Following the premiere of “After the Hunt” at the 82nd annual Venice Film Festival last August, journalist Federica Polidoro sat for a junket interview with the film’s stars, Julia Roberts, Ayo Edebiri and Andrew Garfield. The film, about a reported sexual assault on an Ivy League campus and the fallout that occurs between two professors, Alma (Roberts) and Hank (Garfield) and their young protege (Edbiri), is practically Byzantine. Naturally, journalists were eager to make sense of it. During their conversation, Polidoro attempted to parse the film’s intricate themes of social justice, accountability, sexual assault, power grabs, campus politics and women’s rights. “Now that the MeToo era and Black Lives Matter are done, what do we have to expect in Hollywood, and [what did we lose] with the [current political] era?” Polidoro asked, directing her question specifically to Roberts and Garfield. In response, Edebiri looked at her costars to indicate her vexation that only the white members of the cast were being asked about the status of social movements. Roberts followed it up by leaning toward Polidoro, asking, “Can you repeat that? With your sunglasses on, I can’t tell which of us you’re talking to, so.”
Shortly after the interview was uploaded, the clip went massively viral, garnering upward of 27.4 million views on X at the time of writing, and making Edebiri’s confused reaction into a meme of its own. Polidoro was quickly taken to task online, with commenters questioning her intentions and morals so intensely that Polidoro released a statement on her Instagram story. “Censoring or delegitimizing questions deemed ‘uncomfortable’ does not fall within the practice of democracy,” Polidoro wrote. “Journalism’s role is to ask questions, even on delicate topics, with respect and responsibility.” While Polidoro’s observations are correct on that front, her interview opened a channel of dialogue between those with access and those without; the people who wield power and those who don’t just witness its use, but feel compelled to comment on how power is used.
Ironically, Polidoro’s question and the public’s response became an ironic portrait of the exact conversations “After the Hunt” is depicting, where characters are so consumed in their own agendas that they refuse to listen to or consider the feelings of anyone else, often to their own detriment. In the film, there is no middle ground, only a binary idea of justice — a rigid, unmoving idea of what is right and what is wrong.
(Amazon MGM Studios) Julia Roberts as Alma Imhoff in “After the Hunt”
“There’s always the desire to overexplain. ‘I didn’t mean it that way, and I swear to God, I’m a feminist!’ You always want to [differentiate between] the person you are and the thing you wrote. My hope was always that, by the end of the film, you understand why Alma behaves the way that she did.”
For the film’s screenwriter, Nora Garrett, both Polidoro’s question and the public’s response to it were surprising, but not unexpected. “We’re all witnessing the flattening of beliefs and views into their most extreme and most one-dimensional on both sides,” Garrett tells me over coffee in New York’s West Village, shortly after the film’s stateside premiere at the New York Film Festival. “But unfortunately, or fortunately, human beings are just far more complicated than that.”
As a first-time screenwriter watching her script thrust into the stratosphere, Garrett witnessed a similar set of intense, passionate reactions to her film, which received mixed reviews out of Venice and has continued to polarize viewers since. But despite the varied word-of-mouth response, “After the Hunt” manages to do what so many modern films cannot: It challenges its audience, forcing them to think about their own perspectives, beliefs and ideas about human nature in a time when so many people assume they’ve got it all figured out. But unlike her film, which offers few easy answers, Garrett is delightfully candid. Below, she dives into the whirlwind of getting her first film made, accusations that she’s a “bad feminist,” critics who are pierced by her thorny script, and that viral Venice interview heard round the internet.
This is your first screenplay, and you have these huge names attached. What has this experience been like so far?
The script was finished in 2023, but I was pretty convinced that my best-case scenario for it was going to be spec, or just a sample [to bring to potential agents and managers]. It’s the exact subject matter everyone tells you not to write about. Somebody once referred to it as “radioactive.” So I thought the idea of it becoming a film would be sort of…
Pie in the sky?
100%. But friends of mine who I really trusted said, “I think you have something here.” Once the script got into the studio system, there was word of mouth that people who are far more powerful than me were interested. I think that’s when my life really started to feel like it was changing. My very first meeting with Luca was actually at the Chateau Marmont, where I used to work. There’s always that fantasy that you’re like, “One day, I’m gonna come back here.” One of my first weeks at the Chateau, there’s a cook who cooks for the employees named Betty, and she asked me, “What do you do?” And at that point, I was still pursuing acting. I told her that, and she said, “The only person I’ve ever seen make it is Mark Ruffalo. Good luck.”
Your screenplay’s dissection of our modern culture is so complex. Were there any specific moments in the zeitgeist over the last decade that you felt people weren’t talking about enough that sparked this idea?
There was a part of me that felt like there was a lack of nuance in the conversations that were happening in these public forums. Part of that is because we all live in this increasingly online culture, in the Anthropocene, and we’re all witnessing the flattening of beliefs and views into their most extreme and most one-dimensional on both sides. I think that’s true for everything. But unfortunately, or fortunately, human beings are just far more complicated than that.
