Cast and Crew of ‘After the Hunt’ Weigh Mentorship and Morality

A constant drumming of clock ticks and background chatter rattles the Polaroid of affluent academia that backdrops Luca Guadagnino’s “After the Hunt,” developing the shadowy depths of one professor’s personal and professional life.

Released in select theaters Oct. 10, the film situates viewers intimately within the tension-ridden network of Yale University philosopher Alma Olsson (Julia Roberts) as her principles are tested by a sexual assault accusation leveled at trusted colleague Hank Gibson (Andrew Garfield) by her mentee Maggie Price (Ayo Edebiri). 

Weighted questions of power and privilege are proposed by the dense philosophical jargon of Nora Garrett’s screenplay and captivatingly communicated by the cast, which includes repeat Guadagnino collaborators Michael Stuhlbarg and Chloë Sevigny.

Swapping fight scenes for verbal scrimmages, the thriller is a pressure cooker powered by immersive sound design and the palpable chemistry of its actors. In a roundtable interview with The Phoenix, Guadagnino, Garrett, Roberts, Garfield, Edebiri and Stuhlbarg shared their secrets to maintaining that pressure.

Garfield (“The Amazing Spider-Man,” “The Social Network”) said Guadagnino’s tendency to move on from scenes after one or two takes demonstrates faith in his actors and keeps their performances raw. 

“It’s beautiful, that pressure is,” Garfield said. “And he shoots on film. It makes things sacred. It makes the space between action and cut a beautiful kind of pressure on a piece of coal that could potentially make something worthy of putting in a ring casing.”

Edebiri (“The Bear,” “Bottoms”) similarly cited Guadagnino’s intentionality as a natural pressurizer.

“Everything from the art that’s hanging on the walls or a statue that there’s going to be a closeup of, to what we’re doing with our hands, it’s considered,” Edebiri said.

Capturing this textured mise-en-scène and Yale’s gothic architecture with alluring shot framing, Guadagnino (“Call Me by Your Name,” “Challengers”) pushes viewers headfirst into the class and power tensions bubbling under the Ivy League community.

The director said the contained quality of quaint New Haven and the smaller space within it, including Yale’s campus, was a cinematic tool he used to convey story themes. 

Garrett (“Beirut,” “The Stalking Fields”) said she, too, was inspired by the simultaneously oppressive and lofty nature of the school’s architecture when choosing her script’s setting. 

“Yale is such a storied institution that offers and promises a lot of privilege and contains a lot of privilege and has a really strong endowment,” Garrett said. “And then New Haven, the city that surrounds it, does not get to participate in that same level of privilege or have that same level of privilege. I thought that dichotomy was interesting.” 

Garrett’s script seems to focus centrally on dichotomy, questioning perceptions of truth, justice and privilege as they differ between racial identities, classes, sexual identities and generations. Alma’s interpersonal relationships, twisted up and tightly-knit, place her in constant contest with those she’s closest to. 

As Alma’s relationships fracture, characters stumble in their break from the safety of dependable intimacy. 

Guadagnino said characters are simultaneously close to and removed from each other, creating a network of performative intimacies.

“All these people are isolated in their own individuality and in their pursuit of affirmation of self somehow, finding the way to get what they want, that the intimacies point kind of fake,” Guadagnino said. “The actual dynamic is a dynamic of prevailing onto one another.”

While intimacy is a recurring theme in the director’s filmography, the concept of it as desire for another in “Queer,” “Bones and All” and “Call Me by Your Name” isn’t echoed here. This desire is constructed for show, intimacy instead acting as a breaking point, according to Guadagnino.

“It was something that Luca and I talked about so much, the details and the performative nature of Alma as a person and as a professor,” Roberts (“Pretty Women,” “Erin Brockovich”) said. “To deal with posturing at all times, it’s so exhausting. And to perform it and to keep track of all that was really an immense challenge for me as an actor. I enjoyed every minute of it, but yeah, it was nice to go home and just pack that away and go to bed.”

Like Roberts, Garfield said Guadagnino helped him unpack and dive into the “scary” role that marked a departure from the lovable leading man characters that catapulted him to fame.

“Luca does have a kind of imagination that not many directors afford themselves, where Luca genuinely loves actors,” Garfield said. “He loves collaborating with artists and he likes to see actors expand their own range and repertoire and gives us an opportunity to do them.”

The actors said they took care in their approaches to these complex figures who each exhibit flaws impeding their defenses and respectable qualities enticing viewers to trust them. 

This detectable sense of uncertainty extended from the actors’ relationships to their characters, according to Stuhlbarg.

“We take the information that’s given to us, and we shape lives from that,” Stuhlbarg said. “​​I’m not sure if we’re seeking empathy. Even if our characters are doing something disagreeable or that we might find disagreeable, I think the idea of loving your character tends to happen most often.”

Come-downs from shattered pillars of privilege are manifested in characters’ emotional instability, leaving the audience to navigate through performative smoke and mirrors of righteousness to uncover fragments of the truth.

While successful in its optical production of ambiguity, the film struggles to deliver a clear, substantive message about any of the opposing dichotomies it presents. By tasking the audience with drawing their own conclusions, the film sparks important discourse but fails to stoke its flames.

Perhaps, though, this was Garrett’s point — the gray area functions as a mirror.

“You start with what you’re given and I think each viewer brings their perspective to what they see,” Stuhlbarg said. “From the inside, you take what you’re given and you put it out there. And you let the chips fall where they may.”

“After the Hunt,” rated R, is in select theaters now and will be released nationwide Oct. 17.