British actor Steve Coogan appeared at the Q & A for his new film The Trip at this year's TIFF. (Nick Ut/Associated Press)

By Jonathan Doyle, citizen contributor

The most obvious advantage of TIFF is the opportunity to see new films before just about anyone else. However, there's an even greater advantage that is sometimes overlooked: in many cases, the director, cast and even subject are present to discuss their film with the audience. Here's an overview of some memorable Q&A moments from the first five days of TIFF 2010.

You Can't Un-sign a Document

In making Inside Job, his film about the economic meltdown of 2008, director Charles Ferguson asked some very difficult questions. As Ferguson explained on Thursday night, one interview subject took this so badly that he contacted the director the next day and insisted that the release form he signed was no longer valid. Unfortunately for this subject, Ferguson's lawyers disagreed.

Improvising Answers

One of the greatest virtues of Michael Winterbottom's hilarious new comedy The Trip is the seemingly endless supply of celebrity impersonations delivered by stars Ron Brydon and Steve Coogan. At Saturday night's screening, Brydon and Coogan were asked to show off their impersonation skills in person and, to the audience's delight, they acted out the complete cinematic evolution of Michael Caine's distinctive voice. Since both actors play themselves in The Trip, there was a rare sense during this Q&A -- and the impersonations in particular -- that the audience was actually inside the world of the film.

More than Meets the Eye

The woman seated beside me scoffed loudly when director Michelangelo Frammartino was asked what the title of his film The Four Times meant.  After all, the answer seemed obvious -- until Frammartino launched into an elaborate discussion of ancient Greek philosopher Pythagoras and his theories about the four states of man. An important lesson of Q&As: sometimes the most obvious questions yield the most interesting responses.

Warming Relations

Throughout the new global warming documentary Cool It, director Ondi Timoner (We Live in Public) and her subject Bjorn Lomborg take Al Gore to task for several inaccuracies and distortions in An Inconvenient Truth. However, Timoner dispelled any perceived bad blood in the Q&A, insisting that she has great admiration for Gore's Oscar-winning documentary and is grateful that it made global warming a priority again.

The Jury's Still Out

While virtually the entire cast of John Carpenter's The Ward made it to Monday's Midnight Madness screening, the audience was devastated to learn that the beloved horror auteur couldn't be there himself. Thankfully, he made an amusingly crude video explaining his absence. Looking just like the late great Lee Van Cleef (who appeared in Carpenter's Escape From New York), Carpenter claimed that he was drafted into jury duty at the last minute. In typically irreverent fashion, he also encouraged the audience to give money to his cast and "illegal substances" to his crew.

Unhappy Ending

Oscar winning director Alex Gibney (Taxi to the Dark Side) was at the festival with his new film Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer, which tells the story of the former New York governor's political decline following reports of his involvement in a high-priced prostitution ring. Asked what his subject thought of the film, Gibney explained that Spitzer wished only one thing was different: the ending.

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