Adam Driver has been earning major awards attention for his role in ‘BlacKkKlansman” as Detective Flip Zimmerman, who goes undercover with the Ku Klux Klan in the 1970s. Driver has picked up nominations at the Golden Globes, Critics’ Choice Awards and Screen Actors Guild Awards for his performance and could very well be on his way to his first Oscar nomination in the near future.

Driver recently sat down with Gold Derby contributing editor Zach Laws to discuss working with director Spike Lee, the relevance of “BlacKkKlansman” and why the Cannes Film Festival was an overwhelming experience. Watch the exclusive video chat above and read the complete interview transcript below.

Gold Derby: You’ve worked with a lot of really great directors in the last few years, people like Martin Scorsese, Jim Jarmusch and the Coens. This is your first time working with Spike Lee. What were your expectations like for working with him? Were they exceeded? Were they matched?

Adam Driver: I don’t know what my expectations were. I can’t remember, but they were definitely exceeded. I wasn’t anticipating how familial his set would be, that there were so many people that he’d been working with since “Do the Right Thing,” so obviously there’s a shorthand comfort on-set where immediately egos are diffused and it’s very focused about the story that you’re telling and there’s no go-between between Spike and the actors or anybody. He’s open at all times to whoever.

GD: In terms of working with actors, what does he give you that helps you get to the places you need to go?

AD: He’s a very big advocate about following instincts and following your first impulses, which is a different way of doing it. He likes to work very fast and try to fit it in within a workday. Everybody gets there in the morning and then is at home for dinner, which is good. A different way of working which is no more or less valid than someone who likes to do a lot of takes. It’s just his way of doing it and I feel like you can feel it in his films. What I like about them is there’s like this linear story that’s happening, there’s the script and there’s always this abstract element that feels very impulsive and urgent and is just as equally truthful to the story as a line written on the page. Because the pace is so quick, everybody’s on-set, there’s nobody retreating to their trailers. Everyone’s around and they want to be. It feels like an ongoing conversation all day.

GD: This movie, the tone is so surprising, because I think the story is kind of surprising as well. What did you think the first time you heard the story of Ron Stallworth?

AD: Like most people, I feel like it’s an unbelievable story. We weren’t thinking much about tone or how you play tone. If anything I guess life would be a comedy, but not living in a genre. We weren’t thinking about that as we were doing it.

GD: Did you meet the real Ron?

AD: I did, he came to the first table read and then I called him during pre-production stuff just to ask him a couple questions but during shooting he wasn’t around. I’ve been seeing him and his wife on all the talking about it afterwards.

GD: Did you glean anything from him in conversation that helped inform your character at all?

AD: He said a good detail about improv, actually, ‘cause these undercover cops are acting for their lives and you don’t want to create a character that is so distant from who you are as a person, because you have to back it up. So when it came to improv, he had to think on his feet a lot. He wouldn’t deviate very much from who he was, which is interesting as far as playing it because a lot of times my character is staying things that are the opposite of who he is and then he’s surprised by how connected he is to his personal heritage, but that was always an interesting thing.

GD: You bring up your character’s personal heritage and a line that sums up your character’s journey is you’re talking to John David Washington and he says something about having skin in the game. Can you talk a bit about the arc that your character takes? At first he’s not wanting to really involve himself with this at all, but he does have a very personal stake in this fight against the klan.

AD: Yeah, I think there’s a lot of things that are going on. I think he’s trained himself out of self-preservation to not take his work home with him, I guess. There’s no really better way of saying that, and that to kind of shrive and do the job, there’s almost a level of being impersonal, but then how can you not let what you’re saying affect you and maybe actually sometimes taking it personal actually informs your decision and makes you better at your job? It’s just an interesting idea that I think Spike asks a question and obviously doesn’t answer, but, how much is personal history important to people? Are we bound by genetics? Are we predetermined to behave a certain way? The choices that you make in life, does that get in the way of who you are or does it do the opposite? Does it actually empower you and make you more certain or feel connected to the people around you? Is it more empowering? And I don’t think he has an answer to it but what I like about it is my character is open. I feel like he’s good at his job but he’s open to it being different. I think that was one thing I really liked about him.

GD: Also his heritage as a Jewish person.

