Actress Julia Roberts and director Luca Guadagnino wanted audiences to make up their own minds about new film After the Hunt. Photo / Thea Traff, The New York Times
The film touches on #MeToo and cancel culture, but the star and director wanted audiences to make up their own minds.
Julia Roberts is used to press-tour pleasantries. What has surprised her during the weeks spent promoting her new drama, After the Hunt, is how eager journalists and audiences have been to debate what the film is really about.
“This movie has brought out a lot of really interesting questions and conversations in a way that is terribly pleasing,” she said. “My castmates and I were talking about how this is the only press junket we can remember where we’re not just like, ‘OK, here’s that question for the 24th time.’”
Directed by Luca Guadagnino, After the Hunt stars Roberts as Alma, a Yale philosophy professor who is revered by a coterie of confidants that includes her colleagues Hank (Andrew Garfield) and Kim (Chloë Sevigny), her student protege, Maggie (Ayo Edebiri), and her husband, Frederik (Michael Stuhlbarg). But after Maggie accuses Hank of sexual assault, this tight-knit circle begins to unravel as Alma wrestles with the question of where her loyalty really lies.
Though the movie brushes against hot-button topics like cancel culture and #MeToo, Guadagnino (Challengers, Call Me by Your Name) never wanted After the Hunt to be received as a polemic.
“My idea was of an ambiguous movie that lets the audience think for themselves and make up their own minds,” he said.
One thing, however, is perfectly clear: Roberts and Guadagnino have formed a strong bond. When I met them over soft drinks at a Los Angeles hotel, the 57-year-old actor beamed at her director, 54, and spoke about how that affection extended to castmates like Edebiri, whom she recently hosted at her home for an early birthday celebration.
“Everybody was so endlessly enthusiastic about being with Luca and making this movie and it’s just such a great feeling,” Roberts said. “I don’t care if people believe us or not. It’s just so true how much we really enjoy one another’s company and points of view.”
Her director concurred. “For me, she’s the embodiment of cinema,” Guadagnino said of Roberts, hinting that their collaboration could continue: “There is no wrapping. We have life ahead of us and life together, for sure.”
Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.
Q: Julia, what has been most satisfying about the conversations people have had after watching this movie?
Julia Roberts: I think people don’t realise how much they miss talking. For some reason, I was thinking this morning about when my kids were young and we showed them Stand by Me, and our daughter said to me, “I’m going to give you my phone.” And I said, “OK. What do you want me to do with it?”
She said: “You just keep it. I don’t want it. Seeing that movie, I just thought if those boys had phones, they wouldn’t be talking to each other like that. They wouldn’t have gone looking for that body, they wouldn’t sit around the fire and share these stories.” She could see how it was getting in the way of things. All that’s to say, we love talking to each other and sometimes we forget how important it is.
Q: When you’re reading the script for a movie like After the Hunt, are you already picturing yourself in it?
Roberts: I guess I do in some way. But sometimes, I’m also busy casting the other parts as I’m reading, just so it feels like watching a movie. Sometimes, I’m cursed with the feeling that I have to finish a script. I know people who can read 30 pages and be like, no.
Luca Guadagnino: Oh, you read all of it?
Roberts: Somebody wrote it all down, and they probably cried some tears! And I just think: “Who knows? Something might happen on Page 52.”
Guadagnino: Statistically, if it hasn’t happened by Page 20, it doesn’t happen.
Q: Julia, is there anything that intimidated you about taking on this character?
Roberts: Oh, everything. You have to humanise it to portray it. And then going into the classroom, where she’s imparting her brilliance on these young minds, it was so intimidating doing those scenes. God, all these eyes just looking at me! But at the same time, there’s something thrilling about really pretending to be that person who knows more than anybody else in the room.
Q: And this is a story full of characters who think they know the most.
Roberts: It’s a big smarty-pants-off.
Q: When you first read it, did you know how you wanted to portray Alma?
Roberts: I have instincts, but I don’t have any answers. I collaborate with Luca.
Guadagnino: And yet, you had this major instinct that she had to be blonde. Why, do you think?
Roberts: Cold. Austere. I think any character you play, the more visual assistance you have for it, the better – the clothes, the shoes, the makeup, the hair. Gena Rowlands, her look was our inspiration. It’s not really a normal thing to have a woman who has a shape of hair like that. There were so many little details that contributed to what I was trying to say that then I didn’t have to say anything – I just had to enter the room.
Q: What’s it like to embody that formidable persona?
Roberts: What I appreciate about Alma is that she can be cold and rigid, but she also is deeply hurt and carries a lot of pain. And I think casting Michael Stuhlbarg as Frederik was kind of finding the right hair colour, because their relationship is so critical and so important. It’s two imperfect people being completely devoted to each other. It’s like the saying, “If you want an interesting relationship, stay in one.”
Guadagnino: I love that.
Q: What was your own college experience like, Luca?
Guadagnino: In Palermo, I was alone more than anything else, and I didn’t like being there. I think I stopped being lonely the moment I started to meet artists I admired, people that were very creative in a way of being and very singular.
