‘Queer’ Screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes on Creating an Ending for William S. Burroughs’s Unfinished Classic

This story contains spoilers for the film version of Queer.

The screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes is having one of those Julianne Moore years. Back in 2002, the actress ran an awards campaign that led to her being nominated for two Oscars in the same year, for Todd Haynes’ masterful Far From Heaven (Best Actress) and the grand-divas-of-acting convention (complimentary!) that was The Hours (Best Supporting Actress).

That might just happen for Kuritzkes, thanks to two 2024 collaborations with the filmmaker Luca Guadagnino, arguably the current king of sensual cinema—Challengers, the horny Nicholsesque tennis smash that became a surprise blockbuster in the spring, and the new film Queer, an adaptation of the classic William S. Burroughs novel, which opens in wide release today.

Kuritzkes’ script for Challengers is already up for best screenplay at the Critics’ Choice Awards. And Queer—already named one of the Top Ten Films of 2024 by the National Board of Review—might just put him in contention for the adapted screenplay category.

“It's a very special moment, and one that's hard to really feel the weight of,” he tells me, when we catch up over Zoom. “[These two movies] feel, to me at least, like siblings, just because the story of how they came to be is so wrapped up in each other.”

Guadagnino handed him a copy of the novel on the set of Challengers. “‘Read this tonight and tell me if you'll write it for me,’” he remembers the director telling him. “I started writing Queer while we were still making Challengers, and then finished the first draft of it two weeks after we wrapped.” Three weeks later, Daniel Craig was cast as William Lee, the film’s Burroughs-avatar protagonist. “We really went right from making Challengers,” Kuritzkes says, “to putting Queer together.”

Queer has been a degree less universally embraced by audiences—at least compared to Challengers or Guadagnino’s now-classic Call Me By Your Name. But that’s by design. Burroughs’ novel—while beautiful and in places, transcendent—is messy, knotty, frequently confusing, and ends almost abruptly. If the film version leaves some viewers cold, it should. Why wouldn’t Guadagnino’s adaptation also feel like a dark night of the soul? Sprawling and dark but also a beautiful, emotionally accurate depiction of desire, it’s a film that dares to queer narrative expectations and leave audiences uncomfortable.

Lee, for example, is not the handsome straightlaced graduate student who comes to town in Call Me By Your Name. He’s a messy middle-aged man grappling with an addiction to booze and heroin—and an overwhelming, obsessive desire for Eugene Allerton, a handsome unknowable young American played by Drew Starkey.

If Call Me By Your Name is the J. Crew-wearing, cold brew-guzzling corporate gay with a Manhattan apartment and a healthy 401(k), Queer is the diabolically beautiful evil twin who lives in Bushwick, sniffs poppers for breakfast, and is only ever nebulously employed—messy, unsavory, but who can keep their eyes off him?

Kuritzkes recently caught up with GQ to talk about the process of adapting Burroughs’ novel, helping Guadagnino make his most personal film to date and the D.C. movie they may or may not be making.

GQ: You had never read Queer prior to Luca handing you that copy on the set of Challengers, right? What was your impression of the book when you first read it?

Justin Kurtizkes: First, I was surprised to find that for the most part, Queer was this very straightforward love story. There was a lot of other stuff going on, and it's the same kind of stuff that concerns Burroughs in most of his writing, but Queer sort of stands alone in his canon as this book that for the most part unfolds in a very linear way and is basically focused on the psychology of these two very complicated characters and them trying to get in sync with each other or not. And that was very surprising to me, and that felt immediately very cinematic, or very approachable from the lens of cinema.

