SHINING LIKE A ‘STAR’
Cooper, Lady Gaga bring classic remake to Venice
VENICE — Tears and cheers greeted the very first press screening of Bradley Cooper's “A Star Is Born” Thursday morning at the Venice Film Festival. Screams acknowledged Cooper and Lady Gaga's arrival for a press conference prior to the evening red-carpet world premiere. Gaga, who sings live in the film and wrote her songs, knows why this is the fourth version of a doomed Hollywood romance. “I think it's safe to say that this story has stood the test of time.
“It's a beautiful story about love, about what Bradley refers to as the `human plight,' and addiction,” Lady Gaga said.
Gaga's character Ally is introduced as a hotel waitress who meets Cooper's singing superstar in a drag bar.
“Being in a movie is a dream come true,” she said, “and a remarkable experience. The challenge for me is at the beginning of this film Ally has completely given up on herself. When I started out and I was 19, I hit the ground running and was dragging my piano from dive to dive bar and I really believed in myself. Ally doesn't.”
“Me and the crew could watch her sing every day and we'd forget we were doing a job,” said Cooper, 43, who surprises as a guitarist and singer as well as director. “Just watching her is seeing an incredible artist do her thing. And that never got old.”
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Joel and Ethan Coen's world premiere of “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs” played like an interactive audience participation gig as the audience clapped and hollered at the spectacular storytelling in this sly history of Westerns told in six short films with stars like Liam Neeson, James Franco and Tyne Daly.
“The movie came about just because we had these short stories over the past 25 years and did not know what to do with them. At one point we thought of making them individually,” Joel said. “We wrote a few just recently and, even though they were completely different in terms of mood, they were vaguely about the same thing.
“So it was interesting to put them together — it wasn't anything more complicated than that.”
“We like all kinds of movies including short movies,” Ethan added.
“But there's not a real commercial market for that.”
“Nobody is doing those anthology movies anymore,” Joel said, “and we thought it would be fun to bring it back.”