Adam Driver got a question at the Cannes press conference for Paper Tiger about the acerbic claims made about him by Lena Dunham in her recent memoir Famesick and, well, he shut it down.
“I have no comment on any of that. I’m saving it all for my book,” said the 2x Oscar nominee. (See brief clip below.)
In the book by the Girls creator and star, Dunham writes that Driver was “verbally aggressive” and “hurled a chair at the wall next to me.” The two played lovers on the award-winning HBO series, Driver’s character being quite the abusive onscreen boyfriend at times.
“I remember doing a fight scene with Adam and how scary it was to meet someone so totally present with such absence,” writes Dunham. “Late one night, as we practiced lines in my trailer, I found that mine were suddenly gone. I knew I’d written them. I’d known them only minutes before. But when I opened my mouth, all that came out was a stammer — until finally, Adam screamed, ‘FUCKING SAY SOMETHING’ and hurled a chair at the wall next to me. ‘WAKE THE FUCK UP,’ he told me. ‘I’M SICK OF WATCHING YOU JUST STARE.’”
While filming the couple’s first sex scene in Season 1 of the 2012-2017 drama, Dunham, the show’s creator, writer, star and director, says that “careful blocking went out the window” when Driver “hurled me this way and that.
“Stunned, I couldn’t speak for a moment,” she writes, “unsure of what had happened — had I lost directorial authority, allowed the scene to go off the rails, not given proper instructions? Would I be removed from my command post immediately?”
In Paper Tiger, Driver plays an ex-cop turned get-rich-quick-scheming brother to Miles Teller’s family-man engineer. Driver’s character concocts a way for the duo to start an environmental business together as Russians, largely the mafia, are involved in recalibrating a canal in New York City. Chaos ensues.
Paper Tiger is James Gray’s sixth Cannes world premiere, received a ten-minute standing ovation last night, 2x as long as the filmmaker’s previous 2022 film that was here, Armageddon Time.
Neon acquired U.S. on Paper Tiger soon after it was announced for an in-competition play at Cannes.
