Luca Guadagnino‘s academia cancel-culture thriller “After the Hunt” (Amazon/MGM Studios) is the Italian filmmaker’s latest work to premiere at the Venice Film Festival. It stars Julia Roberts as a Yale philosophy professor, who’s unraveling amid a sexual-assault accusation made by her student (Ayo Edebiri) against her colleague (Andrew Garfield).
From a script by first-time feature writer Nora Garrett, Guadagnino’s third feature in three years plays out of competition in Venice, with the director joined by Roberts, Michael Stuhlbarg, Garfield, Edebiri, and Chloë Sevigny on the Lido. During Friday’s press conference in the Palazzo del Casino, the actors tangled with the film’s thorny topics, which deal not only with assault but also race relations in the academic world and the ideological divide between generations.
Related Stories
Given the film’s cancel-culture overtures, it’s noteworthy and not by accident that the film’s opening credits are in the style of a Woody Allen movie: in the Windsor typeface and white text against a black screen, in alphabetical order, and acknowledging said alphabetical order. Eagle-eyed audiences will ponder the connection between an artist who’s become persona non grata in American culture and Roberts as a professor who is facing accusations and persecution of her own.
During the Friday morning press conference, IndieWire asked Luca Guadagnino why those opening credits share an aesthetic with a Woody Allen movie. “The crass answer would be why not?” the “Call Me By Your Name” filmmaker said. “There is a canon that I grew up with, and why I started thinking about this movie with my collaborators, in front of the camera and behind the camera, we couldn’t stop thinking of ‘Crimes and Misdemeanors’ or ‘Another Woman’ or even ‘Hannah and Her Sisters,’ and there was an infrastructure to the story that felt linked to the great oeuvre of Woody Allen between 1985 and 1991.”
He added, “I played with that a few times before this, a couple of times used that kind of graphic and font, and I felt it was also interesting thinking of an artist who has been, in a way, facing some sort of problems about his being and 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 font, that kind of font. It goes beyond Woody.”
Roberts said it’s “not so much that we’re making a statement” with the hot-button film. “We’re sharing these lives for this moment and want everyone to go talk to each other after… we are kind of losing the art of conversation in humanity right now, and if making this movie does everything, getting everyone to talk to each other is the most exciting thing we can accomplish.
