{"id":874770,"date":"2025-09-22T01:13:02","date_gmt":"2025-09-22T06:13:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/2025\/09\/22\/luca-guadagnino-wants-to-make-you-feel-uncomfortable-with-after-the-hunt\/"},"modified":"2025-09-22T01:13:02","modified_gmt":"2025-09-22T06:13:02","slug":"luca-guadagnino-wants-to-make-you-feel-uncomfortable-with-after-the-hunt","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/2025\/09\/22\/luca-guadagnino-wants-to-make-you-feel-uncomfortable-with-after-the-hunt\/","title":{"rendered":"Luca Guadagnino Wants to Make You Feel Uncomfortable With \u2018After the Hunt\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\u201cNot everything is supposed to make you comfortable.\u201d<\/p>\n

This line is whispered by Julia Roberts<\/strong> in After the Hunt<\/em>\u2014but it easily could have been said by filmmaker Luca Guadagnino.<\/strong> The Italian auteur has never shied away from unsettling storytelling: cannibalistic romances<\/a> (Bones and All<\/em>), sweaty love triangles (Challengers<\/em><\/a>), and an age-gap gay love story (Call Me by Your Name<\/em>).<\/p>\n

For his latest film, he\u2019s bringing that discomfort to the hallowed halls of Yale. Guadagnino\u2019s twisty psychological thriller After the Hunt<\/em> is centered on power and privilege, truth and secrets, and ambition and disgrace. It grapples with timely contradictions, and the things that people think but are too afraid to express.<\/p>\n

\u201cFor me, our role as storytellers, filmmakers, or artists, must always be the one of pushing the envelope, of being able to say everything. It depends on how you say it,\u201d Guadagnino tells Vanity Fair.<\/em><\/p>\n

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“Some people who watched the movie who were at Yale, they couldn’t believe we didn’t shoot in Yale, which is for me a great compliment,” says Guadagnino of recreating the Ivy league school in London.<\/p>\n

<\/span>Yannis Drakoulidis\/Amazon MGM Studios.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

The story follows Alma Imhoff (Roberts), an ambitious philosophy professor on the verge of tenure. But when Maggie (Ayo Edebiri<\/strong>), one of her top students, accuses Alma\u2019s close colleague Hank (Andrew Garfield<\/strong>) of assault, Alma\u2019s secret history and future success both come under threat.<\/p>\n

After the Hunt<\/em> combines Guadagnino\u2019s affinity for complicated storytelling with his focus on craft, as well as intricate, nuanced performances by Roberts, Edebiri, Garfield, and supporting actors Chlo\u00eb Sevigny<\/strong> and Michael Stuhlbarg.<\/strong> With its August 28 Venice Film Festival world premiere just one day away, After the Hunt<\/em> aims to ask hard questions, and let audiences grapple with their answers. \u201cThe idea that something cannot be said, an idea cannot be used, a reference cannot be brought to light because there is a sort of unspoken impossibility of doing so and a self-censorship\u2014it\u2019s so upsetting to me,\u201d says Guadagnino. \u201cIn a movie about dynamics of power and control, it was very important that we felt the joy of our expression, without being mindless, but actually being very thoughtful.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Emmy winner Edebri plays a Yale student who admires her philosophy professor until she comes to her in a time of need.<\/p>\n

<\/span>Yannis Drakoulidis\/Amazon MGM Studios.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

After the Hunt<\/em> could have been inspired by any number of true stories. But first-time screenwriter Nora Garrett<\/strong> says she didn\u2019t base her script on a specific case. Instead, she was more curious about how the culture has explored moments of reckoning like the #MeToo movement. \u201cWe were missing a sense of gray area,\u201d she says. \u201cBut also, we were missing a sense of how power obfuscates, how those within power are insulated from consequences, and those without it are often naked to consequences.\u201d<\/p>\n

Garrett felt as though the cloistered world of academia\u2014a closed community marked by infighting and a very clear hierarchy\u2014would be the perfect setting to explore these weighty issues. She wrote the first draft of the script during a 12-week writers workshop.<\/p>\n

Garrett spent years as a struggling actor; when her script was making the rounds, she was also working as a data analyst for Meta to make ends meet. \u201cI\u2019ve always been really fascinated by power and power structures and successful people within those power structures,\u201d she says. \u201cPartially because I was outside of success for so long. I was like, \u2018What does one do? What happens to your mentality? What happens to the way you tell stories about yourself when you start getting power, when you start having success?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

