Bloody Tennis Interview: Nikias Chryssos | Fantastic Fest 2026
Tennis may provide the arena for Bloody Tennis, but director Nikias Chryssos was interested in a considerably larger competition: the relentless pursuit of becoming exceptional and what people can lose when ambition becomes more important than everything around them.
Speaking with Horror Movies Uncut during Fantastic Fest 2026, Chryssos discussed using the world of elite athletics to examine success, institutional pressure, indoctrination and the ways competitive systems can gradually convince people to accept behavior they once would have rejected.
For Chryssos, those ideas extend well beyond sports.
“I think in our society, if you think about it, even outside of the tennis court and through how you make a career, how you go through school, you know, how much pressure you put on young people,” Chryssos told HMU.
Particularly troubling to the filmmaker is what happens to those who don’t reach the increasingly visible definition of success.
“The downside of it is that people are seen as failures if they don’t make it to a certain level,” he said.
Social media only intensifies that comparison. Images of successful, seemingly happy people are constantly available, while athletes and other public figures can become aspirational models whose accomplishments appear to establish the standard everyone else is expected to reach.
“It’s good to have ambition, obviously,” Chryssos said, but constantly measuring yourself against those exceptional cases can become “almost the recipe for disaster.”
Tennis gave Chryssos an ideal environment in which to explore that contradiction.
The director was drawn to the sport’s unusual combination of athleticism, elegance, endurance and psychological warfare. Unlike a team sport, tennis can leave two players isolated across the net from one another, attempting to control not only the ball but each other’s rhythm and concentration.
“It has such a cool combination of being very athletic and almost like a boxing match without physical contact, and so much as a mind game,” Chryssos said.
Players can interrupt an opponent’s flow, change tactics and survive matches capable of turning after multiple opportunities to finish them. That instability appealed to Chryssos, as did the physical contradiction at the center of the sport.
“It’s athletic and elegant at the same time,” he said.
Inside Bloody Tennis, however, the pursuit of athletic excellence begins evolving into something considerably more unsettling.
The academy initially presents itself as the kind of institution capable of transforming talented players into something greater. Gradually, the language of training, commitment and sacrifice begins resembling indoctrination.
Chryssos sees a connection between those structures and systems far beyond elite athletics.
Even within corporate environments, he noted, institutions frequently encourage people to identify themselves with the organization and give increasingly more of themselves to a collective goal. At the academy in Bloody Tennis, that same expectation becomes more extreme.
“You need this total dedication,” Chryssos said.
For an athlete attempting to become one of the best in the world, doubt itself can become dangerous. Stop believing in the objective and the entire structure around years of training, sacrifice and repetition can begin falling apart.
That need for absolute faith provided Chryssos with a natural bridge between elite athletic culture and the mechanics of a cult.
The athletes at the top become almost superhuman figures: enormous faces on billboards, celebrated personalities and physical ideals for everyone beneath them to pursue.
Chryssos compared that imagery to the statues once constructed around figures elevated above ordinary people. The difference is that only a tiny number of competitors can ever reach that position.
“Only a few,” he said. “It’s in the nature of this that only a few can get there.”
Everyone else risks becoming collateral damage along the road.
That philosophy is embedded in the academy and particularly in Mary’s fixation on ascension. There must always be an end goal significant enough to justify the sacrifices required to reach it.
What makes Bloody Tennis particularly effective is that Chryssos doesn’t immediately reveal the institution as something sinister. The academy becomes disturbing gradually, allowing its characters — and the audience — to normalize each escalation before confronting what those individual compromises have created.
“I think this violence that this place is inhabited by, it drips into you slowly,” Chryssos explained.
For him, there shouldn’t be a single clean moment when a character suddenly realizes she has lost her empathy or become capable of something previously unthinkable.
“It happens step by step,” he said. “You get used to certain things happening, you accept them as normality because they just keep happening on the low level, and suddenly you wake up and you’re in a different place without even realizing.”
