"People never lie so much as after a hunt, during a war or before an election."
–Otto Von Bismarck
"It's funny, because when I was writing After the Hunt, I definitely wasn't like, 'Oh, I want to write about this current socio-political moment.' I was really just invested in the characters and the story," says screenwriter Nora Garrett about writing a screenplay that probes the dynamics of power, privilege and social accountability. She adds, "What I didn't even realize was something that was drilled into me because of my acting training – that the work, the scripts, the text, should not be divorceable from the socio-political moment. One comes from the other and I think that was just in the back of my brain while I was writing."
On today's episode, we chat with screenwriter Nora Garrett about her new film After the Hunt, directed by Luca Guadagnino (Challengers), and starring Julia Roberts, Andrew Garfield and Ayo Edebiri. Set in the philosophy department at Yale University, a devastating accusation by a female student (Edebiri) against a male teacher (Garfield) unleashes public and personal chaos that blurs the truth of the situation and will have you questioning the motives of every single character.
Garrett talks about working as an assistant in Hollywood, spending time on many film sets, and watching the good, bad and ugly parts of the existing power dynamics. These experiences helped her form the complex, morally gray characters that inhabit her script.
"We have a really hard time holding duality in our head. We have a really hard time being like, 'This is a good person who has done a bad thing' or, 'This is a bad person who occasionally does good things.' And it's not even really about bad and good, right and wrong. I think it's about this feeling of why these characters present themselves a certain way, and is that different from how they feel about themselves on the inside?" says Garrett.
She also shares what she learned about writing from working with Julia Roberts: "Economy. Julia is such a good actor, and I am the type of writer who will take two paragraphs to say what she can say in a look. I think that what I really learned from her was that sometimes you just don't need to say this monologue, you need these two lines, economy of word, and then asurplus of really good character thought brought by an actor can sometimes make a scene sing more than a lot of dialogue."
To learn more, listen to the podcast.