THENEWYORKER, OCTOBER 28, 2019 63
subway. ‘Take a taxi,’ I said. ‘Nope,’ he
said. ‘Too expensive.’”
Driver initially turned down the au-
dition for “Girls,” on account of tele-
vision being evil (“I was an élitist prick,”
he says), but his agent persuaded him.
The casting call described Adam Sack-
ler as “a carpenter, incredibly handsome,
but slightly off.” Driver showed up with
a motorcycle helmet under his arm.
Jenni Konner, Dunham’s co-showrun-
ner, recalled the reaction in the room
as ecstatic. “Remember the old Beatles
films, where the women are scream-
ing?” she told me. “That’s what his au-
dition felt like.” As the show evolved,
details of Driver’s life would seep into
the scripts; in the third season, the fic-
tional Adam lands a role in Shaw’s
“Major Barbara” on Broadway, a nod
to Driver’s appearance in “Mrs. War-
ren’s Profession.” “He was always some-
one I saw as a rhinoceros, who picked
one thing and ran toward it,” Driver
said of his character on “Girls.” “He
can’t see left or right at all, just sees
what’s immediately in front of him, and
he chases it until he’s exhausted.”
The first time Driver saw himself in
“Girls,” on Dunham’s laptop, he was
mortified. “That’s when I was, like, I
can’t watch myself in things. I certainly
can’t watch this if we’re going to con-
tinue doing it,” he said. Many actors de-
cline to watch themselves, but for Driver
that reluctance amounts to a phobia. In
2013, he watched the Coen brothers’
“Inside Llewyn Davis,” in which he has
one scene, singing backup on a folk song
called “Please Mr. Kennedy”: “I hated
what I did.” He swore off his own mov-
ies, until he was obliged to sit through
the première of “Star Wars: The Force
Awakens,” in 2015. “I just went totally
cold,” he recalled, “because I knew the
scene was coming up where I had to
kill Han Solo, and people were, like, hy-
perventilating when the title came up,
and I felt like I had to puke.”
The directors I spoke to sympathized
with Driver’s aversion. “I think he’s
rightly concerned that he would be-
come conscious of himself in a way that
would be harmful to his acting,” So-
derbergh said. When I spoke to Baum-
bach, he was still “in a discussion” with
Driver about watching “Marriage Story.”
Spike Lee told me that Driver did see
“BlacKkKlansman,” at Cannes (“It was
very, very happy”), but Driver corrected
the record: he had hidden out in a green-
room and returned for the closing bow.I
n September, I met Driver in Brus-
sels, where he was shooting “Annette”
on a soundstage. He plays a failing co-
median; his wife, played by Marion Co-
tillard, is an opera singer on the rise. To
ease the resulting tension, they take a
sailing holiday with their baby, Annette,
and get caught in a storm. That day’s
scenes took place during the squall. In
one corner of the studio, half of a life-size
sailboat was mounted ten feet high on
a gimbal, a mechanism that would toss
and turn the boat like a mechanical bull,
while a cyclorama projected a tempestuous
curved backdrop around it. Sprinklers
would unleash rain and fog, while water
cannons spewed waves. Also, the film is
a musical, so there would be singing.
Carax, the director, smoked a ciga-
rette in his sunglasses, as Driver and
Cotillard emerged from a pair of black
makeup tents. They rehearsed the scene
in which Driver draws Cotillard into a
drunken waltz on the sailboat’s deck.
He mocks her theatrics (“Bowing, bow-
ing, bowing”), and she pleads with him
in song (“We’re gonna fall, gonna die”),
before he flings her offscreen. The film’s
co-writers, Ron and Russell Mael,
known from the seventies band Sparks,
watched on a monitor. “We spoke very
briefly to Adam about three years ago,
just about the style of his singing,” Ron
whispered to me. “We didn’t want it to
be Broadway, you know?”
Driver, wearing a fake mustache,
measured the exact distance to spin be-
fore accelerating in the final moment.
“If I’m throwing her, I don’t want to
wing it,” he said. There was little lee-
way for benign rebellion. Driver later
told me, of Carax, “His movies to me
feel very much like freedom—like cap-
tured chaos—but they’re very, like, ‘Turn
here, move left here.’ So it’s like doing
math, but then not making it look like
we’re executing choreography.”
A crew member yelled, “Silence, s’il
vous plaît,” and in came rain, thunder,
lightning, and waves. Between takes, Co-
tillard sang her lines to herself, while
Driver stretched his legs on the railing
of the boat, like a dancer at a barre. During
one take, they slipped and fell. “Are you
O.K.?” Driver said, helping her up, thenasked the gimbal operators if the device
was turned on too high: “We did this all
yesterday, and we didn’t slip once.”
Like Robert De Niro in his “Raging
Bull” days, Driver is known for embrac-
ing physical feats. For “Silence,” in which
Garupe is captured by the Japanese, he
lost fifty-one pounds, on a diet of choc-
olate-flavored energy goo, sparkling
water, and chewing gum. For “Paterson,”
he learned how to drive a bus. For “Logan
Lucky,” in which he plays an amputee,
he learned how to make a Martini with
one hand. “He wanted to be able to do
it in a single take,” Soderbergh said.
After Driver and Cotillard had been
soaked half a dozen times, Carax called
a twenty-minute break. “Let’s do a tight
twenty minutes,” Driver requested. He
dried himself off for the next scene, in
which the comedian wanders the ship
alone, pummelled by waves and singing
an ambiguous mantra, “There’s so little
I can do.” By the end, he is crouched on
the deck, his palms pressed to his ears.
They tried it again, and again. “Our
timing was off,” Driver said after one
take, wringing water from his black
T-shirt. He and Carax went over the
timeline of waves, music, boat rocking,
and drunken stumbling. By now, Driver
had been singing in a fake thunderstorm
for five hours, and he was drenched. But
he wanted more. “It doesn’t match up
to the music,” he said of the boat move-
ments, leaning over the railing.
Carax suggested that they had what
they needed. “If you already have it, then
fine,” Driver said, sounding agitated. “I’m
trying to move on, but I don’t under-
stand. And the timing is wrong.” He lis-
tened for a moment. “All right, then. I’m
fine moving on. It’s just unsatisfying.”
Then they had a revelation: the boat
choreography didn’t need to match the
underscoring. They did the scene one
more time, a cappella. Finally, for safety,
they recorded a clean audio track of
Driver’s singing. Wrapped in a towel,
he sang his line repeatedly into a boom
mike, alternately braying and mum-
bling, and then trailing off into a
near-whisper. “There’s so little I can
do,” he sang, dripping and determined.
“There’s so little I can do. There’s so lit-
tle I can do. There’s so little I can do.
There’s so little I can do. There’s so lit-
tle I can do. There’s so little I can do.
There’s so little I can do.”