AD: Yeah, I guess what I mean is he has to be open to change. He is a bit confronted with pure hatred, organized hatred, but he’s open. I don’t know how you don’t let that affect you and internalize it and be thoughtful about it.

GD: This movie takes place 40 years ago but you and Spike and everyone involved make a lot of references to today and what’s going on right now. You were in pre-production right before Charlottesville, is that right?

AD: I don’t know the timeline actually. After.

GD: Well how did what’s going on today affect what you guys were doing in the film?

AD: There’s obviously an importance to the story overall that you wanna get right, but then I always feel that you can’t play importance. It’s not effective or it doesn’t help you play the scene. It sometimes can get in the way. There were moments of us kind of self-reflecting of what the overall story was. I think I probably have a different answer than if you ask somebody else, but I always get lost in the minutiae of filmmaking. I’m not thinking about it so much of what it’s doing or the importance. I try to treat it as important as everything else, or to be prepared and show up and stand here, just all these little details is what I’m thinking about. All the other big questions I don’t take on.

GD: I think unfortunately you could probably make this movie at any time, really.

AD: Right, which is kind of Spike’s point, I think.

GD: Obviously at the ending of the movie there’s this direct reference to what happened in Charlottesville. Did you know that was gonna be a part of it or when you saw the film for the first time was it a surprise?

AD: No, I didn’t know it was gonna be a part of it. Yes, it was a surprise. I haven’t seen the whole thing, but when it first was shown at Cannes, usually I leave and then come back at the end. So I came back right when it cut to the footage of Charlottesville. Obviously what you’re doing in the lobby doesn’t match the mood of what’s happening, so it was even more jarring. I didn’t know the movie was ending that way, and what a great way to end it. Spike has this great answer about that kind of wrote itself into the movie.

GD: Talk a little bit about the reaction at Cannes, showing the movie in front of that audience and the response that you guys got.

AD: Cannes is very overwhelming. You’re walking up stairs and it feels like we’re gonna sacrifice something together other than watch a movie. But it was very moving. People really responded to the questions that Spike was raising and it was good.

GD: And you’re surrounded by all the greats of world cinema there and you’re a part of that too so I guess that must be humbling in a sense.

AD: Sure, yes. Things like that are almost too much to take in. I’m not very good at self-reflecting and you can’t imagine you’re there at Cannes with Spike and this cast and this story, it’s all overwhelming.

GD: I’ve been thinking about the film a lot ever since I saw it back in August. The film continues to have this kind of relevancy throughout this year. I was especially thinking about it after what happened in Pittsburgh. It sort of directly relates to your character as well, as a Jewish character in the movie and then what happened there. Can you talk about the film in the context of that and the fact that there’s still this continuous hatred and violence toward people just based on their religion and their race?

AD: Yeah, it’s hard to say the thing that accurately, in the 20 minutes that we have or however long this is, that summarizes how absurd it all is. Beyond absurd. How damaging it is. How disheartening it is. All of it. Obviously Spike’s movie is very good about starting it with “Birth of a Nation” and ending it with where we are now and how much this has been a part of the conversation in this country for so long and whatever I can say about it is minimal compared to the atmosphere in the country, everyone’s collective hatred about… I shouldn’t say hatred, but how just upsetting it is. I will say the good thing to take away is the communal sense after, the sense of community, of people coming together afterwards and what better way to do that over… That’s a great thing about filmmaking or creating anything as a group of people is it’s a collective group of strangers that are forced to be intimate with each other. They’re forced to lay everything out on the table in a short amount of time in service of something that’s bigger than one person. That’s why I feel like storytelling, there’s no data of how it is, but the communal part of it is a good takeaway. It’s kind of a rambling answer ‘cause I don’t really have anything concrete to explain it or where to go from there, I guess.

GD: It’s a hard thing to boil down to a soundbite, but I guess walking away from the movie, having seen it a couple of times now, maybe an odd thing to say considering how the film ends, but I do walk away with it with a slight sense of hope because at least we’re having these conversations and we seem to be having them more seriously now than we have in a long time.

AD: I feel like there’s hope in identifying things. Maybe this is a better answer of what I’m trying to say, is what’s the role of movies in this. There’s always something empowering about a group of people saying, “Oh, that’s it.” That can’t be minimized.

GD: Well it’s a really great movie. Thank you so much for taking the time.

AD: Thank you so much.