Italian filmmaker Luca Guadagnino is frequently in conversation with other artists in his works from 2015's A Bigger Splash, which took inspiration from Jacques Deray and Roberto Rossellini, to his 2018 remake of Dario Argento's Suspiria and films throughout his oeuvre. But his latest dialogue with disgraced director Woody Allen feels a bit too intimate of a conversation for some. Sign up for the Out Newsletter to keep up with what's new in LGBTQ+ culture and entertainment delivered three times a week straight (well) to your inbox!Guadagnino's newest feature, After the Hunt, which follows last year's Challengers and Queer, stars Julia Roberts as a Yale philosophy professor who becomes embroiled in scandal when her star pupil (Ayo Edebiri) accuses a fellow professor and longtime friend (Andrew Garfield) of sexual assault. But the film isn't the straightforward #MeToo-inspired work of cinema that its plot seems to implyas hinted at out of the gate, in the drama's opening credits.Those credits, which are styled in Windsor typeface with white text against a black screen and run in alphabetical order, are a direct nod to the signature style Allen has used since his early days as a director. And attendees at the Venice Film Festival, where the feature premiered on Friday, immediately made the connection which wasnt exactly difficult to figure out given the content of After the Hunt. See on Instagram In a press conference Friday morning, critics were eager to know what Guadagnino and his stars had to say about about the nod to Allen, who was accused of sexual misconduct by his adopted daughter, Dylan Farrow, more than two decades ago."The crass answer would be, why not?" Guadagnino said in response to a question from IndieWire about the styling the credits after an Allen film. "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."Guadagnino, slightly deflecting by the end, 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."According to The Hollywood Reporter, earlier in the press conference, the director made another telling remark when speaking to why he was drawn to the script for the film, which was penned by first-time feature writer Nora Garrett. "Everyone has their own truths. It's not that one truth is more important than the other. It's how we see the clash of truths and what is the boundary of these truths together."Joining in the dialogue, Roberts, whose lead character finds herself in dangerous territory in the wake of her student's accusation, addressed the fact that the film has already stirred up controversy with both its approach to the subject matter and its invocation of Allen."It's not so much that we're making a statement. We're just sharing these lives for this moment, and then we want everyone to go away and talk to each other. That, to me, is the most exciting bit because we're kind of losing the art of conversation in humanity right now. If making this movie does anything, getting everybody to talk to each other is the most exciting thing that I feel we could accomplish," the veteran actor said, according toTHR.After the Hunt opens on October 17 in theaters.