‘After The Hunt’: Read The Screenplay From First-Time Scribe Nora Garrett That Refuses To Offer Easy Answers

Deadline’s Read the Screenplay series spotlighting the awards season’s most talked-about movies continues with Amazon MGM Studios‘ After the Hunt, the timely and searing thriller directed by Luca Guadagnino, written by Nora Garrett in her script debut and starring Julia Roberts, Andrew Garfield and Ayo Edebiri.

The pic had its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival and hit U.S. theaters October 10. Roberts scored a Golden Globe nomination for Best Actress – Drama nom playing Alma Imhoff, a Yale philosophy professor who with long-awaited college tenure at her fingertips becomes the center of the story’s gravity when a student (Edebiri) comes to he to accuse Alma’s colleague and friend (Andrew Garfield) of sexual assault after one of Alma’s salon mixers. How Alma deals with it — defending her friend, keeping her own future secure even as it may be slipping away — could also betray one of her own deepest secrets.

Garrett’s script drew the Oscar-nominated Guadagnino to the project for numerous reasons, including that it was a chance to create a potboiler problem that was rooted in power, maybe a different driver than his past works (Call Me By Your Name, Challengers) whose characters’ motivations were rooted more in desire. It also tackled timely topics that the script illuminates but purposefully doesn’t offer easy answers to: defining what “truth” is, political correctness, academic elitism (there is some wicked drubbing in the script around that), #MeToo and “woke” culture among them.

Guadagnino and Garrett spent a summer sharpening her script, focusing on the gray areas of these issues the characters must face and make them even more difficult to resolve — mirroring more realistically what audiences also face in our current cultural moment.

“It would be hard to find anyone more fearless than Luca in going where things aren’t comfortable, aren’t clear-cut, and can’t be tied with a bow,” Garrett says. “I felt lucky that Luca wanted the story to be sharper rather than to shave off its edges. This is a cultural moment when we have, collectively, been invited to look deeper within ourselves, at both that which we inherited, or that which we’ve been conditioned to believe. And only by openly interacting with what’s going on under the surface can we get to more understanding.”

Read the screenplay below.