Upon graduating from NYU Tisch School of the Arts in 2013, Nora Garrett visited a restaurant with her grandmother near Lincoln Center. This past September, she could see the posters for her first-ever film “After the Hunt” plastered around Alice Tully Hall from that same spot.
“I remember being so depressed [in 2013] because I had no idea what I was going to do,” Garrett told WSN. “If only I could go back and tell that girl where she was going to end up.”
After studying at the Stella Adler Studio of Acting, Garrett took roles off-Broadway before moving to Los Angeles to work as an assistant for actresses, creatives and industry executives. All the while, she continued to act in short films and enrolled in ad hoc classes, including ones about philosophy and playwriting. Garrett credits a script analysis course she took at Tisch for influencing her to become a writer.
“That class is something that I returned to all the time,” Garrett said. “It was so seismic for me in using sociopolitical cues and psychology and to garner a sense of empathy for why your characters might behave in ways that seem regressive or difficult to understand.”
“After the Hunt” does just this. The psychological drama takes place in Yale’s philosophy department in 2019, where college professor Alma (Julia Roberts) gets caught in the middle of sexual assault allegations that her mentee Maggie (Ayo Edebiri) levels against fellow professor Hank (Andrew Garfield). Garrett spoke to WSN about how her own academic experiences influenced “After the Hunt” as well as its complex characters.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
WSN: Can you elaborate on your process of developing this film as a spec script?
Garrett: Something that was told to me when I was at NYU was that the people you’re coming up in school with are going to become your best collaborators. That was certainly true for me, because I was really developing [my script] in a vacuum. I didn’t have an agent. I didn’t have a manager. No one told me to write this. I wanted to write it and I felt compelled to write it. I wouldn’t have survived the process if it had not been for my friends who were much more successful in the industry than me and who were doing it for much longer, who gave me really good notes and encouragement, and also who eventually introduced me to my manager [Sydney Blanke].
I started writing ‘After The Hunt’ in an ad hoc class I took postgrad. The point of the class was to finish a first draft of something with accountability, and that was instrumental for me in getting from the blank page to the finished first draft. Since I have so many actor friends, I did a table reading with a bunch of them. I thought ultimately I would make it myself with my friends, so I was very surprised when my manager set it on this trajectory.
WSN: ‘After the Hunt’ takes place at Yale University, a prestigious Ivy League institution whose climate is fraught with tension. How did your educational experiences influence your development of Yale’s setting in this film?
Garrett: I did a playwriting course there after I graduated, and when I arrived there for the first time, that was the sort of college that I had in my imagination, and the intellectual atmosphere that I thought I was going to have in college. I think that’s ultimately what people who go to Yale also think, and it’s not always that way. There’s always some frisson or texture because the actuality is it’s always going to be different than your imagination. I was generally fascinated by this sort of insular culture that had a lot of elitism baked into it.
WSN: The film also uses philosophy to approach difficult topics like sexual assault, racial and gender tensions and power dynamics in academia. Were there any implicit biases you had toward this subject matter — and your morally gray characters — that you had to work through while developing the script?
Garrett: Another moment that was instrumental for me at NYU was taking Writing The Essay. We read excerpts from Carl Jung and bell hooks, and these specifically really stayed with me. bell hooks specifically talks about this dual consciousness of being a woman, but also a Black woman, and understanding that women are seen first and foremost as women. And for black women, you’re understanding not only what you feel about yourself, but what other people in the world see and feel about you.
This was all very useful when writing ‘After the Hunt.’ When it came to shaping the character of Maggie, Ayo Edebiri was really instrumental in navigating those different and challenging identity markers, because [Maggie is] a black woman who is adopted into enormous wealth and privilege on campus with mostly white people in a mostly white department with a white female mentor. I wish, in some ways, it was more challenging to get into the mind of someone like Hank, but I’ve just seen so many men like that and overheard so many conversations where specifically white men feel very beleaguered and victimized by the societal moment.
WSN: Near the end of the film, Frederik says it’s an ‘adult’s job to protect the innocence of a child.’ What kind of conversations do you hope this film opens up for different generations of viewers, especially those on college campuses who may confront the conflicts “After the Hunt” touches upon?
Garrett: That moment in the hospital bed is Frederick offering, very gently and lovingly, another narrative for Alma. The genius of Luca’s epilogue and wanting to have it five years later is that you don’t know if she decided to walk through that door. To me, the beginning of empathy is always understanding where people are coming from, and what learned behavior they have, what societal tensions were in their upbringing. My hope is that there’s an engendering of empathy and further understanding of compassion and openness — a willingness to see the same event from multiple sides.
“After The Hunt” is currently playing in theaters.
Contact Dani Biondi at [email protected].