The China Mail - Adam Driver shuts down question about clashes with Lena Dunham

Lena Dunham, who wrote, directed and acted in the series, accused the "Star Wars" and "Marriage Story" actor of being rough with her during their first sex scene. He "hurled me this way and that", she wrote in her new memoir "Famesick".

"It wasn't that I felt violated," Dunham wrote, but that she felt she had "lost directorial authority".

Another time, she alleged, Driver "hurled a chair at the wall next to me" when he grew angry at her for forgetting her lines during a rehearsal, and swore repeatedly at her.

The hit show "Girls", which ran for six seasons until 2017, was about a self-obsessed writer and her boyfriend named Adam, played by Driver, and their on-off toxic relationship.

It often seemed to mirror Dunham's own life.

Driver, who is married to actress Joanne Tucker, shut down the issue when he was questioned about it at the Cannes Film Festival, where he is starring in James Gray's new crime thriller "Paper Tiger".

The gripping drama about an ordinary family that falls in thrall to the Russian mafia in New York is in the running for the Palme d'Or, the festival's top prize.

Gray, the US director of "The Yards" and "Little Odessa", said the "crisis of masculinity" -- a recurring theme at the festival -- was nothing new. "Sophocles was talking about 2,500 years ago."

"What is recent is (the idea of) the strong man without flaws. That's the last 100 years. That's the thing we have to get away from and bring back the complexity of what it means to be a human being. That's what I've tried to do," he told reporters.

Gray also said his film was an indictment of the often "transactional" nature of the United States. "Like the current American president, who is a symptom of what I'm talking about. Totally transactional. You know, how can I make the most money?

"This ethos becomes everything, and what does that do to our souls? If you tell young people it doesn't matter whether you're a good person or not... it leaves them adrift," he said.

Which is why, Gray said, he set the movie in the mid-1980s. "It was the beginning of the moment in which the market became God."

Y.Parker--ThChM