Camera image.
Adam Driver’s low-key visit to Poland’s EnergaCamerimage Film Festival became a viral internet meme over the weekend after the actor gave an explosive answer to a question during an audience question-and-answer session following a screening of Ferrari.
Marek Zydowicz, the festival’s director and founder, has now issued a statement in response to the viral clip, which has caused a lot of local discussion here in Torun.
“As with any film festival, there are open conversations with invited artists, both sensible and completely trivial questions and comments. In my opinion, the question raised during the question and answer session with Adam Driver belonged to the second category,” Zydowicz’s statement said. “It was an assessment without deeper justification that contradicts the spirit of our festival and the work we want to achieve.”
Zydowicz went on to say that Camerimage’s goal is to “celebrate, honor and recognize the art of the moving image and the great artists and film collaborators.”
“We look forward to audiences seeing Michael Mann’s Ferrari and the deeply authentic, outstanding work he and his filmmaking team, including Adam Driver, have done,” the statement concluded. Read the full statement below.
During the question-and-answer session in question, the viewer asked Driver about the Ferrari crash scenes, which he described as “pretty harsh” and “cheesy.”
In response, the driver said, “Fuck it, I don’t know. Next question.”
The driver’s reaction elicited gasps and giggles from the rest of the cinema audience. A clip of the interaction was shared widely across social media platforms.
The actor, who plays the role of Enzo Ferrari in the Michael Mann-directed biopic, was in Torun to accept the festival’s honorary acting award, while Ferrari appears in the festival’s main competition, which focuses on cinematography. The picture begins in the summer of 1957, when Enzo, now a former racing driver, is in a crisis. The factory that he and his wife Laura (Penélope Cruz) built from nothing ten years earlier is threatened with bankruptcy. Her unstable marriage was rocked by the loss of her son a year earlier, and Ferrari finds it difficult to acknowledge his son with Lina Lardi (Shailene Woodley). Meanwhile, his riders’ passion to win drives them to extremes as they embark on 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 was written by Troy Kennedy Martin.
Other images shown in competition at Camerimage include “Poor Things” by Yorgos Lanthimos, “Napolean” by Ridley Scott, “Killers Of The Flower Moon” by Martin Scorsese and “Maestro” by Bradley Cooper. The festival runs until November 18th.
Marek Zydowicz Opinion:
As the founder and director of the EnergaCAMERIMAGE film festival, it was a great honor for me to welcome Adam Driver as a guest at the festival. We prepared a very demanding festival plan for him, which Adam accepted with great openness and commitment. Despite the very tight program of his visit to Toruń in connection with his honorary award “Golden Frog” and the promotion of the film “Ferrari” in the main competition of our festival, he took part in meetings and discussions about the EnergaCAMERIMAGE film festival and the art of cinematography with the admirers of his talent and cinema lovers and asked that the post-screening conversation be made public in order to have a direct dialogue with the people who came to see the film. He also visited the museum where I was preparing an exhibition of Jan Matejko’s outstanding painting entitled “Astronomer Copernicus or Conversations with God”, which was shown at the National Gallery in London last year.
As with any film festival, there are open conversations with invited artists, both meaningful and completely trivial questions and comments. In my opinion, the question raised during the question and answer session with Adam Driver belonged to the second category. It was an assessment without any deeper justification, which contradicts the spirit of our festival and the work we want to achieve.
As I have dedicated the last thirty years of my life to the careful analysis of film images, our goal is to celebrate, honor and recognize the art of the moving image and the great artists and film collaborators. We look forward to audiences seeing Michael Mann’s Ferrari and the deeply authentic, outstanding work he and his filmmaking team, including Adam Driver, have done.