Roberts: At 17, you knew you wanted to be an artist.
Guadagnino: Yeah. I knew that when I was 6 or 7, actually. I did a play at 16 at high school that caused me to repeat the year. They got a scandalous play.
Q: What was so scandalous about it?
Guadagnino: I took two texts by the great Ionesco and made them into a sort of variety show. There was this park where I used to hang out, and I became friends of a group of amazing trans people. This was 1987 and they were so wonderfully performative, and I was so inspired by that, that I invited them to perform in the play.
But they weren’t part of the school, and that was enormously scandalous. When people saw it, they were speechless. So when I did The Protagonists 13 years later and presented it [at the Venice Film Festival] and there were a lot of walkouts, I was already a veteran of that. I didn’t give a [expletive].
Q: So even at a young age, you were eager to tweak academic institutions.
Guadagnino: I was going to grab the opportunity to make what I wanted. I started the year convincing the headmaster to let me direct the play instead of a professor. I don’t know how; clearly, I’m good at convincing financiers. With [After the Hunt], we said to them, “We want to build everything in London,” and they said, “Yeah.”
Roberts: Only Luca can get people to go, “It sounds like a great idea!”
Q: Is it true that you planned to age Chloë Sevigny up to be sort of a Fran Lebowitz character?
Guadagnino: Not like Fran Lebowitz, but I wanted the character to be much older. We tested that with makeup. It was very successful.
Roberts: It looked amazing.
Guadagnino: But to convince me that I’m wrong takes one word sometimes. Chloë said, “Are you sure? I think I look like a crocodile.” And that was it. Say no more.
Q: The characters can be vicious to one another and yet, it’s somehow cathartic to watch their confrontations.
Guadagnino: Because it’s entertainment. It’s cinema.
Roberts: Especially when what they’re saying aligns with what you’re thinking.
Q: Julia, when you’re watching the movie, are you ever the one gasping at what your character says?
Roberts: Playing it feels correct. Watching it feels brutal. But it’s also fun because I can almost feel Luca somewhere in the room smiling.
Q: But when you have that camaraderie behind the scenes, does it give you more permission to be vicious when you need to be?
Roberts: Oh, yes sir. In fact, I think that being together at my house had that big of an impact on our ability to be very committed to what we were doing because we were safe. We knew who we were as opposed to rehearsing for a week, and two days later, getting shoved up against a wall or slapped in the face.
Q: The film’s tagline is “Not everything is supposed to make you feel comfortable.” Do you feel the younger generation is too comfortable, or in need of a prod?
Guadagnino: I don’t like generalisations. I do believe the needs of Maggie are not met in the gaze of Alma, and that triggers this tug of war between the two women. More than they are representing some generations, they are completely encapsulated in a world where they want to be the most powerful person. I would not think, generally speaking, it’s a Gen Z representation. I like to think about this movie the way you think of a movie by George Cukor or Mike Nichols. It’s more like cinema.
Q: If people call you a provocateur, do you embrace that?
Guadagnino: No. I’m kind and nice and a great chef.
Q: Provocateurs can be great chefs.
Guadagnino: I don’t want to be considered someone who does something for the sake of it.
Roberts: Just for the reaction.
Guadagnino: Right, that’s something that I don’t like. I am so lucky that I can do things in a very distinct, profound way with artists like Julia. I think sometimes you do something that is intense and people are going to be reflective on that intensity. But, no, I don’t think I’m a provocateur.
Q: So when the opening credits employ the same font and format Woody Allen used, that’s not a provocation? Not even a little bit?
Guadagnino: It’s beautiful. It’s so graphically arresting, and it is a canon of the history of cinema.
Q: Sure, but given how the movie touches on cancel culture …
Guadagnino: I thought that was the best way to create the titles for this movie. The next one [in Artificial, starring Garfield as OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman] is going to be an homage to Pablo Ferro’s title credits for Philadelphia by Jonathan Demme. Every movie is different, but I think I’m a film historian, and I love cinema. I’m not salacious.
Roberts: You’re a cinéaste.
Guadagnino: But I did have to make a phone call and say, “Julia, do you mind if we put you in alphabetical order?” She said, “Of course.”
Roberts: I love alphabetical order. I think it speaks to the collaboration.
Q: The movie begins in 2019 and ends as Trump is taking office, though you finished filming before his election.
Guadagnino: When we wrapped, we knew we were going to add this moment of 2025. So we were ahead of it.
Q: Did you have a sense as you were shooting of what January 2025 was going to look like?
Guadagnino: 85%. I was sure the Republicans were going to become the new Government, and I knew the title – After the Hunt – had to apply to that moment. The movie coagulates in that final two scenes completely.
Q: College campuses have become a battleground for this administration. What do you think they would make of this movie?
Guadagnino: It would be interesting. Maybe it’s too elaborate, the philosophical concepts that Julia speaks. They would not understand.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Kyle Buchanan
Photographs by: Thea Traff
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