In terms of these stories, whether they’re about #MeToo or even power dynamics or campus stories, we’re not afforded that kind of nuance. Usually, we get preachiness or something clean-cut and easy to discern. What drove you to make “After the Hunt” less easily digestible?
That was something that was teased out through the collaboration with Luca. Luca is so intentional and so faithful. But he made a really good point that someone like Alma, who has worked her entire life to get to the top of this power realm — who fought through illness and misogyny and all the things she lists at the beginning of the film — she wouldn’t give up. She wouldn’t just lie down and allow people to take something from her, whether or not it’s for her quote-unquote highest good. It’s about her needing to have that brass ring no matter what. And I felt that he was right about that. I felt it made sense of the world we live in, because I think people are, for the most part, loath to give up on themselves or on their aims.
We live in a time where people either want to be told exactly what to do or they don’t want to be told what to do at all. But this film falls smack in the middle. It’s not revealing anything. There are no easy answers.
It’s funny, looking back on our rehearsal and collaborative process, we talked very rarely about the current cultural climate. Not because we didn’t have that in the back of our brains, but Luca works very spontaneously, very specifically and very in-the-moment. And I think that there’s a sense of like every scene arrives to him anew on the day. If you’re thinking about, “What is this going to do in culture? How is this going to feel in culture?” that’s assuming it’s going to do anything.
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You lose the real story in pursuit of relevance?
Right. It’s a certain sense of manipulation that can get you away from following where your story wants to go.
Alma is so complex and full of contradictions. She’s not easy to pull apart.
Alma was always someone who lived a life of the mind and lived a life of many machinations, and, therefore, was calculating and precise, and also deeply contradictory and steeped in a sense of self-denialism. You try to love that person, try to be with that person, and you’re always going to get [shades of them]. Maggie only sees a facet of her, and Hank also only sees a facet of her because she’s very controlling about how she projects this certain type of persona, until that becomes untenable. But I think the female characters I’ve always been interested in are women of appetite.
“Appetite” is a great way to describe someone so hungry for something that she makes herself sick by the end of the film.
I was fascinated by a woman who lived such a life of the mind that she had a sort of willful misunderstanding of the machinations of her body. She was treating her body like she was a teenager. She wants to coast towards this goal of academic tenure. And I was interested in that because we live in a culture of optimization, and especially for women, there’s so much emphasis on the way you treat your body. I was fascinated by the idea of someone who has their teeth sharpened and is openly ambitious.
(Amazon MGM Studios) Andrew Garfield as Henrik “Hank” Gibson and Julia Roberts as Alma Imhoff in “After the Hunt”
To have someone like Julia Roberts playing that character, too, and in your first script. What was that phone call like?
It’s one of those things where the verbiage that everyone uses is “attached.” And my question was, “Okay, what does that mean? Are we signing anything?” I was like, “Let’s lock it down!” Julia Roberts is in her own echelon. She is completely in a pantheon that I could only deign to touch. I was just like, trying not to be a stuttering idiot, trying not to blurt out, “I love ‘Pretty Woman’!” But then you meet her, and you meet someone who’s so disarming, honest and frank. A woman in her position could very easily allow herself to be subsumed by the mechanism that protects celebrity. But I think she’s willfully human.
On the other hand, Alma is moving with blinders on. She doesn’t really have the capacity to process Maggie’s confession that Hank assaulted her through any lens outside of her own experience with Hank. Why include a plotline where a woman is apprehensive about believing another woman? I imagine that’s part of why the film has been greeted with tension.
Venice was an entree into that response. With a film like this, if you want people to respond and bring themselves to it, you don’t get to pick and choose how that happens. There’s always the desire to overexplain, and be like, “I didn’t mean it that way, and I swear to God, I’m a feminist!” You always want to [differentiate between] the person you are and the thing you wrote. My hope was always that, by the end of the film, you understand why Alma behaves the way that she did, and you understand why she is unable to receive Maggie’s confession. Because to receive Maggie’s confession would mean dismantling her self-denialism. Alma wants this thing so f*cking badly, and so much of that has been predicated on being able to compartmentalize and being able to not look at certain things from her past. Then, when she’s forced to look at it, she’s unable to because of how hard she’s worked to compartmentalize. Those things don’t just come unraveled in one moment.
There’s a modern desire to have everyone react perfectly in a moment, and to have that moment of reaction be the defining statement of their character. But that’s not how we work as people; we’re all informed by our own sh*t.
To me, Alma’s vulnerable moment in the hospital bed at the end of the film is what I hope people see as an aha moment of, “Oh, that’s why,” and get a real sense of empathy and forgiveness for Alma, or at least understanding as to why she’s behaved that way. Responding imperfectly in a moment of great stress doesn’t mean that this is a story designed to show how women fail each other, or how women are pitted against each other, or to regress feminism. None of that is what I believe is in the script and in the close watching of the film, and none of that is what I believe I intended. It was always about the character behaving this way because she cannot allow herself the truth of her own experience.
