Camerimage Festival Director Shares Statement About Adam Driver’s Viral Expletive Response During ‘Ferrari’ Audience Q&A

Zac Ntim
·4 min read
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Adam Driver’s lowkey visit to Poland’s EnergaCamerimage Film Festival turned into a viral internet meme over the weekend after the actor gave an expletive response to a question during an audience Q&A following a screening of Ferrari.

Marek Zydowicz, the festival’s director and founder, has now shared a statement in response to the viral clip, which has been the center of much discussion on the ground here in Torun.

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“As is the case with any film festival featuring open conversations with invited artists, both sensible and completely trivial questions and comments. In my opinion, the question raised during the Q&A with Adam Driver belonged to the second category,” Zydowicz’s statement read. “It was an assessment, lacking deeper reasoning, which is against the spirit of our festival and the work we are aiming to achieve.”

Zydowicz continued to say that the goal of Camerimage is to “celebrate, honor, and recognize the art of moving pictures as well as the great artists and collaborators of films.”

“We look forward to audiences seeing Michael Mann’s Ferrari, and the deeply authentic excellent work he and his filmmaking team, including Adam Driver, have accomplished,” the statement concluded. Read the statement in full below.

During the Q&A in question, the audience member asked Driver about crash scenes in Ferrari, which they described as “pretty harsh” and “cheesy.”

In response, Driver said: “F**k you, I don’t know. Next question.”

Driver’s response elicited gasps and giggles from the rest of the audience in the cinema. A clip of the interaction has been shared widely across social media platforms.

The actor, who stars as Enzo Ferrari in the Michael Mann-directed biopic, had been in Torun to accept the festival’s honorary acting award, while Ferrari screens in the festival cinematography-focused main competition. The pic opens in the summer of 1957 when Enzo, now an ex-racer, is in crisis. Bankruptcy threatens the factory he and his wife, Laura (Penélope Cruz), built from nothing 10 years earlier. Their volatile marriage has been battered by the loss of their son a year earlier, and Ferrari struggles to acknowledge his son with Lina Lardi (Shailene Woodley). Meanwhile, his drivers’ passion to win pushes them to the edge as they launch into the treacherous 1,000-mile race across Italy, the Mille Miglia.

Patrick Dempsey, Sarah Gordon, Gabriel Leone, and Jack O’Connell also star in the film which Troy Kennedy Martin scripted.

Other pics playing in competition at Camerimage include Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things, Ridley Scott’s Napoleon, Martin Scorsese’s Killers Of The Flower Moon, and Bradley Cooper’s Maestro. The festival runs until Nov 18.

Marek Zydowicz’s Statement:

As the founder and director of the EnergaCAMERIMAGE film festival, I was very honored to have Adam Driver as our guest at the festival. We prepared a very demanding festival schedule for him, one that Adam embraced with great openness and commitment. Despite the very tight program of his visit to Toruń related to his honorary Golden Frog award and promotion of the film Ferrari as part of the Main Competition at our festival, he participated in meetings and discussions about EnergaCAMERIMAGE film festival and the art of cinematography, met with the admirers of his talent as well as cinema aficionados, and asked for the conversation following the screening to be open to the public to have that direct dialogue with people who came to see the film. He also visited the museum where I prepared an exhibition of Jan Matejko’s outstanding painting entitled “Astronomer Copernicus, or Conversations with God,” presented last year at the National Gallery in London.

As is the case with any film festival featuring open conversations with invited artists, both sensible and completely trivial questions and comments. In my opinion, the question raised during the Q&A with Adam Driver belonged to the second category. It was an assessment, lacking deeper reasoning, which is against the spirit of our festival and the work we are aiming to achieve.

Having devoted the last thirty years of my life to careful analysis of film imagery, our goal is to celebrate, honor and recognize the art of moving pictures as well as the great artists and collaborators of films. We look forward to audiences seeing Michael Mann’s Ferrari, and the deeply authentic excellent work he and his filmmaking team, including Adam Driver, have accomplished.

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