Luca Guadagnino was first struck by his After the Hunt star’s A-list powers when she played Steel Magnolias’ effervescent Southern belle Shelby in 1989. Now three-and-a-half decades on, the Italian auteur finally got his professional meet-cute with Julia Roberts in a quiet corner of a glitzy LA bash.
‘It was at the house of a very important person in Hollywood,’ he remembers. ‘This wonderful person put us together, we sat on the couch and we never stopped talking.’
Even for a filmmaker of the pedigree and experience of Guadagnino, there were nerves to banish during those couple of hours chatting with the Hollywood icon. But, he says, ‘she made me feel familiar in a second. Over time we bonded over many things.’
Their first chat zeroed in on a buzzy screenplay by rookie screenwriter Nora Garrett that Guadagnino was set on making after his 2024 one-two of Queer and Challengers when another project unravelled. Set in the cloistered but politically febrile world of Yale, After the Hunt focuses on a handful of characters with secrets to hide and well-practised facades to hide them behind.
Roberts plays Alma, a spiky philosophy professor competing for tenure with her friend (and maybe more) Hank, played by Andrew Garfield. Star pupil Maggie (The Bear’s Ayo Edebiri) is the third point in a triangle that’s compromised and complicated by uneven power dynamics (in both directions – Maggie’s wealthy parents are Yale donors).
Then Maggie turns up distraught on Alma’s doorstep one night, revealing that Hank has sexually assaulted her. Only her professor is a less than sympathetic – or believing – audience. The toxic fallout draws Alma’s doting but dissatisfied husband Frederik (Michael Stuhlbarg) and uni psychiatrist Kim Sayers (Chloë Sevigny) into a combustible situation. Race, class, sexuality and generational differences are the battlegrounds on which this slow-burn psychological thriller will play out.
‘I loved that this is an ensemble piece where every character is equally vital to the tapestry,’ says Roberts. ‘You don’t come across many films with this many different kinds of intricate relationships.’
After the Hunt takes its name from a quote by Prussian leader Otto von Bismarck (‘People never lie so much as after a hunt, during a war, or before an election’). Deceit and duplicity is so ingrained with these characters, they’ve lost sight of the truth.
Before the hunt
After the Hunt is Roberts’ best performance in years – since Mike Nichols’ Closer in 2004 – and it’s one that yields plenty of clips to pull out for those awards ceremonies. Alma’s vicious run-ins with Maggie yield one of the line readings of the year – ‘Not everything is supposed to make you comfortable. Not everything is supposed to be a lukewarm bath for you to sink into before you fall asleep and drown’ – and a host of intense unravelling moments.
Guadagnino has a great way of encapsulating Roberts’s value as an A-lister in this thorny role. ‘She encompasses the kind of immediacy you get when you see a great movie star: there’s familiarity and yet also a profound capacity for change. I'm very proud of her performance.’
An obvious parallel is Cate Blanchett’s Oscar-nominated performance in Tár, another psychological thriller that would slot into a tasty culture wars double-bill. Here, the set-up and fallout are accompanied by the tick-tock of a metronome that signifies an indefinable peril hanging over this privileged world. ‘Hitchcock is the great master of the invisible threat and I think this movie is Hitchcockian in that sense,’ says Guadagnino. ‘We looked a lot at the work of Bergman – Persona – and Mike Nichols. Gena Rowlands in [Woody Allen’s] Another Woman was very important, too.’
Julia has changed me a lot
Unusually, the film’s rehearsals took place in Roberts’s San Francisco home. She hosted, cooked and baked for her co-stars, including a banana bread that’s since achieved fame via the cast’s chatshow appearances. Guadagnino was a fan. ‘I love banana bread because it's without dairy and I can't have dairy,’ he says. ‘Julia is a formidable chef.’
He has cherished memories of the star’s hospitality and tour-guiding skills. ‘She doesn't know it, but for me, San Francisco will always be Julia,’ he says. ‘I will never forget the sweet hours spent with her walking the streets of San Francisco, going to church with her in San Francisco. Julia has changed me a lot.’
Their friendship has continued. When Guadagnino was making his new film, Artificial, in San Francisco, Roberts visited the set. ‘It was delightful,’ he says. So does he plan to work with her again? ‘Oh my God, of course.’
Entering the chat
Already one of the year’s most talked-about movies, After the Hunt is bringing its moral and ethical quandaries to about 315 million homes this week. The streaming release (it’s on Prime Video now) will spice up family chats over Thanksgiving and Christmas this year. Not everyone will love it, as it’s not a people-pleasing movie in that sense, but when the end credits roll, the debates will start…
Is Alma a ‘problematic icon’ like Lydia Tár or a complex figure caught between past trauma and a burning need to survive and flourish in an ultra-competitive world? Is Hank a liar and a sociopath? And are Gen Xers hopelessly ill-equipped to grasp the concerns of zoomers and young millennials? Or are the latter just the oversensitive snowflakes the alt-right wants you to think?
‘The thing that intrigued me most initially was I just couldn’t land my thoughts on if I liked her, if I hated her, or if I even fully understood her,’ says Roberts. ‘She is definitely one of those rare characters that you keep puzzling over, and that was exciting to me. And Luca clearly didn’t want to dull any of her jagged edges. In fact, he only wanted to keep sharpening them.’
These questions have been debated since the lights came up on the film’s world premiere at the Venice Film Festival in August. Journalists emerged from press screenings yakking about it and those fired-up discussions continued right into a box-office press conference that Roberts presided over with no-nonsense good humour.
Then came a viral moment when an Italian journalist, interpreting the film as an obituary for both the #MeToo and Black Lives Matter movements, addressed a question to Roberts and Garfield while ignoring Edebiri. ‘Can you repeat that?’ Roberts asked the journo, hoping for a more inclusively framed version of the question. ‘With your sunglasses on, I can’t tell which of us you're talking to.’ It fit neatly, if inadvertently, with the movie’s themes of bias and marginalisation.
I'm proud of any kind of conversation the movie sparks
Aside from that awkward encounter which he heard about later, Guadagnino relished the film’s Venice reception. ‘It's very important to be able to be in a dialogue with people,’ he says. ‘It's great when the perspective of another is different from yours, and comes from a different [place]. That's the beauty of it.’
When After the Hunt landed in cinemas in early October, the director was head-down on Artificial, his new drama about OpenAI CEO Sam Altman (played by Garfield). So has he followed the online conversation since it came out? ‘No, no, no,’ he says. ‘That would mean looking on the internet, reading articles and reading tweets and Instagram, and that's something that I tend not to do. But I'm proud of any kind of conversation the movie sparks.’
He’s an artist who likes asking difficult questions but won’t be caught providing easy answers. I ask him about his use of opening credits that ape Woody Allen’s house style, right down to the Windsor Light Condensed font, and that seem to flirt with the zeitgeist. He bats the question back like one of Challengers’ forehand smashes. ‘For me, it's very complicated, the idea that a gesture that utilises a very iconic font becomes something you have to explain,’ he says. ‘It tells me two things: one, the great power of cinema and the great power of that beautiful font; and two, the bias that always accompanies art. People should think about their biases in the first place.’
Roberts puts it less directly. ‘This is one of those movies where you can go out afterwards, dissect every moment and debate why each character did what they did,’ she says.
‘For me, that’s what makes going to the movies great.’
After the Hunt is streaming on Prime Video from 20 November.