"After the Hunt" writer Nora Garrett said she never could have predicted the lead actor in her new film when she began writing it.
"Not in a million years," Garrett said of superstar Julia Roberts stepping into the lead character of Alma Imhoff in the psychological thriller, directed by Luca Guadagnino, which hit theaters this weekend.
"It's so funny, because I feel like when we were first out with this script and meeting with producers, a lot of them would ask me, 'OK, who's your dream cast?' And I was truly so flabbergasted by that question," Garrett told ABC News.
"It was just imaginary people in my head. I never thought that it would get to this point. And, yeah, I think it would have been supreme delusion to have been writing it and said to myself or my friends that Julia Roberts was gonna play the lead," Garrett continued.
"After the Hunt," which hit theaters on Oct. 10 in Los Angeles and New York, is a quick-paced and emotionally intense psychological thriller, shining a spotlight on the elite world of academia. The film takes on the politics of college campuses through the prism of sexual violence, race, class disparity and more.
The film centers around Roberts' character, a professor, in her dealings with fellow professor Hank (Andrew Garfield), student Maggie (Ayo Edebiri) and husband Frederik (Michael Stuhlbarg).
Garrett also lauded Guadagnino for his ability to build a world inside the screen.
"Luca is a very sumptuous director," Garrett said of the "Call Me by Your Name" and "Challengers" director. "He's very tactile, and he loves the sort of messiness and beauty of humanity simultaneously."
She highlighted the many ways Guadagnino looked to pull humanity off the page and onto the screen.
"He's really interested in human gestures and human spaces. And so the sets were so rich and textured, and it felt like immersive theater," she said.
"You could wander through that apartment set, and I would find things on the last day that I had no idea were there on the first day, and no one was going to see them except for maybe the actors."
Garrett opened up on social media over the weekend as the film was released to show appreciation for how far her work has come.
"I wish I could go back and tell the girl writing this film in her studio apartment on a dying laptop with little to no idea where her life was going what it would become. Or maybe that would’ve ruined it, I don’t know," Garrett wrote. "What I do know is grateful doesn’t even begin to describe it, and lucky is an understatement. "
