“After the Hunt” Production Designer Stefano Baisi on Creating Three Generations of History in One Apartment

It’s no accident that Oscar-nominated Call Me by Your Name director Luca Guadagnino‘s movies look as elegant as they do. The Italian filmmaker has a side hustle as an interior designer. In 2017, he launched his eponymous studio and hired architect Stefano Baisi, who helped him design shops, hotels, Dior fashion shows, and luxury apartments. Last year, Baisi crossed over to film by conjuring a surreal 1950s Mexico City for Queer, Guadagnino’s adaptation of William Burroughs’ novel featuring Daniel Craig.

Now Guadagnino and Baisi re-unite for After the Hunt (in theaters now), starring Julia Roberts and Andrew Garfield as revered Yale professors whose comfortable academic perch starts to wobble when an ambitious student (Ayo Edibiri) threatens their reputations.

Basio, visiting Los Angeles from his native Milan, talks to The Credits about replicating New Haven in London and taking inspiration from the Upper West Side apartment building where Rosemary’s Baby was filmed.

For After the Hunt, what did Luca Guadagnino want to communicate, through your designs, about Julia Roberts and Andrew Garfield’s Alma and Frederik [Michael Stuhlbarg] characters?

He wanted to express the power that these people hold in society, the power they aspire to, and the social position they have achieved. The academy, the university, the institution – all these things form the backdrop of this movie, together with the Wharf on the industrial side of the city, which represents the other side of Alma.

The story is set at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, but it was actually shot in London. How did you accomplish that swap?

I went to New Haven for three or four days, where I had access to Yale classrooms and offices. I also visited the outskirts of the city, the Wharf, and began to build my vision of the place. We thought Fredrick and Alma’s home should be sort of like an Upper West Side apartment in New York City. We designed an apartment inspired by the Dakota and Langham buildings. Rosemary’s Baby was shot in the Dakota.

Alma and Frederik’s apartment seems burnished in warm golds and browns. What was your palette for their place?

I studied the work of Ingmar Bergman because we wanted After the Hunt to have a similar palette.

Alma and Frederik, being members of the academic elite, demonstrate good taste in their home environment. We’re not looking at self-assembled furniture from a big box store.

We wanted to tell a story through the way we treated their apartment, giving depth to the characters by evoking a sense of history. We figured Frederik inherited the apartment from his parents, who had inherited it from their grandparents, so we created three layers of time. The grandparents may have come from Europe, so they brought this kind of [minimalist] Bauhaus style to the apartment, which you see in the kitchen. Frederik’s parents lived there during the Jaqueline Kennedy era. After that Fredrick and Alma wrote their personalities onto the apartment.

Where do these layers of history peek through in the furnishings?

You can spot some [Austrian designer] Josef Hoffmann furniture in their apartment, like the dining room table. We found that during a visit to LobMyer, a historic glassware company in Vienna. We had a meeting around this beautiful, massive wooden table and thought the piece would work very well in Alma’s dining room. We thought the flowered upholstery created a link to the Jacqueline Kennedy era, making the furniture look more American. We decided that Alma and Frederik would bring their own experience to the home by reupholstering furniture, adding different covers to the bedroom walls, and displaying art from their travels around the world, including places like Haiti and North Africa.

The apartment reveals something about who these people are, not through expositional dialogue, but through their furnishings.

Exactly! That’s what Luca wanted to do with the apartment. Instead of creating a generic space, we wanted to be very precise. Every item in their study and every book was selected in relation to the characters, Frederik being a psychoanalyst, Alma being a professor of philosophy. It’s all very specific.

Luca had input on the books?

Of course! We did our research, and then Luca personally picked the books.

Beyond the confines of Alma and Frederik’s apartment, how did you go about replicating Yale University in London?

We shot everything at Shepperton Studios. We had nine soundstage sets plus huge sets in the backlot.

What did you build in the backlot?

The Indian restaurant in the movie was built on the backlot, complete with sidewalks, tarmac, signs, the facade of the building. Everything is an exact replica of a real place in New Haven, which we measured and photographed.

In the Wharf neighborhood, Alma rents a bare-bones place in stark contrast to her richly furnished main home. What were you going for with her “Wharf” apartment?

That’s a simple apartment representing a sort of interior space where Alma can work and hide her secrets and lies. We wanted to show the difference between this industrial part of town and the university, which is a very clean and polished bubble with neo-Gothic towers and a few modernist buildings, such as the Beinecke Library. Whereas in the Wharf [neighborhood], you see smokestacks and industrial buildings. We designed Alma’s apartment from scratch, thinking it should be the kind of place you’d find in the eye of the city.

You shot some scenes at Cambridge University, right?

Only one, where Alma is walking through a gate to the campus, and we filmed some establishing shots without actors at Cambridge. But on the Shepperton backlot, we built a very large [campus] quad. We used real iron for the fence, wood for the benches, and real grass. We did molds and used concrete to create the stone sidewalks. And the trees – part of them were built with Styrofoam-type material, which we painted.

Your architectural background must have come in handy.

For sure. But also, in a project of this scale, you’re working with a very good team where the only way to communicate is to speak and to draw.

If you were on set during filming, did you enjoy watching the actors go through their paces in your custom-built environments?

I’m almost always on set with Luca. It’s important to be there with him in case there are questions, or maybe he asks if you can move a wall. And I love to see the actors in these spaces. With Luca, you never know where he will put the camera. He’s guided by the actors and whatever inspires him on the day, so it’s a big responsibility for me to give him a 360-degree set.

You’ve been working alongside Luca Guadagnino for nearly a decade, first at his design studio, then Queer, and now After the Hunt. Being in close creative proximity to Mr. Guadagnino all these years, what do you see as his prime virtues as an artist?

First of all, Luca’s knowledge of cinema history is incredible. He really knows and respects the master filmmakers of the past, so that’s the first thing. The other thing is that he pushes you over your limits in favor of what the movie needs. That’s very motivating.

Pushing you past your limits – – does that create stress?

[Laughing] Of course. If you do a movie like After the Hunt in the time we did it, there’s going to be a bit of stress.

After the Hunt is in theaters now.

Featured image: (L to R) Ayo Edebiri as Maggie and Julia Roberts as Alma in AFTER THE HUNT, from Amazon MGM Studios. Photo Credit: Yannis Drakoulidis © 2025 Amazon Content Services LLC. All Rights Reserved.