Update, November 13: Camerimage Film Festival director Marek Żydowicz has released the following statement about Driver’s exchange with a fan.
“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.”
November 12: Adam Driver has spent months dutifully promoting his role in Michael Mann’s “Ferrari” (with the help of a SAG-AFTRA waiver), but he had little patience with an aggressive question from an audience member at the Camerimage Film Festival in Poland on Sunday.
During a Q&A after a screening of the film, in which Driver stars as racing magnate Enzo Ferrari alongside Penelope Cruz’s Laura Ferrari, an audience member asked Driver about the car crash scenes.
“What do you think about [the] crash scenes? They looked pretty harsh, drastic and, I must say, cheesy for me,” the audience member asked. “What do you think?”
Driver gave a terse answer: “Fuck you, I don’t know. Next question.”
Driver previously spoke about the intense mentality required to film the racing scenes while promoting “Ferrari” at the 2023 Venice International Film Festival.
“The mindset of racing cars in pre-production with Ferraris […] you become painfully aware, it’s the opposite of escapism, it’s absolutely focused on the mindset of what’s happening right now. There’s no room for daydreaming or losing focus in attention, because you’ll crash obviously,” Driver said. “The mindset was helpful in playing the character. It’s impulsive. It’s pre-psychology. He’s making decisions in a vacuum.”
“Ferrari” debuted to mostly positive reviews after its Venice premiere, and Neon is expected to mount an aggressive awards campaign for Driver, Cruz, and Mann following the film’s wide release on Christmas Day.
“‘Ferrari,’ Mann’s first feature since 2015’s cyber-terrorism thriller ‘Blackhat,’ is as operatic a work as you’d expect from the master of sprawling crime dramas like ‘Heat’ and ‘The Insider,’ but it’s also sillier and lighter on its pedals in ways that work both for and against it. Driver and especially Shailene Woodley — who plays Lina Lardi, Enzo’s side piece and the mother of his eventual heir Piero Lardi Ferrari — struggle palpably with the Italian accents of their characters,” IndieWire’s Ryan Lattanzio wrote in his Venice review of the film. “But it’s part of the fun in a movie that never takes itself too seriously, and demonstrates Mann’s rigorous but loose-handed approach to the material, especially in wince-inducing racing sequences powered by practical effects and meticulously rendered replicas of period Ferrari and Maserati cars.”
