The ever busy Luca Guadagnino took a break from filming his upcoming Sam Altman/OpenAI flick “Artificial“ to hit the red carpet at the Venice Film Festival for his latest feature, “After The Hunt.” The dramatic thriller stars Julia Roberts as a professor who is shaken when a student (Ayo Ediberi) accuses a colleague (Andrew Garfield) of rape, and the picture provocatively opens with a credits sequence that prominently uses Windsor Light — the very same font Woody Allen has recognizably used for every film since 1975’s “Love & Death.”
In a festival full of cinephiles, this did not go unnoticed or unremarked upon, and Guadagnino shared how his own film was influenced both by Allen’s work and personal controversy.
“We couldn’t stop thinking of ‘Crimes and Misdemeanors,’ or ‘Another Woman,’ or even ‘Hannah and Her Sisters,’ ” Guadagnino said. “And there was an infrastructure to the story that felt very linked to the great oeuvre of Woody Allen between 1985 and 1991, I would say.”
“I felt it was also sort of like [an] interesting nod to thinking of an artist who has been, in a way, facing some sort of problems about his being,” the director added. “What is our responsibility in looking at the work of an artist that we love like Woody Allen? And by the way, it’s a classic, that kind of font. I just want to conclude it’s such a classic that it goes beyond Woody now.”
It’s a bit of extra food for thought to go with Guadagnino’s timely picture. Co-starring Michael Stuhlbarg, Chloë Sevigny, and Lío Mehiel, “After The Hunt” opens on October 10th. [EW/THR]
