‘After the Hunt’ Is “About Love and Forgiveness”
The team behind the Luca Guadagnino thriller, which also stars Andrew Garfield and Ayo Edebiri, have embraced the ambiguity and questions posed by the conflicting accounts.
Her co-stars also embrace the uncertainty and questions provoked by the story’s conflicting narratives.
Luca Guadagnino’s campus thriller explores the fallout when promising PhD candidate Maggie (Ayo Edebiri) accuses Andrew Garfield‘s professor Hank of sexual misconduct. It examines how this affects Maggie’s mentor Alma (Julia Roberts), who’s close friend and colleague with Hank.
Self-Reckoning
“We all feel like we are the heroes of our own stories. There’s quite beautiful moments of self reckoning, self revelation, that each of our characters have in this film. 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 humanist and a 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, that he’s faced with something that he hadn’t previously recognized in himself.”
“It’s like watching a slow-motion train wreck,” he said. “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 there’s many layers to this text and to these extraordinary performers. You 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.”
Explore different interpretations
“We were getting to excavate this text, and there were 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 to 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 fool each other, fool ourselves, was really freeing.”
“There’s a song that plays in this film 7 times, it’s a song about forgiveness. 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,” Roberts said. “He always felt that this beautiful story that writer Nora Garrett wrote 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.”
“Everyone will see this film with their own particular lens,” Stuhlberg said. “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.”
The first-time screenwriter said 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.
Garrett 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.”
After the Hunt, from Amazon MGM Studios, hits theaters in N.Y. and L.A. on Oct. 10, expanding on Oct. 17.
