VENICE: Julia Roberts hopes to “stir it all up” for viewers of her new film about a university professor grappling with fraught US campus politics, as the Hollywood star made her debut at the Venice Film Festival on Friday.
The “Pretty Woman” star was attending the city’s festival for the first time in her career for “After the Hunt”, a cancel-culture psychological drama from Italian director Luca Guadagnino.
Speaking at a press conference on Friday ahead of the premiere, Roberts said the film does not aim to answer questions, but provoke them.
“Everybody comes out with all these different feelings and emotions and points of view. You realise what you believe in strongly and what your convictions are, because we stir it all up for you,” she told journalists.
Roberts plays a Yale University professor haunted by a secret from her past after a student accuses one of her colleagues of sexual assault.
Questions over truth and fiction, and whether characters are reliable narrators, course through the film by the director of “Bones and All”.
Touching on Gen Z culture and the generational divide between students and professors, the Amazon-produced film has overtones of Todd Field’s 2022 drama “Tar”, which handed Cate Blanchett a best actress award at Venice.
“Not everything is supposed to make you comfortable,” Roberts’s character in the film tells the student who claims she was assaulted.
Roberts said the film did not advocate any one point of view.
“We are challenging people to have conversations and to be excited by that or to be infuriated by that, it’s up to you,” she said.
“We are kind of losing the art of conversation in humanity right now, and if making this movie does anything, getting everybody to talk to each other is the most exciting thing I feel we could accomplish.”
