The Turning Point: A Conversation with ‘After the Hunt’ Screenwriter Nora Garrett

After the Hunt is a gripping psychological drama about a college professor (Julia Roberts) who finds herself at a personal and professional crossroads when a star student (Ayo Edebiri) levels an accusation against one of her colleagues (Andrew Garfield), and a dark secret from her own past threatens to come into the light.

There are films that stick with you. Films that make you think about the grandness of moral ambiguity. They become personal, sometimes validating, and if done right – throw you off kilter – making you reexamine it all again. After watching director Luca Guadagnino’s latest film, After the Hunt, wonderfully penned by screenwriter Nora Garrett – you get that… and a lot more – heavy on the ambiguity.

Nora Garrett discussed with Script how focusing on her character Alma shaped the foundation of the screenplay and overarching story that plays out, exploring themes of morality and ethics, generational differences, and also highlights her writing process and creative collaboration with director Luca Guadagnino. Plus, she touches on the impact of Julia Roberts’ performance and the value of economy in dialogue and the importance of verisimilitude in filmmaking.

This interview has been edited for content and clarity.

Sadie Dean: Diving in, how did you land on this story? Did it start with the characters? And then going from there, mapping each character out, how they inform each other, move through the story? Basically, framing that narrative. Big question! [laughs]

Nora Garrett: [laughs] The rest of this interview will be spent answering just this question. [laughs] I think that with every process of writing, there's a certain amount of it that's premeditated and intentional, and a certain amount of it that's the alchemy of being in the space with the characters when they come to life.

But the idea of it really started from the character of Alma that was really the genesis of the story. I was really curious about successful people, the misuse of power, abuses of power, and the intoxication of having power, and what that does to you if you're having all of this external sort of validation...

And I thought it would be really interesting if there was this woman who was incredibly high achieving, but so compartmentalized because she had this sort of deep-rooted shame attached to a secret that happened at a time where she had enough plausible deniability to sort of be like, 'Well, I wasn't totally online at that point.' Not so to speak, like on AOL messenger, but you know what I'm saying. [laughs] But also had a sense of her intentionality. And how do you deal with that schism in your identity while you're trying to project this other identity to the larger world?

And then I think that the very classic sort of screenwriting 101 thing is like, put your protagonist in situations that are going to be the most painful for them, specifically: emotionally, physically, whatever the container of your story is. But I think every character was designed as sort of like a particular prism point from Alma's nexus - Alma, played by Julia Roberts - and how each one of them both hit at something in her that she wasn't willing to look at in herself, and had sort of like a metaminic representation of something that she either experienced or didn't want to experience.

Sadie: And how that unfolds is so interesting - putting these little puzzle pieces together from moral worth, and then there’s talk about business optics and how that equals their identity. And you're seeing that inner and outer dilemma for both Alma and Maggie, both use it to protect themselves but also finding a way to connect with each other. That dynamic between these two is interesting to watch unfold.

Nora: Their dynamic was one of the most important to me when I was writing the script. Alma teaches philosophy, specifically epistemological thought, which is the study of ethics. And Maggie is getting her PhD in ethical study as well. And to me, the study of philosophy is really a study of morality. How does one live life, and how does one live life well? And especially in this current cultural moment where our signposts for morality are so fractured, we don't have a collective agreement about the right way to live one's life anymore, if we ever did. I feel like, that is sort of the spine of philosophical thought.

And I think that Maggie and Alma are from very different generations of women that have had very different experiences of feminism. Maggie's character is slightly younger than me, but I feel like there's this sense of what is the right way to be a woman too, what is the right way to support other women, what is the right way to be a feminist? And I feel like these two women have very entrenched ideas of what is the right way to go about handling this, and what feels right in terms of integrity, and what feels right in terms of their values.

When Maggie especially felt like she had found someone who was almost like a surrogate mother, and then to feel like she had gotten this woman entirely wrong, because at sort of the nadir of her experience, Alma doesn't give her the type of validation and support that she expected.

I think for both of them, it's a reckoning... because I think Alma, too is surprised by that. I don't think that was premeditated either, and so it is sort of that thing of the outer self having to reckon with the inner self in the microcosm of this one turning point.

Sadie: I'm still thinking about that moral and ethical compass of the, ‘He said. She said. They said’ finger pointing and ‘What do I do in this situation? Who do I side with?’ And there’s that dilemma for Alma, she has power – does she easily give it up? Especially for Maggie?  This is something that could and possibly has played out in the real world, and gah, it's such a shame. And equally sad to see it portrayed on screen too.

Nora: It is. It's devastating. And I think it's devastating for young women to have the experience of having a really complicated relationship with someone that they assume is going to be a female mentor and a role model to them. And I think also something that goes on in the film that is hopefully a corollary for what our current social political moment is, is that there's a lot of outward grandstanding, and then when you really get down to the nitty gritty, people have actually very different ideas when it applies to their own life. And I think that schism and that dichotomy was interesting to me.

