‘After The Hunt’ Production Designer Stefano Baisi On Creating “Layers Of History” To Match The Apartment Of An “Academic Elite”

For Luca Guadagnino’s After the Hunt, many of the integral scenes of the film take place in Alma’s expansive apartment. Production designer Stefano Baisi‘s job was to design the apartment in a way that matched the aesthetic of the educated elite, while also bringing a sense of history to pair with the story.

Baisi says it was important to bring a generational history to the apartment in the design, with influences from not only Alma and her husband Frederik, but also Frederik’s parents and grandparents. While infusing the sense of history, it was also essential to create a home that would match the style of an apartment found in the upper echelons of New Haven society.

DEADLINE: What were your inspirations for the apartment?

STEFANO BAISI: In the first draft, the apartment was described as a brownstone house that is a very common architecture in that part of the United States, so it was coherent with what you can find in New Haven. Then, Luca thought that to represent that kind of academic elite world and to bring to life all the actions that the characters had to do in that space, it was more efficient and more powerful to have a horizontal space instead of a vertical space as the brownstone houses are. So, we started thinking about the Upper West Side and Upper East Side apartment in New York that has been shot many times in many movies and that could be a good environment. We started thinking about the Langham building and the Dakota building as main references for the apartment

DEADLINE: How about the interior design?

BAISI: We wanted to give depth to the characters and we start thinking, who was Frederik? Who was Alma before being the characters that are in the movie? Frederik probably inherited the apartment from his parents, and before the parents from his grandparents, so we started thinking of creating three layers of history in the apartment, starting from the grandparents that escaped from Europe to United States, bringing the architectural styles of the time like the Bauhaus to create the first layer of history. Then we thought about the parents that lived the Kennedy era in the United States and we collected many of the interiors from the apartments of Jacqueline Kennedy to start creating this second layer of history. Then we brought into the apartment Frederik and Alma’s life. They traveled a lot, they collected art pieces from North Africa and many places all around the world.