Adam Driver has described the emotional experience of working on his latest film about a couple getting divorced.

The Star Wars actor plays a theatre director who is splitting up from his actress wife, played by Scarlett Johansson, in Marriage Story.

Arriving at the film’s premiere at the BFI London Film Festival, he told the PA news agency: “I remember Noah (Baumbach, the director) wanted to make a love story centred around a divorce but also maybe make a movie where it plays with your allegiances as an audience, that you find someone that you’re on board with and then maybe that changes.

“And this idea of performance was also something that we talked about a lot so my first impression of reading it was how beautifully he intertwined all of those ideas and character that were really well articulated and that is just as a document, then reading and playing it was surprisingly more emotional.”

He added: “Hopefully you still get a sense that there is underlying love there.

“I think it’s just something that happened, it’s not even a bad thing, it’s just about love transitioning into something else and how two people can navigate it well or they couldn’t and I think it does a good job in equal measure of telling both of those perspectives.”

Baumbach’s script reportedly draws on the writer’s own divorce from the actress Jennifer Jason Leigh, and he said: “I wanted it to be an even handed movie and to be as much about one character as it is about the other, the`way I always thought about it is that in some ways it’s the story of two people but I wanted it to feel like one story.

“There is that feeling that just because a marriage ends doesn’t mean it wasn’t a marriage and love doesn’t go away and that was something that I kept in mind throughout.

“It’s a love story, there is a shell of divorce that the narrative is inside of, it’s a movie of hope and about love and how love isn’t always one thing and sometimes it transforms.”

Marriage Story is released on Netflix on December 6.