There wasn't that kind of clarity from a musical position on Queer. He threw out lots of different things that were kind of riddles to solve, but, eventually, what we decided on was leaning into Burroughs and the idea of the cut-up technique and using samplers. It felt like an organic way to tell the story musically.

Reznor: I just found some notes from a call with Luca. So I'll read [them to] you. Here was our directions: "Love could feel like dread—Stockhausen. Lee towards lover—engulfing, overwhelming, an uncompromising approach. He's a broken, lonely man—unknown reciprocation, unsure throughout, but still beautiful. I like the scale of an orchestra—bipolar. Make the score bipolar. Burroughs was like this, from Old America, but contemporary—the score should be like that. Maybe electronic element—Ayahuasca." Okay—go write a score.

the original cut was significantly longer, at least an hour longer than what's in theaters now. And a lot of what was taken out was a more surreal element that was exciting and alters the way the film feels quite a bit. When a lot of that got removed, it was hard for us to understand what the film became, because it shifted the tone of it quite a bit in certain ways.

It became disorienting at times to also quantify the impact the whole film has. You know what I mean? We're watching three-minute chunks, a week of this three-minute and then a week of that seven-minute segment, assuming it sits atop the scaffolding that got us there and leads to what's happening.

sometimes, when you start taking those pieces out, it becomes harder to understand. What you're working on is now affected because it doesn't have that stuff you know is there because you watched it, but it's not there. That's the part of filmmaking that I find tricky. We've experienced it with [David] Fincher as well on some things. To be able, as a director, to remain objective with that many moving parts, that's what feels... When people have said, “Do you ever think about directing?”—it's like, I've thought about how I know I couldn't do it. I thought about, “Well, I'd like to do it,” but it's like, the ability to be able to remain objective about so many things, that feels daunting to me. And as composers we feel like we're able to microscope in to get really close up on things.

Challengers is filled with details like that, people and places that may not matter to the drama but are integral to dropping us into a world that feels authentic and joyful. Joyful because Guadagnino’s delight in them is contagious; you can feel his affection for every cheap hotel and country club tennis court and all of the unimportant people whose lives are built around them. There are a lot of wonderful, trashy American locations in this movie and every one of them Guadagnino films as if it were a beautiful villa somewhere in Northern Italy.

And you always get the sense that they love what they’re doing, leaning deep into their material and capturing it with a cinematic verve that is often unexpected but never pretentious. Even when I feel totally lost to the plot of Guadagnino’s Suspiria, I can feel his love for the theatricality of Tilda Swinton’s old age makeup or the fountaining blood pumps that end the film.

Challengers is filled with details like that, people and places that may not matter to the drama but are integral to dropping us into a world that feels authentic and joyful. Joyful because Guadagnino’s delight in them is contagious; you can feel his affection for every cheap hotel and country club tennis court and all of the unimportant people whose lives are built around them. There are a lot of wonderful, trashy American locations in this movie and every one of them Guadagnino films as if it were a beautiful villa somewhere in Northern Italy.

These movies could exist without the guys who directed them…but they would be shells of what they are now. Demme and Guadagnino bring their love for character, for actors, for bodies, for genre, for the camera, for music, for landscape, for Applebee’s, and suddenly what could have been just very good becomes truly great.