Julia Roberts Jokes That Andrew Garfield is Her Therapist at ‘After the Hunt’ NYFF Press Conference

“Don’t you want Andrew to be your therapist? Because he’s my therapist,” Julia Roberts quips, drawing laughs from the crowd of journalists, press correspondents, and industry professionals at the screening of “After the Hunt” on the festival’s opening day.

Just moments before, Andrew Garfield was unpacking how he explored his character’s unconscious motivations.

“So I definitely have my own impression of this major event as the character. And then I have to somehow, maybe we both have to do the magic trick of going, ‘But what don’t I know about what I did? What don’t I know about what happened? What don’t I know about what happened in the moments where I was doing what I did?” Garfield explains

“What is happening below my conscious awareness?’ And that’s where it gets really hard and fun and like exciting and horrible and the only way we get to the healing, I think, for all of us is by traveling through all of those kinds of second-layer materials, like those unconscious materials, those unconscious drives.”

After the Hunt, the latest drama film from director Luca Guadagnino, stars Julia Roberts as a philosophy professor whose life is thrown into chaos after her protégée (Ayo Edebiri) accuses her longtime colleague and friend (Andrew Garfield) of sexual assault.

Once the moderated Q&A ended and the floor was open to audience questions, it was only a matter of time before someone asked Ayo Edebiri about that interview from earlier this month at the Venice Film Festival. In her response to the audience member, she noted that she “didn’t really pay too much attention” to the online reaction to the now-viral interview.

“I think I’m less online than I used to be,” Edebiri said. “So I didn’t really, to be completely honest. And I love to lie, I make money lying. But yeah, I didn’t really pay too much attention.”

Diplomatically expanding on her thoughts on the interview, she added, “I think it was just a very human moment. And I think strangely, an uncomfortable conversation, it’s kind of one of the many things our film is about.”

Despite being shot in London, Guadagnino expressed his eagerness to replicate real-life Yale and New Haven locations for the sake of authentic world-building in the film. “We created with the production designer of this movie, which is here, Stefano Paesi, with whom I collaborated on ‘Queer,’” he explained, “So we literally remade the Beinecke Library or the main quad. And then we discovered in this extensive time of research that there were places like the Three Sheet Bar or the Tandoor restaurant where these characters could have gone.”

By the end of the press conference, Guadagnino was also eager to express his gratitude that his film is the opener for the New York Film Festival — but not before sharing how filmmaking has been a childhood dream come true.

”I think it’s about cinema, you know?” he said, “Like, I dreamt of making film when I was a kid, and to play with movie making, it’s what I really ask my life to be, and I’m very lucky and proud.”

“After the Hunt” premieres at the New York Film Festival today and will be released in theaters nationwide on October 10th.