And then the other thing I was really surprised by was that Burroughs had cultivated this persona—one that I very much bought into when it came to him—[as] this very austere, cool, gruff, sometimes very macho writer. And in Queer, I found this character William Lee, who was very tender and sweet and embarrassing and kind of funny. And funny because he was, at times, very pathetic—but in a way that I found very relatable. But also very endearing, because he didn't know when to shut up, or he didn't know the wrong thing would come out of his mouth, or he didn't know when to stop pawing at the object of his affection. And that felt like a guy I could reach out and touch in a way that the Drugstore Cowboy Burroughs of popular culture felt very at a distance.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZszbqdOq7g

One thing I find really interesting with your adaptation is that the novel ends abruptly, with Lee and Allerton leaving the jungle without finding what they’re looking for. And obviously that's not where the film ends. For me, what happens instead is one of the best parts of the film. How did you go about finishing an unfinished story? I find it interesting, because he's not just any writer, he's Burroughs. He has a cult, and those people have feelings about these things.

One of the benefits I had when I was writing this script was that I was in Boston with Luca making Challengers. And so I had a couple of weeks to just talk with Luca before I started writing, where we could really go back and forth about the vision for the movie and the ways we wanted to honor the book, and also the ways we wanted to depart from the book. And one of the very early conversations we had was about this moment at the end of the text of Queer where it felt like a door was being opened and then very quickly closed. It felt like the book almost wanted to go through the door, but for whatever reason didn't.

And it's of course always speculation to project that kind of want onto a writer like Burroughs, because who am I to say what Burroughs wanted to do? But it felt, to me, in bringing the book from literature to film, [like] the film wanted to open that door and step through it, and see what was on the other side. And it wasn't obvious to me that if they got what they were looking for or what they thought they were looking for, that that would solve the problem of their relationship. You know what I mean? It felt like, who's to say that they're both going to react the same way to communicating on the level of intuition or to experiencing this deep telepathy? It may actually make them both feel more lonely than they were going in.

And what would that be like? What would it be like to sit with that and to deal with that? And that felt like this very complex thing to explore in a movie. So I knew that Luca and I were on the same page about that. And so that gave me a lot of confidence to do this act of breaking from Burroughs's text. I probably wouldn't have had that confidence if I didn't know who I was writing this movie for.

I love that ending because it's like what you said, it's getting to the top of the mountain and then realizing that that's not enough. Or to put it in Mike Nichols terms, since I know you’re a fan of his work—it's like The Graduate’s ending, right?

Yeah, I love that comparison. I think that there's a real horror in getting what you think you want. Or sometimes you have to get what you think you want to realize what you really want. And you can never really know what you really want because you are just a person. We're not equipped to understand anything, let alone our own psyches.

It's interesting you say that. I kind of see that even in Challengers.

Big time. I think both movies to an extent are pushing towards a climax where people are going to communicate without words, and somehow that communication is going to be deeper and truer than anything they could say to each other. I think that is a sort of unintentional connection that the movies definitely have.

In one way, the book is almost like an exorcism for Burroughs—I mean, we'll get to the wife later. And then at the same time, Luca, in talking about this movie, has said it's his most personal yet, something very important to him. How do you become a partner in that? Knowing that these are the stakes for this person, how do you then be like, ‘Okay, I'm going to help you on this thing you want to accomplish’?

Well, it was very daunting to me. And honestly, when Luca gave me the book and I read it, I said yes immediately, but I then immediately afterwards was completely scared shitless because I didn't know how I was going to write this as a movie because even though it is fairly straightforward as a love story, it's still Burroughs, so it doesn't present itself cinematically. You kind of have to make it that.

I think I was buoyed by this feeling of, first of all, being incredibly honored that Luca would ask me—because I knew that the book meant a lot to him and that it was a movie he had been wanting to make forever. And then I felt this tremendous sense of responsibility to write him this [script] that would allow him to make the movie he had been dreaming about. And then next to that, there was this responsibility to Burroughs and to the community around Burroughs, because Burroughs is one of those writers who means a lot to a lot of people.

