Don't ask Adam Driver stupid questions

It is a truth universally acknowledged that an audience Q&A will be terrible. You will find yourself stuck in place, unable to intervene as your fellow man stands to confidently announce that “This is actually more of a comment, but….” Whoever first said “there are no stupid questions” had never been to an audience Q&A, or else they would’ve known better. And up on stage, the artists or creators or dignitaries or whoever is fielding these inquiries must steel themselves and respond politely to the inanity, no matter how far below their dignity it may be.

Except some days, some glorious days, an artist might shed the veneer of politeness and answer the so-called question with the energy it deserves. So it was at Poland’s Camerimage Film Festival on Sunday, where Adam Driver apparently felt that enough was enough and shut one of these questions down. After a screening of his new film Ferrari, an audience member asked, “What do you think about [the] crash scenes? They looked pretty harsh, drastic and, I must say, cheesy for me. What do you think?” What is a man contractually obligated to promote the movie in question to say to such a provocation? “Fuck you, I don’t know,” is what Driver went with. “Next question.”

Driver could have responded by defending the movie in earnest, sure, but why give a troll the time of day? It’s actually a relief to see the star treat an unserious question in kind; there’s some catharsis here for everyone who has had to suffer through a bad Q&A (Rian Johnson clearly agrees. Driver’s Star Wars: The Last Jedi director, who no doubt has fielded a lot of nonsense in his time, reposted the clip of Driver’s response with the caption, “My man.”).

In fact, let this moment be a learning opportunity for us all. There are ways to ask questions about things you didn’t like or have critiques about (“What was your reaction to seeing the crash scenes for the first time?” would be a mild way of putting the question in question). Nine times out of ten, an actor is not going to join you in trashing the movie they just made. Let’s all try to inject some substance into our questions, rather than being offensive or fawning, that the artist can actually respond to—not just for the sake of the person answering the question, but for all your fellow audience members who have to suffer through the secondhand embarrassment of listening to it.