“You meet Julia Roberts, and you meet someone who’s so disarming, honest and frank. A woman in her position could very easily allow herself to be subsumed by the mechanism that protects celebrity. But I think she’s willfully human.”
The film allows us to wonder if Maggie is telling the truth about her assault. We get the sense that she’s being honest, but there’s no 100% clarity. Why leave it as a question mark?
Maggie lying about plagiarizing her thesis [is important]. When stories like this come out in the news, it can become a character assassination. “Has this person been truthful their entire life? And does that mean they’re telling the truth now?” Oftentimes, men are given much more of the benefit of the doubt. “They’ve been nice their entire life, they’ve been good their entire life!” I just don’t believe that human beings are that linear, and I think that’s incredibly frustrating, especially because in this moment where we’re trying to figure out what grace looks like and what rehabilitation looks like. We don’t have the answers. We’ve done our best with the justice system, but it fails much of the time. We want things to be clear so that we can have a very clear understanding of, “This is how I will move forward, and this is how someone will be punished.”
Films are often supposed to represent the idealized version of the narrative. So I understand why people would be watching this and be like, “No, no, that’s not right.” But certainly, my script is not in an effort to denigrate Maggie’s experience.
I wonder if some of that response has been because people perceive actors like Julia and Ayo to have certain character traits in real life that are supposed to bleed into the roles they take on.
People have a very clear idea of who Julia Roberts the actress is, and who Ayo Edebiri the actress is, and Luca as a storyteller. At the end of the day, a film is always a work of fiction. You’re telling a story. And I think that there’s a hyper-personalization happening where people believe that the characters people play are also them in real life, or the stories that people write are also them in real life. And that doesn’t allow for a lot of experimentation.
(Amazon MGM Studios) Ayo Edebiri as Margaret “Maggie” Resnick in “After the Hunt”
The ending of this film will be a sticking point, and it almost throws everything that came before it into question, depending on how you read it. Was Luca verbally calling “cut” over the shot of a $20 bill Alma puts on the table a conversation between you both?
Luca doesn’t make shot lists, so it was not something that I had prior knowledge of. But I do think, to Luca, the focus on the money was about commerce and power, and about the idea that these are people who are always going to be about transactions. In our culture, money is inextricable from power. And then I think the “cut” was meant to be the thing that reminds audiences that this is a movie, and it’s Luca’s interpretation of the film. Who owns the narrative? And I think the two characters at the end, Alma and Maggie, are having a conversation in which they’re trying to come to terms with the fact that they will never be on the same page. But they’re owning that, and feeling felt in that, whereas hearing “cut” gives you the sense that this was someone else’s narrative all along.
“I am not so naive to think that I don’t have anything to learn. God, I would quit now!”
The viral question at Venice, where the interviewer was implying that we were past a certain cultural moment, what was your reaction to seeing that as the person who wrote the movie, and then seeing Julia, Ayo and Andrew shut it down and reframe the narrative being spun in the question?
Julia, Ayo and Andrew are such professionals and people of such character. To not only have these incredibly talented people as a part of this film, but to have these people who are deeply integritous, and who are unafraid to be present in that integrity in such a charged environment? I’m just glad they exist.
When things fade out of the headlines, like Ayo was saying, it is tempting to believe that something has been solved. But the truth of the matter is, and why social justice movements are so difficult for the people who are on the front lines of them, you’re only hoping to move the needle one inch. It’s tempting to believe we can supersede that, but the fact is, we’re always going to be attempting to unpick the injustices that exist absolutely.
It seems maybe there are some willful bad readings of this film, just based on its subject matter. Have you read any of the criticism?
[Laughs.]
People do not want to respond to the conversations you’re having in this film favorably. What has that been like? I mean, we’re not talking about overall pans here, but…
A friend of mine said something to me the other day that helped put some perspective on it: “Look, mixed reviews for your first film is great.” And I am not so naive to think that I don’t have anything to learn. God, I would quit now! But I’m a sensitive person. I made a really strong commitment to try and stay offline, but unfortunately, the IMDB app, of all places, notifies me anytime my name is in an article. I tapped on one, and it was the worst headline, specifically about the script and specifically mentioning me by name. And I was in my apartment after Venice and was like, “Well, here we go!” I gave myself one hour to go down the rabbit hole.
But I think criticism that always hits the most personally are the ones implying [I don’t care about women.] I really care about women’s stories, feminism and the feminist movement. I have been so impacted by the movements that have championed different ways of being a woman, and being a female-identifying person in this world, and I would hate to be seen as on the wrong side of that. That’s not my intention. And I think anytime you approach something with nuance, and it’s not met with nuance, there’s a feeling of . . . disappointment doesn’t quite cover it. And at the same time, people are entitled to their own opinion! There’s nothing I can do. And again, you don’t get to pick and choose. If you start a conversation, and if you want to have people bring themselves to it, then that self is allowed to show up in any way it wants.
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