VENICE, Italy (AP) — Andrew Garfield would like everyone to know about his gesticulating. Not in his performance as a Yale philosophy professor accused of sexual misconduct in “After the Hunt,” but while discussing an actor’s responsibility to comment on the work they’re putting out in the world.
It’s a blue-sky day outside the luxurious Hotel Cipriani and Garfield is seated alongside his co-stars Julia Roberts and Ayo Edebiri discussing a film that has, for better or worse, become the topic of some spirited debates. Just a few days prior at the Venice Film Festival, journalists at a press conference asked Roberts and filmmaker Luca Guadagnino if the film undermines the feminist movement.
“I don’t think it’s the actor’s responsibility at all to express anything in public. Ever,” Garfield said, using his hands for extra emphasis. “Please, tell them about the gesticulation.”
This image released by Amazon MGM Studios shows Ayo Edebiri, from left, Julia Roberts and director Luca Guadagnino on the set of “After the Hunt.” (Yannis Drakoulidis/Amazon MGM Studios via AP)
Roberts chimed in: “The hair as well.” (It was bouncing).
With “After the Hunt,” in theaters Friday, Guadagnino and his actors knew they were making something thorny, something challenging, about messy, imperfect people whose lives, and lies, are upended with the accusation. They were ready to own the decision to use a typeface in the opening credits made famous by Woody Allen. But they had not anticipated the anti-feminist question, which was perhaps less a question than an accusation.
“This question was so tone deaf to the movie itself,” Guadagnino said. “Like, you’ve mistaken the subject with the object.”
Trouble in the philosophy department
The film is an ensemble piece about a few characters in and around Yale whose heady philosophical chats about agency and power become less theoretical under the glare of sticky real life dramas. Roberts plays Alma, a revered professor up for tenure alongside her colleague and flirty drinking buddy Hank (Garfield). Edebiri is a student named Maggie, a child of billionaires who everyone says is brilliant and who is a little obsessed with Alma.
After a boozy party at Alma’s, Maggie comes to Alma first to tell her that Hank crossed the line. Hank denies anything happened and claims that Maggie is retaliating because he accused her of plagiarizing her thesis. No one knows quite who to believe. Alma, too, is harboring her own secrets. And everything in their world unravels in spectacularly melodramatic fashion.
Julia Roberts digs into a meaty role
The screenplay comes from Nora Garrett, who was working as a data analyst at Meta before her script caught the attention of Guadagnino and Roberts, in quick succession.
“The story really started with the character of Alma,” Garrett said. “I was really interested in this idea of a woman who had a lie or something that she was deeply ashamed of at the core of her being.”
But Alma’s controlled compartmentalization of her past starts to unspool with Maggie’s accusation. The part allows Roberts to do some of her best work in years.
“I’m saying something that might sound obvious, but she’s one of the greatest stars and one of the great actresses,” Guadagnino said. “The symbol, the beauty of the symbol, and at the same time the truth of the performance. She’s so three-dimensional.”
Roberts was particularly fascinated by Alma’s relationship with her husband, Frederik, a shrink played by Guadagnino regular Michael Stuhlbarg, whose unexpected choices had her in awe.
“I did catch myself watching him a couple of times instead of being in the scene and I was just like, ‘Wow, that’s so (expletive) good,’” Roberts said. “And then I think, ‘Oh, I have a line.’”
She added: “The big fortune of getting older is having more life experience and intellectual resources to bring into something like this.”
The Luca Guadagnino way
Guadagnino likes to shoot things quickly, which can be a little destabilizing for first timers. Garfield, who Guadagnino has been trying to work with for almost 20 years, had to do one of his most emotional scenes on his first day. He’d come straight from a very different kind of film where he was playing “a very goofy dad” and was panicked.
“I was really struggling to transition,” Garfield said. “I wanted to make sure I came in as full and hot as possible. Before we had shot any takes I was just kind of pacing around just staying in (character). And then Luca comes up to me and I think he’s going to give me some nugget and he’s like ‘Are you always going to be like this?’”
Garfield quickly came to understand that the combination of speed and lightness is part of Guadagnino’s magic with actors.
“He wants urgency, he wants you to be a little bit on the balls of your feet,” Garfield said. “So when it comes time to shoot, it’s like the train has left the station and you just hold on for dear life or you get taken by it in a way. That’s really exciting.”
Roberts didn’t even remember a heated scene where she grabs Maggie by the face until she was watching the movie in Venice.
“I was so stunned,” Roberts said. “I did not see that coming.”
Nods to the classics
From the Woody Allen typeface to the mannered collegiate settings and intellectual conversations, the film is in many ways a throwback to classic films — not just Allen’s but those of Mike Nichols and Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s “All About Eve” as well.
“I thought a lot about films that have been able to resist the pressure of time and to become some insightful classics,” Guadagnino said.
Perhaps the most inscrutable of the bunch is Maggie. Even Edebiri said she had some trouble wrapping her head around her motivations and actions.
“She’s a tricky girl,” Edebiri said. “A word Luca kept using a lot in conversations was displacement. Maggie’s such a displaced person psychologically, but also as a transracial adoptee, and occupying this space full of these professors who are performing.”
But the point for all are the questions, not the answers, and “After the Hunt” is not a film that wraps anything up in a tidy morality. Those conversations are for the audience to have.
“There are very few filmmakers who are alive for whom the priority is radical, vulnerable, unbridled self-expression and exploration and curiosity rather than something didactic,” Garfield said. “The conversation is the thing, I think, that’s the most we can ever dream of, that people will be confronted by their own response. The film hopefully is a mirror for every person watching, and then they can compare reflections with each other.”
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