On the Note of Q&A's | TakePart Social Action Network™

On the Note of Q&A’s Posted by Gina Telaroli on September 17, 2008 at 8:09 am

I love going to screenings that filmmakers are at and panels about filmmaking. It’s always great to hear people speak about their craft, esp when you got to just see it. What I don’t love is the portion of the event that consists of “questions from the audience.” In fact this portion almost always makes me wince and shake my head.

Independent Film Week is one of the worst examples of this phenomenom, mainly because the folks on the stage are somehow involved with the film industry and the folks in the audience want to be in that industry (or at least get their movie made). This essentially means that during the audiences Q&A time, there is at least 2-3 folks that use the time to ask about their specific film project. It’s hard to watch people to try mask the fact that they are asking the person on stage to adopt their film in some way with another question. Often times the moderator has to cut them off. I wince, I shake my head.

The NYFF is not much better, I thought since the audience was full of press it might not be so painful but I was wrong. It wasn’t nearly as bad as an audience Q&A but folks still asked ridiculous questions - like why someone was listed on the “special thanks” portion of the credits and even why the credits were so long. The one food thing that sometimes comes out of this is that the filmmakers on stage are usually pretty awesome and creative and often have pretty great replies to pretty stupid questions.

The best example of this that I ever saw was at the NYFF screening of No Country for Old Men last year. Someone in the audience asked the panel, which consisted of both Coens, Javir Bardem, Josh Brolin, Kelly MacDonald and a tough Tommy Lee Jones, what it was like working with the Coens in comparison to other directors. The entire table just looked at each other before little Kelly MacDonald sat forward and said “there’s two of them.”

Ahh well. This is something I should just accept because it isn’t going to change. People will always think that if they ask just the right question the person on stage will suddenly change their life. This, I learned when I did college press in Chicago and interviewed quite a few famous folk, is not something that happens.

And as a closer, I give you a video I took at the NYFF in 2006. It’s the crew from David Lynch’s Inland Empire and the audience member asked “why did you name the film Inland Empire.” David Lynch’s answer is priceless.