Julia Roberts has said she hopes her new movie After the Hunt sparks conversations, and the film’s stars have indicated they are happy to embrace the uncertainty and questions provoked by the story’s conflicting narratives, many of which remain unanswered.
Still the team behind the Luca Guadagnino-directed campus thriller, which explores the fallout when promising PhD candidate Maggie (Ayo Edebiri) accuses Andrew Garfield’s professor character Hank of sexual misconduct and how this affects Maggie’s mentor Alma (Julia Roberts), who’s also close friends and colleagues with Hank, did answer some questions following After The Hunt‘s New York Film Festival premiere Friday night.
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When asked how much they wanted to know about what was left unresolved for the audience, Garfield, Edebiri and Michael Stuhlbarg all seemed to welcome the film’s ambiguity.
“[It’s] fascinating to play with what’s conscious, what’s unconscious, in terms of what’s driving these people, what motives are hidden from ourselves,” Garfield said. “I feel like we all feel like we are the heroes of our own stories. I think there’s quite beautiful moments of reckoning, self reckoning, self revelation, that each of our characters have in this film, and in those moments, it’s the kind of horrifying staring into the abyss of the kind of horrifying mirror that these characters are faced with at certain points. … I think there is a kind of a reckoning that this person, who believes himself to be a kind of humanist and a kind of great professor … and a guy that’s trying to open and unlock all of his students and someone who’s daring and trying to get people closer to the edges of their own hearts and the centers of their own hearts, that he’s faced with something that he hadn’t previously recognized in himself.”
Stuhlbarg, who plays Alma’s psychiatrist husband Frederick, added that the word “ambiguity” felt “very appropriate for this experience.”
“It’s like watching a slow motion train wreck,” he said of the film’s story. “You don’t know what’s going to happen, but you feel something’s coming. And that was kind of the experience, ambiguous, of playing it is that, you know, there’s many layers to this gorgeous text and to these extraordinary performers, and you kind of throw yourself into it to pull out what you think is going to be useful, and then you throw yourself into it and things happen. But being outside of the center of that action, I know something’s going on. I don’t exactly know what it is, but I’m pressing and I’m watching it, and I think it’s a hard place to be and a wonderful place to play, because you’re kind of on tenterhooks the whole time. And I never know what it’s going to be and having Luca throw extraordinary things at us during the process of being in that unsurety gives you moments of direction and moments of flourishing and moments of silliness and moments of depth, and you just ride it, but it’s a very appropriate word for the world we were inhabiting.”
And Edebiri, in particular, praised the rehearsal period at Roberts’ house as giving them license to explore different interpretations.
“We were just getting to excavate this text together, and I feel like there were just early conversations that we were having with each other, and also that I was having with Luca, where I feel like it was like we were getting permission, in a way, to, like, fill in the blanks where we needed to fill them in, and then where there needed to be space and ambiguity, or in moments with each other, to maybe find things that are more primal, we just got license to do that,” she said. “Being able to have that license to, I don’t know, sometimes, like, fool each other, fool ourselves, I think was really freeing.”
And while Roberts wouldn’t reveal what she thought truly happened or if she even wanted to know that to play Alma, she did have an answer for what she thinks the film, which has been described as a #MeToo story and one about the world of academia, is truly about and it’s found in the film’s abundance of music.
“There’s a song that plays in this film seven times … and it’s a song about forgiveness. And I think it says so much about these relationships and how Luca asked us to approach them and construct them and what he asked of us as artists to find and articulate in the characters we were portraying,” she said. “I think that he always felt that this beautiful story that [screenwriter] Nora [Garrett] wrote us was about love and forgiveness and trying to understand who we really are deep inside of ourselves and why we posture and do the things that we do.”
Prior to the screening, Stuhlbarg and Garrett said they were welcoming the questions, conversations and opinions being shared after people saw the film.
“I think everyone will see this film with their own particular lens,” Stuhlberg told The Hollywood Reporter on the red carpet ahead of After the Hunt‘s opening night screening. “I think it presents quandaries to an audience, and it’s up to them to decide what really happened, and I think it gets conversations going, and I’m delighted that those conversations seem to continue and they seem to be happening after every screening of the film. I’m just as curious to know what people are curious about and I’m looking forward to hearing what people have to say.”
Garrett added, “We all did really hope that people would be able to bring their opinions to this and their ideas to this and you don’t get to pick and choose what type of opinions those are. I think as long as people feel very strongly, that’s welcome.”
The first-time screenwriter told THR that while she had been thinking about the ideas and themes of the story for a while, it was the Alma character that really drew her in.
Specifically, Garrett says, she saw the philosophy professor as “a woman who has such outward success but such inward self-denialism and if there was something that could cause that inward self-denialism to crumble a little bit or fracture a little bit, how that would change her life and how she would live her life.”
And as for the “unreadable” elements of Alma, as THR‘s review of After the Hunt noted, Garrett said, “She has a lot of internal machinations and because she’s not looking fully at herself she’s also going to project something which confuses what you might believe to be her internal drive.”
After the Hunt, from Amazon MGM Studios, is set to hit theaters in New York and L.A. on Oct. 10, expanding on Oct. 17. Brian Grazer, Jeb Brody and Allan Mandelbaum produced the film through Imagine’s first-look deal with Amazon MGM.
The 2025 New York Film Festival runs through Oct. 13.
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