Students and faculty of a certain age may be familiar with seeing the face of retired English Prof. Ralph Williams around campus. But in recent weeks he’s been increasingly prominent in a different incarnation: as an illustration adorning a bright yellow canvas, the words “Yea/Nay?” displayed beneath his grinning visage.

The posters are promoting the new film “Answer This!” (formerly titled “Trivial Pursuits”), a feature-length production centering around a grad student immersed in bar trivia. The film was shot entirely in Ann Arbor and places Williams in a featured role. It's premiering at the Michigan Theater tonight and promoting Williams’s participation to the fullest extent, even marketing T-shirts featuring his face.

“Sometimes I wonder if our main contribution to society is going to be getting him on T-shirts and people are going to forget about the movie by like next year,” joked writer-director Chris Farah in an interview with the Daily. “People love that shirt.”

Farah, a University alum who graduated in 1998 with an English degree and returned in 2002 for his master’s in near-eastern studies, put together the film with the help of his brother Mike, a co-producer who is the president of production at the humor website Funny or Die. The brothers were granted permission to film on campus and use the the University as its setting — a first for any production — and received full cooperation during the shoot that took place in fall 2009.

Several persistent e-mails were all it took for Farah to convince Williams to take the role — his first in a film. Farah was not only a former student of Williams as an undergraduate but also a graduate student instructor for his class, which led to a role-reversal when it was Farah’s turn to direct his former teacher.

“It was, as I heard the phrase, a ‘fast-learning experience,’ ” Williams told the Daily.

He added that because he was playing a character based so heavily on himself, with his mannerisms and personality, he occasionally had disputes with Farah over the direction his character, Dr. Elliot Tarson, should take.

“I can, I think, play a person doing wrong things, but it’s hard for me to play myself doing things I would never do,” he said, referring to the fact that the character is portrayed trying to exert control over the life of his son (Chris Gorham, TV’s “Covert Affairs”).

“My great fear, you see, is that my son, who will be here this Friday seeing the film, will say, ‘Yup, that’s my dad,’ ” Williams added, laughing. “I would be deeply chagrined.”

The production was granted access to filming locations previously off-limits to movie crews, like the inside of Michigan Stadium during a game. With the help of Lee Doyle, director of the University’s Film Office, scenes were filmed in the packed Big House during the 2009 season opener against Western Michigan University.

“I don’t know if there’s ever a screening when I see that, that I don’t get choked up in some capacity,” Farah said.

The University was also surprisingly receptive to scenes in the film depicting certain other student traditions, he said, like sex in the stacks at the Graduate Library.

“They actually went for it. That was the one thing that I was worried that they could protest,” Chris said. “We shot it in the frickin’ library … I’m sure if we had gotten funky or something like that, they would’ve said something.”

“I have always been aware that my students go to the library and that some of the things they do there involve study, but I had no idea of the particular range of things,” Williams deadpanned, laughing. “So the sex in the stacks, apparently.