival, screened at major festival galas including at TIFF and New York and had a limited release over Thanksgiving weekend, gaining steam in its expansion ever since. It’s also become an awards magnet for Craig, who was named Best Actor by the National Board of Review and scored Golden Globes and Critics Choice noms.
Queer has been a passion project for Guadagnino, who first read the novel (it was eventually published in 1985) as a teen in Palermo and began writing a script for it at age 21; he says he still has the first draft on a floppy disk somewhere.
Guadagnino sparked to the story of William Lee, Burroughs’ alter ego, and his time as an ex-pat in Mexico City in the 1940s exploring his sexuality (and heroin — it is Burroughs after all). William meets and falls deeply in love with an American serviceman (Eugene Allerton in the movie, played by Drew Starkey), only to have it end in rejection. Ultimately, “we’re telling a love story, in particular the tragedy of being rejected in love, but despite that rejection, carrying on,” Guadagnino says.
In real life, Burroughs began writing Queer in the early 1950s just after the infamous incident in which he accidentally shot and killed his second wife, Joan Vollmer, at a drunken party. He began the short novel while awaiting trial; he never was able to complete the novel but went on in quick succession to write Junkie and Naked Lunch, seminal works that cemented him alongside pals Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg as a Beat-era icon.
Guadagnino thought of Kuritzkes after the two were doubles partners on Challengers, the love-triangle tennis pic that starred Zendaya, Josh O’Connor and Mike Faist. Guadagnino snapped up the Queer rights he had been seeking for years during that film’s production and approached Kuritzkes, a New York playwright whose Challengers script was his first produced screenplay.
Kuritzkes accepted the new challenge that included finding an ending for Burroughs’ unfinished work.
“While Queer depicts a very specific time and place, its themes — longing, loneliness, and the limits of what we can seek in another person; what they can do for us, and what we must do for ourselves — remain universal,” Kuritzkes says. “Though it may not always feel like a love story, it’s fundamentally a story about love. Indeed, it was a book about all the things I had been going after in my own work for as long as I’d been writing.”
Check out the script below.