That gradual transformation also informed how Chryssos approached the film’s ensemble of young women.
Rather than treating the players as interchangeable victims of the same institution, he wanted each to represent a different personality and survival strategy. Sophie, Frieda and the other athletes enter the academy carrying individual motivations, insecurities and ideas about what success means.
One exercise proved particularly useful in developing those distinctions.
Chryssos asked the actresses to write motivational letters to academy leader Mary while remaining completely inside their characters.
The exercise forced each performer to consider why her character wanted to be there in the first place — what she believed the academy could provide and what she might be willing to surrender for the opportunity.
Chryssos said the process also benefited enormously from what the actors themselves brought to the material.
“They brought so much themselves,” he said.
Sandra Guldberg Kampp’s Sophie, for example, was shaped partly by the actress finding elements of herself within the character. Those individual contributions helped the ensemble maintain separate identities even as the academy gradually pushes its athletes toward the same ideology.
Another influence on the film came from a direction that may be immediately recognizable to audiences familiar with sports manga and anime.
When HMU asked Chryssos about similarities to the heightened sports-academy stories long prevalent in manga and anime culture, the filmmaker confirmed that the connection had been on his mind early in development.
Manga and graphic novels have repeatedly offered Chryssos a kind of creative freedom that he finds valuable.
“I think this freedom is something that inspires me a lot,” he said.
He recalled returning to comics and graphic novels around the period when he made his first feature and finding their willingness to push narrative and visual ideas liberating. Rather than remaining bound by expectations of what a particular genre should look like, those stories demonstrated how horror, heightened imagery and ordinary interpersonal interactions could coexist.
That freedom is evident throughout Bloody Tennis, where recognizable sports-drama structures can suddenly give way to considerably stranger territory without abandoning the human conflicts underneath them.
Chryssos also discussed the presence of Denis Lavant, whose work in films including Beau Travail and Holy Motors has made him one of European cinema’s most distinctive performers. For Chryssos, casting an actor capable of suggesting menace, sympathy and tragedy simultaneously was essential to giving the academy’s coaching structure additional complexity.
The coach could easily have become a straightforward authoritarian figure. Instead, the performance allows the character to exist somewhere between an intimidating remnant of old-school training culture and someone carrying his own history within the institution.
That ambiguity complements the larger world Chryssos has constructed. The academy isn’t frightening simply because one obviously evil person controls it. Its power comes from a system in which everyone gradually learns what behavior will be rewarded, what weakness will be punished and how much abuse must be accepted in exchange for the possibility of greatness.
By the end of HMU’s conversation, that became the central question surrounding Bloody Tennis: What should an intensely ambitious person actually take away from watching it?
Chryssos acknowledged the irony that the film’s extremity could potentially energize some competitive viewers rather than caution them. There is, after all, something seductive about stories of people willing to go farther than everyone else to reach the top.
But his concern ultimately lies with what happens along that climb.
“I think just reflect on it,” Chryssos said, pointing toward how people behave toward others, how ambition changes them and “what kind of level of abuse” they become willing to accept.
That question becomes particularly important for young people entering environments where mistreatment can easily be disguised as discipline, tradition or the price of opportunity.
Chryssos sees solidarity as one of the few meaningful defenses.
The system represented by Mary works partly by destroying the bonds between the athletes and convincing each person to think exclusively about her own advancement. Isolation makes individuals easier to control. Genuine relationships create resistance.
“The only way to defend yourself if something happens is together with others,” Chryssos said.
It is a surprisingly communal conclusion for a film built around one of the most individualistic sports imaginable.
That contradiction may also explain why tennis proves such an effective vehicle for what Chryssos wants to examine. Bloody Tennis isn’t simply interested in whether someone can become exceptional. It asks what happens when exceptionalism becomes an ideology — when winning requires total devotion, other people become obstacles and abuse becomes another training exercise to endure.
Ambition isn’t necessarily the villain.
The danger comes when reaching the top becomes important enough to justify everything sacrificed along the way.
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