And it's a very personal relationship that people have with Burroughs, and I found out with this book in particular. I think the thing that ultimately allowed me to get through the writing of it was that I started to see myself as a kind of medium between these two artists. That on the one hand, there was this guy I knew very well and was very dear to me as a friend and as a collaborator. And then on the other hand, there was this person who I didn't know at all, except through this book and through the other writing he had left behind and the life that he led. And so I tried to kind of open a channel between the two of them, and that was this brand new way of writing for me.

And that's not to let myself off the hook. It's not to say that I think when you try to really see a book clearly or see a piece of writing clearly, you have to in some sense, let that piece of writing see you. And I had to find myself in there and take ownership of the ways that the book really touched me personally. But I went into it at least with this feeling of, this isn't a movie I would probably write if I didn't have a source material. It's not a story that I would come up with without a source material. And it's certainly not a book I would adapt if I didn't know who I was adapting it for. And so I really leaned into that, into the responsibility of that.

The film ends with Lee shooting Allerton—or at least this vision or mirage of Allerton. The book owes some of its notoriety to the fact that Burroughs accidentally shot his wife while writing it. And in the introduction to the 1985 edition, there's that line where he says, “I would never have become a writer… but for Joan's death.” It knocked me out, that line. It's almost incredibly selfish—it's a crazy line. Was that the inspiration for that scene?

There was this feeling that I had and that Luca shared, which was that we weren't interested in making the William S. Burroughs biopic, and we weren't interested in making a movie that was faithful to him, the man. We were interested in making a movie that was faithful to this character, Lee. But at the same time, Queer is a somewhat unfinished book, and it's a little hard to tell at points where the text of Queer ends and where the life and work of Burroughs begins. And especially because of the thing you're talking about, where in every edition that gets published now of the book, they include this essay where Burroughs talks about how he would not have been able to write Queer or even be a writer without this horrible event that he was responsible for. So it felt like that was so fundamental to the construction of Queer that we had to find a way to incorporate it.

But at the same time, Burroughs clearly made very intentional choices about what aspects of his life he wasn't going to include in the William Lee that he constructed for Queer. And his wife is not a part of that vision. The real Burroughs—William S. Burroughs, the man—was in Mexico City with his wife and kids. And actually Lewis Marker, who Allerton is based on this man Lewis Marker, who Burroughs was in love with, was at the party where Burroughs shot his wife. He was a witness to it.

Crazy.

And so you learn all of that, and your mind starts racing about how you can include all of it. And then I sort of quickly realized, well, that's not William Lee. That's William Burroughs. So how do we acknowledge the sort of psychic wound and the haunting of this event that made Queer possible without all of a sudden turning the book into a story about William Burroughs?

I read that you're working on a Mike Nichols-inspired project with Jude Law.

I can't say much about it because it is not so much that it's a Mike Nichols-inspired movie. It's just that Mike Nichols is somebody that Jude and I really bonded over.

That's good to put out there.

And when I sent Jude the script, he read it and said, "Oh, if only Mike Nichols were still around." But we're not making a Mike Nichols biopic. [Laughs] Mike Nichols has just meant a lot to me, and he also obviously meant a lot in Jude's life.

And then the other thing, of course, that’s in the ether is that you and Luca might be doing a DC movie. Anything you can share about that?

I really can't share much about that. It feels silly to not acknowledge that I wrote a script for DC… but I can't really say much more beyond that. [Laughs].

That's good. I feel like not being able to acknowledge something means there's something to acknowledge. [Laughs] So yeah, we'll take that. Now that the year’s winding down and awards season is ramping up, how are you feeling?

Good, yeah. A lot of this period of the year, I'm doing a lot of stuff that's not me sitting at my desk writing, and that drives me a little crazy. But aside from that, it's all good stuff. I was saying to somebody, you do all this stuff because you're trying to make a case for the movies sticking around. And that's actually what it's about. A lot of movies get made, and people don't see them, or they just disappear from people's consciousness. And you use the energy of all of this stuff for this time of year to make a case for, ‘Don't forget these movies.’ So I am reminding myself constantly of that.