M. Night Shyamalan’s latest directorial effort, The Last Airbender, is still doing very well at the box office, despite hideous reviews. So I guess M. Night gets the last laugh, all the way to the bank. He’s still promoting the film in other countries, and it was during a panel discussion/press conference that M. Night might have insulted a Mexican journalist, and now everyone is yelling at him and calling him rude. I’m swaying more towards Pajiba’s take on things though – that M. Night got a dumb question and he tried to give an honest, albeit bitchy answer. Here’s the video:

Okay, the reporter starts the long-winded question by stating – as fact – that audiences have “lost faith” in M. Night’s work, then she asks, “Airbender feels like you want to captivate audiences again by becoming more commercial, am I right?” M. Night replies: “I think if I thought like you, I would kill myself. Everything you said is the opposite of how artists feel. The way that you just thought… literally, I would just kill myself. Your impression of my career is not my impression of my career, your impression, it’s something you read on Google or something…” And he goes on, blah.

Anyway, people are bashing him because they think he was telling the woman to kill herself? I think that’s it. But is that really what he was saying? Or was he just saying that he, as an “artist” couldn’t think that way, and if he did, he would kill himself. As Pajiba points out: “Celebrities and directors, they get asked some dumb f-cking questions, not only in audience Q&As, but from reporters, themselves. More times than not, the celebrity in question is gracious enough to reframe the stupid f-cking question in a way he or she can answer it without making the stupid questioner look even more stupid. M. Night, at the very least, answered it honestly, and while he boasts some arrogance in this clip, he’s not exactly prickly. I don’t know why we insist our celebrities be so goddamn deferential to dumbass questions.”

Header: M. Night on July 9, 2010. Credit: WENN.