And the question goes to...?

Last weekend I saw a film whose director was in attendance for a post-screening Q&A. As a general rule, audiences are the least-qualified people on earth to ask questions about whatever they’ve just seen. But the director in question happens to be very bright and articulate, and I was eager to hear her speak about the film.

I should have known better. Things started out well enough – people asked interesting questions about palette and process and props – and then, of course, it descended into ruination.

“My question is more of a comment” is a preface one comes to dread hearing. You steel yourself for the digressive, long-winded tirade, incoherent to the point of lunacy. The comment represents an effort to redirect the room’s attention toward the commenter, to speak at length to a rare captive audience. One can often sense the insecurity lurking beneath the monologue.

Not that questions proper tend to be any more illuminating. Some are indelicate, even rude: difficult arthouse fare has been known to bring out the hostility in a film festival crowd. “What exactly is the point of this movie?” is a question I have heard on more than one occasion. The filmmakers don’t typically have much to say in response.

People ask about budgets and grosses with the chilly rigour of an accountant. The most sensitive subjects – rumoured calamities, private tragedies – are broached as if the theatre were the therapist’s office. Some questions manifest a fundamental ignorance of the filmmaking process, and others, no less vexingly, make pains to flaunt their arcane expertise: “How did you find the Bayer-pattern colour filter array shooting on the Alexa SXT EV?”

Everywhere – from the humblest screening room to grandest festival premiere – you will find a budding director who wishes desperately to know the secrets of the trade: “What advice would you offer an up-and-coming filmmaker trying to make it in the biz?”

I apologize if these descriptions come off as cruel. In truth the asker aspires to ask the right thing. Maybe it’s best, then, to think of the Q&A not as an engagement with the talent on stage, but as a guileless display of vulnerability from a well-meaning, earnest crowd? The people, bless their idiot souls, are trying. Let’s extend them the patience to work their problems through.