Adam Driver loves dinosaurs and laser guns

Adam Driver can act against any green screen but sometimes being hit with a tennis ball on a stick is as humiliating as it sounds.

65 is in cinemas now. Picture: Sony

Not every movie Adam Driver makes involves him looking off into space and imagining a different world or make-believe characters.

But as a veteran of the Star Wars franchise, Driver knows how to interact with things that aren’t there. And dinosaurs definitely aren’t there. There are lots of dinosaurs in Driver’s latest film, 65.

In the action-thriller directed by the writers of A Quiet Place, Driver plays a space pilot named Mills, whose ship crash lands on an uncharted planet. The twist – as revealed in the promos and in the first few minutes of the movie – is that the planet is Earth and it’s 65 million years in our past.

Mills is one of only two survivors, the other being a young girl similar in age to the daughter he recently lost. Ensuring her survival compels him on what seems, at first, to be a hopeless quest across a dangerous landscape of beastly monsters, natural threats such as enormous geysers and the impending collision from a species-destroying asteroid.

Adam Driver loves dinosaurs and laser guns. Picture: Jean-Baptiste Lacroix/AFP

Driver isn’t wary of having to work against green screens and scene partners that aren’t there but it’s not always easy.

“With this, even with the dinosaurs, we had a mix of [practical effects and CGI],” Driver told news.com.au.

“There were a lot of imagining things in the distance. You have to imagine the dinosaur looks like this and is cool or scary. OK. And there’s always the humiliating thing where it’s a guy dressed in green and he has a tennis ball and a stick and he is hitting you [with it] repeatedly.”

He added with mirth, “That really makes you question your life decisions.

“So when it’s more tactile, it’s easier to interact with. You don’t have to waste time really trying to imagine what’s there.”

Driver is one of the most acclaimed actors of his generation, with the versatility to goof around as a man-baby in Shawn Levy’s comedy This is Where I Leave You, tap into melodrama in Leo Carax’s operatic Annette or be a sensitive presence in auteur-driven indie dramas such as Jim Jarmusch’s Paterson or Jeff Nichols’ Midnight Special.

65 movie still Picture: Sony

But he also loves an old fashioned action adventure. Maybe the light sabres from his Star Wars days made an impression because it was, after all, “the dinosaurs, the laser guns and prehistoric Earth” that attracted Driver to 65.

“I love being part of movies where everyone in a family can go, and this is very much that, a family movie. We don’t have to insult an audience’s intelligence by making it so general that we don’t have any room for emotional storylines or characters you don’t care about.

“I mean, I saw all those movies growing up. I saw Jurassic Park in the theatre.

“I love opportunities of doing things that are big but also have something to play, that’s unique and not something you’ve seen a million times.”

65 is in cinemas now