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Stuhlbarg previously worked with Guadagnino on Call Me By Your Name<\/em> and Bones and All.<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/span>Yannis Drakoulidis\/Amazon MGM Studios.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

The script found its way to the production company Imagine Entertainment, and eventually to Guadagnino, who worked with Garrett to push its more challenging and uncomfortable explorations to the forefront. They beefed up the screenplay\u2019s focus on the divide between generations, with Alma and her colleagues struggling to understand the culture of Gen Z. (\u201cI believe her, but whatever happened to stuffing everything down like the rest of us?\u201d says Sevigny\u2019s character in the trailer.<\/a>)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cHe really wanted to make it so that neither generation felt like the right generation, or they had the right ideas,\u201d says Garrett of Guadagnino. \u201cHe wanted it to feel like all of these people are products of the society in which they were born into, in which they grew up in. They\u2019re all acting out of that sort of primordial soup, as opposed to acting out of righteousness.\u201d<\/p>\n

Alma is the center of the story, and all the other characters pivot around her\u2014from Maggie and Hank, who adore and worship her, to her husband (Stuhlbarg), who cares for and challenges her. Guadagnino says Roberts was the first actor to see the script. \u201cWe started talking and became instant friends,\u201d the director says. He cast the Bear<\/em> star Edebiri because of her \u201cwit and spirited intelligence,\u201d and had wanted to work with Garfield for years\u2014since he saw Garfield in his 2007 feature film debut, Lions for Lambs.<\/em><\/p>\n

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Sevigny, who plays another Yale professor, worked with Guadagnino on the HBO series We Are Who We Are<\/em> and Bones and All.<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/span>Yannis Drakoulidis\/Amazon MGM Studios.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

Each character is layered and full of contradictions. But Garfield\u2019s Hank, the man accused of assault, required an incredible amount of agility and intensity. \u201cThere were a lot of discussions about the ambition of this man, his capacity of being so mindless about his vanity,\u201d says Guadagnino. \u201cAnd we discussed the idea of being dispossessed in his own truth. How does he deal with that? What that triggers: rage, fury. At the same time, what is behind his own truth? Because if he has his own truth, that doesn\u2019t mean that that\u2019s the truth.\u201d<\/p>\n

Filmed in London, where Guadagnino\u2019s team meticulously recreated the classrooms, hallways, and courtyards of Yale, After the Hunt<\/em>\u2019s ambiance of discomfort is also enhanced by an unsettling score from the two-time Oscar-winning team of Trent Reznor<\/strong> and Atticus Ross.<\/strong> \u201cThere\u2019s always this kind of question being posed, and they created this beautiful theme that is articulated five times in the movie,\u201d says Guadagnino. \u201cThe more the movie becomes, the more the music grows into full doubts.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u201cI felt that we could use that script as a jumping place to go very deep and to explore all these themes and dynamics in an absolutely non-judgmental way of the characters and their behavior,\u201d says Guadagnino (right), with Edebiri and Roberts on set.<\/p>\n

<\/span>Yannis Drakoulidis\/Amazon MGM Studios.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

The final piece of the collaborative puzzle was cinematographer Malik Hassan Sayeed,<\/strong> making his return to feature films after a 25-year absence. Sayeed worked on Spike Lee<\/strong> films like Clockers<\/em> and He Got Game<\/em>, but hadn\u2019t shot a feature film since 1998\u2014working instead on commercials and music videos. \u201cI was more frightened to ask than he was. He was so generous and so wonderful,\u201d says Guadagnino. The partnership went so well that he\u2019s working with Sayeed again on his next film, the Sam Altman<\/strong> biopic Artificial,<\/em> starring Garfield and Monica Barbaro.<\/strong><\/p>\n

After its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival, After the Hunt<\/em> will be distributed by Amazon MGM Studios, opening in theaters beginning October 10. Guadagnino has only one wish: that he could be a fly on the wall after its screenings end. \u201cI honestly would love to be invisible and hear the conversations. I think that will be, for me, probably the most rewarding part of the process,\u201d he says. \u201cI want to understand how people react to this movie\u2014because I think many of the things that are said in the movie and the ways in which they\u2019re said could be possibly things that people had not yet the impulse to say out loud.\u201d<\/p>\n

After the Hunt will premiere at the Venice Film Festival before being released in US theaters on October 10. This feature is part of Awards Insider\u2019s exclusive fall film festival coverage<\/a>, including first looks and exclusive interviews with some of the biggest names set to hit Venice, Telluride, and Toronto.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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