Trading places and staying authentic
Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper are holding court, and it’s an imposing one.
The pop diva turned movie star and the movie star turned musician/director, the powerhouse duo behind the latest remake of Hollywood romance A Star Is Born, are meeting journalists one by one in a balcony of the Masonic Temple, the Yorkville-area rock landmark that has rolled to the likes of Led Zeppelin, Bob Dylan and David Bowie.
Watching the proceedings from the floor below, on this first Saturday of the recent Toronto International Film Festival, is like seeing a royal couple greet supplicants, each granted an audience of 10 minutes.
Gaga’s attire contributes to the impression. She’s wearing a pale pink form-fitting classic gown designed by Jonathan Simkhai, which shimmers as she moves. Cooper is more conservatively dressed in a grey sports coat, dark jeans and open-collared white shirt. When my turn comes to ascend the stairs, past several security guards and attendants, I’m greeted with a hug as well as handshakes from Gaga and Cooper — and my view of the situation immediately changes. The two aren’t so much royal visitors as they are campaigning politicians, pressing the flesh in a major charm offensive to build on Oscar buzz surrounding themselves and their movie.
They are in a great mood, and no wonder: A Star Is Born is getting raves from critics, first at its Venice Film Festival world premiere then at TIFF a few days later. Oscar pundits immediately tipped the film for a Best Picture nomination, plus nods for Best Actress for Gaga and Best Director and Best Actor for Cooper.
They grin when I tell them that they’ve blown up my pet theory, born of decades of observation, that actors make better pop stars than pop stars make actors. In this movie, with Gaga making her first major screen performance as rising star Ally, and Cooper doing his own singing and guitar playing as seasoned rocker Jackson Maine, they both convincingly demonstrate that it’s possible to cross the divide between the intimacy of film and the expansiveness of stadium concerts.
“Thank you!” Gaga says. “I think that was part of the contract that we made with each other at the beginning. He said, ‘I believe in you as an actress,’ and I said, ‘I believe in you as a musician.’ ”
Neither of them is the least bit coy about how they long wanted to do what the other has turned into a career.
“I think it’s a universal ambition for every single human to want to be a rock star. Who wouldn’t?” Cooper says.
“And I wanted to be a movie star,” Gaga says.
“I shouldn’t say ‘movie star’ because that implies celebrity. I prefer to be a musician and an actress, but I always wanted to be an actress. And I just couldn’t audition! I was terrible at it; I used to freeze up. I was already writing music and performing, so I decided to go for it as a singer.”
They are filled with mutual admiration for how each stepped into the other’s world. It’s a sentiment, expressed with evident sincerity, that will be repeated many times over the long months of awards season campaigning to come.
“She’s the real deal,” Cooper says.
“As an actor, I don’t think I’ve ever worked with somebody who’s so present in an emotional way to what’s going on around her.”
Adds Gaga: “I knew instantly when I heard him sing that he could play a rock star, like right away. I hope this is not too ostentatious of a statement, but I honestly believe that there’s no other actor on the planet that could have played this role. It’s too specific, and it’s too passion-driven, and it has to be the right person. And his voice, when I first heard it, just came from his soul, his gut — and that’s storytelling. You can have the most amazing voice in the world and have no ability to tell a story, but that is not the case with him.”
I ask them what was the best advice they gave each other: his most valuable tip to her about acting and her hot tip on how to be convincing as a musician.
Cooper goes first, talking about a scene early in the movie where Jackson discovers Ally performing “La Vie En Rose” in a drag bar. Later, when the bar closes, he’s persuaded to serenade Ally and a couple of drag queens with his melancholy hit “Maybe It’s Time” alone, with just his acoustic guitar, on the same stage.
“Her advice was ‘know your surroundings,’ ” Cooper recalls. “All of a sudden, I’m not singing to 20,000 people or 80,000 people at Glastonbury (another scene in the movie), but in a room with three people in a very small intimate setting, which was harder — Lady Gaga is watching me sing, bro!
“She came up on the stage and she was just so respectful. She said, ‘You know this, you don’t have to perform a thing.’ And I just locked right in.”
Cooper looks at Gaga: “I just wanted to do good for you,” he says. Gaga smiles: “You did!” She says Cooper gave her a lot of good tips about acting, but two in particular really made the difference: understand your character and believe in the people you are working with.
“He told me that you have to memorize your lines, but what you really need to know is what you’re saying, and what story you’re trying to tell — and you have to really know it from the inside. So that when you get on set, you throw the script away and you walk onto set and they yell ‘action!’ and you’re just fully immersed in the moment...
“And there’s something else he says to me in the film, and it’s so true: He says, ‘All you’ve got to do is trust me.’ I trusted him the whole time. When I went on set, as hard as it was to be without makeup and with my natural hair, I just trusted him every time and I’m so glad that I did. Because I just love the way that he shot it and I love the way that he portrayed this story in such an authentic way. I think that’s why people cry watching it — it’s because it feels very real.”
Authenticity is definitely the buzzword for Cooper’s A Star Is Born.
He spent years preparing for it, which included many months learning to play guitar and sing. He also spent months working on getting Jackson’s accent to match the distinctive cowboy drawl of co-star Sam Elliott, who plays his brother and manager. Cooper thought it would be strange to have two brothers with different accents.
“The movie is about being indelibly authentic,” Cooper says.
“And that’s the thing I promised every actor that was kind enough to trust me. I told them, ‘There won’t be a moment where you’re not truthful on screen.’ And then you tell a story...
“Look, I cry in movies all the time,” he adds, picking up on Gaga’s comment about audiences weeping.
“Movies have formed who I am as a human being. So if we’re able to tell a story that touches people the way we’ve been touched by films and music, then we’ve achieved our goal.”
My 10 minutes are up. The next journalist awaits. The long campaign road stretches ahead for Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper. I ask whether they’ll do a few actual concert dates together, since they click so well on the stage and screen.
“That would be fun,” Cooper says.
“That would be fun,” Gaga agrees. “I love singing with him.”