Julia Roberts lived with her co actors for a few weeks before filming After the Hunt

Julia Roberts arrives. Tense up everybody. It's you, it's me. I told her the new movie is so provocative. New question. I keep wrestling with it, changing my mind. I'll just tell you what I think. Okay. You could go home if you want because I really have so much I'd like to say. I want to know what you think. In the film, she plays a powerful but mysterious Yale professor at the center of a quartet of great actors. She's trying to piece together a kind of Me Too puzzle, an accusation against her close colleague and competitor by her student and protege. So who is telling the whole truth? What are you saying happened? There's so many layers of mystery going on. I mean, I know there's sort of the obvious question of an incident. Who's telling the truth? But who is ever telling the truth or not? And why in this movie is what's so interesting to me. She is challenging to Iowa Deberry, who plays the graduate student from a powerful family. As the film asks, do we know everything about her motives? I don't feel comfortable having this conversation with you anymore. Everything is supposed to make you comfortable. Not everything is supposed to be a lukewarm bath for you to sink into until you fall asleep and drown. And it's been really such a beautiful thing to sit next to Io, who I really admire and adore, and to listen to the words she chooses and the way that she sees the world in this movie. And Julia's character is just as challenging to her friend, that professor played by Andrew Garfield. Charismatic, untamed. She says, watch his intensity. This was his first scene on his first day on set. You know the truth and you won't say it because it'll make you look bad. You're going to ruin me, ruin my life, and you can easily stop it. You give me too much power, Hank. I did not do this. You did this to yourself. First take just blows in and has this great scene and, you know, it's a long scene and then it's over, you know, cut. And I was just like, oh, I'm sweating. And at the center of it all, the question, what do we do with loyalty and doubt? And having an ability to share opinions, to disagree, to have discourse and leave room for the person opposite you having these conversations. It's almost as if there's a place beyond all these certainties that we can just meet and grapple together. That is so perfectly said, so perfectly said. The actors and their director had a chance to talk about all this when they made the unconventional decision to live together at Julia's house for a couple of weeks before filming. She and her husband, cinematographer Danny Motor, cooked the food. I still can't believe that you all had God's sleep away camp at your house. Everybody got to come stay at your house. I mean, I love a good puppy pile of people. As you know, some days it felt like tight corners and some days it's like, do we have any more clean forks? Somebody wash some forks. But it was great. And I think it was the fast track to the inside of each other. I told her some writers are calling her performance astonishing, powerful. The monumental center, the coiled spring. You can stop me. Did you write all these things, Diane? Thank you. Truly breathtaking. And that you get the varying shades of earnestness, caginess, altruism and selfishness of being a human. Will you send that to Danny? She is now 57 years old, but it's always tempting to roll back the tape on her amazing career. An Oscar winner for Erin Brockovich. I love the world. I'm so happy. Thank you. A pretty woman. Big mistake. Big. Huge. And that first burst into the screen behind the counter in Mystic Pizza. Perfect. When I first interviewed her early on, she was still so vulnerable, maybe trying to find her way. You know what I love the most about this moment? What? Even your ears are blushing. Your ears are blushing. I'm telling you, my heart is racing right now. And they were just so bright. So red. Well, that's why I have them hidden now. Now she's a woman in full command with the lucky gift of a 23-year marriage and three grown children she adores. So I thought I'd go back to a question I asked that young woman long ago. What does she hope heaven will be like? There would be music. There would be dancing. Everybody would have wings in any color, in like their favorite color, right? And then at night, whenever we went to bed, it would be really, really quiet. And then you'd just hear little bells in the very background that you could only hear if you really listened. I stand by my responses, yes. And do you want to amend anything in heaven now? I think we need a bigger table.