Sadie: What was your creative collaboration like with your director Luca [Guadagnino]? He has a very specific lens and approach to his films, and this is no different. Something very specific stood out for me, and I’m not sure if this was originally in the script, but how he focuses on hand gestures, it’s so very unsettling.

Nora: Luca brought a lot to the script, and the way that Luca works is so spontaneous, so sort of on the day in the way things are being shaped. I think he said on set one day, he was like, 'I paint every frame on the day where it's happening.' He's adding to the painting every single day. As opposed to being like, 'Oh, this is a static thing that I'm putting a little piece into.'

He really wanted to bring a lot more moral ambiguity to it. He wanted to bring a lot more generational drama to it. He didn't want it to be a polemic about this generation has it right, this generation has it wrong. This generation is passe. This generation is not. And he wanted to really dig into the depth of what is true and false.

Luca is such a humanist. He's so interested in people and human desires. And he was really interested in what power means as a gesture. And I think that's where a lot of the hand focusing came like, when are you reaching for something? When are you grasping for something? When are you trying to hold on to something or someone? And is it a gesture of love and kindness, or is it a gesture of you stay here so I can keep eyes on you?

Sadie: Your writing journey to this point, what drew you to this medium as a storyteller?

Nora: My love of screenwriting really came from a feeling - I'd written a ton, but I was acting, and I was writing a lot of prose, and I was writing a lot of plays, and I was writing a lot of stuff that I felt like was either performable in a black box theater, or just something where I was like this is for me to have an emotional perspective on the world.

And it wasn't until I started assisting for the last man that I assisted for and he had an idea for a screenplay, and I was like, 'OK I'm going to try to see if I can do this long form,' I'd written pilots, and I thought this is a great collaborative container in which to do this. And I just really loved how facile it is.

With prose, you're just building something that takes a very long time. And what's lovely about screenwriting to me is that you can change a whole character's backstory in one scene, you can build and rebuild simultaneously, and it's just really improvisational and spontaneous in that way. And I think that with this script, looking back on it, it feels like such an amalgamation of so many things that I was thinking about and writing about for so long.

This felt like the kind of final form of that, in a way, trying to write about power, trying to write about power dynamics, trying to write about these murky gray areas between your perception of something versus another person's perception of the very same thing. But the first draft of it, I actually wrote in a class that was run by a writer named Tim Neenan, and it was just all about structure. And the purpose of it was really to finish a first draft in 12 weeks, which was of course, just a huge vomit draft.

And after that, it took on a process of refinement. I have a lot of really lovely writer friends, so they gave me notes. I did a reading with friends who are actors… hearing it out loud, and getting vouches from people who I trusted, being like, 'I think you have something here that we should keep exploring and honing and making right.'

Sadie: Knowing that you wrote this first vomit draft in 12 weeks, from that point to now, seeing it up on the screen, is there any scene in particular that were surprised to see play out so well – doesn’t hurt to have such a talented cast to perform these parts – but I’m so curious.

Nora: Thank you, I appreciate the question… Obviously, Andrew Garfield's character Hank Gibson, is a very complicated figure in this script, but the scenes between him and Julia Roberts' character Alma, were my favorite to write. And obviously I was writing this before either of them came on. So, it wasn't like them in my head, but those two characters, I feel like, especially the scene without giving anything away, in Alma's wharf apartment, what I love about that scene is the turn.

Anytime I read my writing back, or watch my writing, I'm just like, 'Oh, God, what was I thinking?' [laughs] but I do think that the turn in that and having a turn in real time with people who are so united at the beginning of that scene, and united in ignominy, I mean that to me was really interesting of the together and then the apart, and then the undergirding of their history of togetherness and apartness. I felt like that was one of those scenes where I felt like, ‘what a neat construction.’

Sadie: I was thinking of that scene too! It does have such an interesting turn, because of all the dynamics that are happening there, and who has the power in that situation. And you're like, ‘OK, who am I siding with? And I feel weird about this, and should I be watching?’ [laughs]

Nora: Yes, correct! All of the above. [laughs]

Sadie: Any big learning curves for you as a screenwriter that you're going to take away from this and apply to what you're writing next?

Nora: Another great question, thank you. Yeah, massive, massive learning curves. [laughs] I think something that I learned from Julia Roberts specifically was economy, because I come from playwriting, I can tend to have very dialogue heavy scenes. And when you get a really brilliant actress in the room, they can communicate so much with their body language, with their internal objective, that you don't need a lot of that on the page. She was very good about being like, 'Don't make me say all these lines, I'll do it.' [laughs] That was a very big learning curve.

But also, Luca is someone who is so attached to verisimilitude, down to his sets which are designed by his gorgeous production designer, Stefano [Baisi]. But there's a sense of he needs everything to be real and realistic and could have really happened down to the architecture of a space. These characters need to be grounded in what could actually happen and what they could actually move and walk through. And I think, of course, it's film. There's always going to be devices, right? But that's something that's been really sticking with me as I continue to write about being like, OK, there are things you can, of course make up, but there are things that have to be grounded in the production of it, and in the realism of it.

After the Hunt is now playing in Theaters.