From playing the villain in Star Wars to why “making a movie is like taking a piss,” Adam Driver gets candid with Brut at the Festival de Cannes.
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00:00As an actor, your job is to kind of be invisible in a way.
00:05You're supposed to watch and be a spy,
00:07and live life and have the experience,
00:09and make mistakes, and when suddenly that attention's on you
00:14it makes you self-conscious in a way that,
00:17or just the idea that any actor or celebrity
00:21somehow has an opinion on global affairs,
00:24that it's a given weight, but I don't know
00:27how you cope with that, I think maybe it's just not
00:30to take it too seriously.
00:32How do you find the body, the gestures of a character?
00:36Well, it kind of comes from different things, I think.
00:39It depends on what the script is,
00:41and sometimes it's something that you add on top of it,
00:44and sometimes it's pretty obvious.
00:46Sometimes a costume piece, I think, affects a character.
00:50Sometimes it happens before you start shooting anything,
00:54and sometimes it happens two weeks into the shooting already.
00:58It's mostly from the script, I'd say.
01:01You know, I'm thinking of this beautiful entrance
01:03as a stand-up comedian in Annette.
01:05How did you compose this body?
01:09Well, we talked about him being very lean
01:12and kind of like sinewy.
01:14You know, he's smoking cigarettes, but he's also eating a banana,
01:17so there's already some kind of...
01:20almost he's commenting on health, you know.
01:23And it's an athletic thing, his show,
01:26so you kind of get the sense that he is comfortable with movement.
01:31But how we found the entrance,
01:35it was really a combination of a lot of different things.
01:39You know, he's got a lot of muscles,
01:41but the entrance was really a combination of instinct and choreography.
01:47That's what Léos does really well.
01:49You know, it's very interesting, because when I interviewed Léos,
01:51he told me acting, according to him,
01:53had to do with a balance between chaos and precision.
01:57Oh, yeah, that's a great way of describing it.
01:59That's how he coins it.
02:01When did you first embrace chaos as an actor?
02:04Do you remember?
02:06No, I didn't have that moment.
02:08I think you have to,
02:10but sometimes I'm more comfortable with it than other times.
02:12Sometimes a scene kind of leans towards you having to embrace it.
02:19And sometimes, you know, you kind of want something more structural.
02:23I mean, you're not only...
02:25It's odd that you're making this thing that you're capturing once,
02:29that is going to live forever, and you're only doing it once.
02:32You don't really often have the time to rehearse it,
02:35so a lot of your first impulses wind up making it
02:38into a form that's very strict once it's done.
02:43You know, it's pretty rigid, actually.
02:45And then as you're making it,
02:47not only do you have to compete with your impulses,
02:49but you're competing with technology.
02:51You know, and time. Always time.
02:53I was wondering, do all the movies accept chaos?
02:55Can you let go the same way in an independent movie,
02:58say a Jim Jarmusch movie,
03:00and in a huge franchise like Star Wars?
03:03Yeah, it's just different ways of...
03:06Even, I mean, it depends on what your definition of chaos is.
03:09You just referenced Jim Jarmusch,
03:12which, you know, we did this movie,
03:15Patterson, which is very...
03:17He's a very cerebral character.
03:19But from take to take, you know,
03:21my version of chaos is just not knowing what's going to happen.
03:24But that doesn't necessarily have to be in a big, physical, obvious way.
03:28It could be very internal, like having a different thought
03:31that leads you to it can be chaotic, you know,
03:34because you don't know where you're going.
03:36But then there's things like Star Wars,
03:39which are more obvious, you know, set pieces.
03:42They're more external, the chaos.
03:44There's visual effects in a lot of moving pieces,
03:47but it doesn't make it any less chaotic.
03:49It just makes it maybe...
03:51It depends on what your definition of chaos is.
03:54So I like this phrase that you often quote making a movie.
03:58It's like having to take a piss.
04:00It's so urgent. I love that.
04:02What do you mean by that exactly?
04:04That it has to come from a place of need and be urgent.
04:08You know, it's a lot of effort to get to a place,
04:11to get a lot of money together, to get...
04:14I mean, even this is something on a small scale,
04:17but you have three cameras or four cameras.
04:19Everyone picked out their clothes.
04:21You know, they got makeup.
04:23You hear hours, and you're considering it
04:25because you, you know, believe.
04:27And it's a lot of effort to do this thing.
04:29It makes it easier and I think maybe more gratifying
04:32if it feels that urgent that you have to do it, you know?
04:35As an actor, what remains of the army man,
04:37of the soldier that you used to be?
04:39I think in the military,
04:41I learned a lot about working as a unit.
04:44You know, it's like a team...
04:46It's a team sport, making a film.
04:49It doesn't really rest on one person.
04:51And making sure that you're doing your job
04:54in support of everybody else's job
04:56is how they're very similar.
04:58So I think I took that from it.
05:00Would you say sometimes making a movie is a mission?
05:02A military mission?
05:04Sometimes, yeah.
05:06What movies are you talking about?
05:08All movies. All movies are always a mess.
05:11It's a miracle that any movie gets made.