BRADLEY, REBORN
Actor turns director with ‘A Star is Born’
Bradley Cooper is not not happy to be on the press tour for “A Star Is Born,” the movie he specifically, exactingly, meticulously, perfectionistically, obsessively directed, co-wrote and stars in. In fact, he’s very not not happy! He worked so hard on this movie. Every detail of it comes from a true thing — something he’s learned, something he’s seen, something he knows for sure. It’s such hard work to try for something true and to get it right, and maybe he’s succeeded.
What a huge bet this was; what a long haul it’s been; what a fullon occupation of the past four years — years in which he, after an Oscar nomination for “American Sniper,” had his pick of just about any role he wanted. Years in which his heart was consumed by little else. How could he not be excited for people to see it?
“This is the joyous period,” he told me.
This is the third remake of the movie, the story of the big male star who plucks the little woman from obscurity and watches her celebrity and relevance rise above his, to tragic consequences. Each one is slightly different, a reflection of the filmmaker himself — the way different chefs can make a roast chicken at different levels of transcendence. Cooper liked that. He liked that there was an opportunity to reflect himself in there: his romantic view of creativity, his despair of what com-
merce can do to art. He liked that it was a love story above all those things.
He created Jackson Maine in that image: an earnest, rootsy, behatted rock star whose weary, substancecompromised heart can’t bear to see the star-making machinery overtake a sincere, poetic message — a character from another time who is reminiscent of Neil Young or John Fogerty or Cher-husband-era Gregg Allman, but is none of those guys exactly. Could a musician like Jackson really draw giant crowds in 2018 the way he does in the movie? It doesn’t matter. It’s taken on with such grand, Hollywood sexiness that it’s easy, when you’re watching it, to just round up.
Jackson is not so much jealous of Ally, the character Lady Gaga plays, like in previous incarnations of the movie, but he bemoans how the industry strangles her ability to say the kind of things she did when he found her singing “La Vie en Rose” in a drag bar.
Now, maybe you’ve guessed at all this because you are one of the more than 9 million people who have seen the trailer (or one of the people who has seen the trailer 9 million times). Yes, the trailer, which was the closest thing we’ll ever get to a trailer song of the summer: 2 1/2 minutes of such electricity that it immediately became the subject of actual think pieces and social media obsession and maybe a meme or 12.
So yes, Cooper is very excited to finally reveal this labor of love, this Everest of accomplishment. The things he’s not so excited about — the things that maybe if he had his way he wouldn’t do — involve the ways a person is expected and obligated to share it. Meaning, he’s not really excited to sit down and explain the thing.
People want to know, I tell him. People want a deeper sense of where the movie came from. He wanted to show a piece of himself in the movie. This is an extension of that, I told him.
“It’s different,” he said. “This is because you’re creating content.”
“But it’s your story,” I told him.
“But you’re doing it,” he said.
“I’m going to write your story,” I said.
“I won’t have any control, and it really isn’t a collaboration.”
Sure it is. That’s why I’m asking questions.
“You have all the say,” he said. “It’s not like you’re going to show it to me and say, ‘Let’s work on this section.’ You know what I mean?”
So he sat back and told me the same things he told everyone else, and I took notes and then spoke to some people who know him. Here’s what I came up with:
He grew up loved, in Philadelphia, in a house full of music: Tom Waits and Bob Seger and Billy Joel and Mario Lanza and Led Zeppelin and Vivaldi and Tchaikovsky and Prince. His father was a stockbroker and his mother worked at an NBC affiliate and then raised her family.
He always liked performing. He played the upright bass, its neck sticking out of the window of the family Cadillac as he was driven to school. He was 12 when he saw “The Elephant Man” and knew right then he wanted to act.
He got to learn under his directors: Todd Phillips (“The Hangover” trilogy) and Clint Eastwood (“American Sniper”) and David O. Russell (who directed him toward his other two Oscar nominations, for “American Hustle” and “Silver Linings Playbook”). All the mundane stuff about directing, he loved it. He got to the point where he understood the machinery. He was ready. People told him to direct a pilot or a commercial to get his feet wet, but he didn’t want to. He needed skin in the game.
“I guess I felt like I wasn’t utilizing all of myself,” he said.
But it wasn’t easy to get someone to hand him a project. Then he pitched “A Star Is Born” to Warner Bros., and whatever happened in that room made the Warner people hand over $38 million before marketing costs.
In 2011, “A Star Is Born” belonged to Eastwood, who directed “American Sniper.” Beyoncé was attached, but then her first pregnancy reportedly delayed filming and ultimately, there were too many scheduling conflicts to proceed. Eastwood talked to Cooper about the role, but Cooper was hesitant. He was 36; he didn’t think he could play someone that weathered.
“I knew I would be acting my balls off to try to be what that character was because I was just too — I just hadn’t lived enough, I just knew it,” he said.
By 2015, he felt ready to play the role in “A Star Is Born.” Now he looked in the mirror and saw it. “Honestly,” he said. “I could see it on my face. I just felt it.”
But Eastwood had moved on. Then one evening, Cooper watched Annie Lennox sing “I Put a Spell on You” on TV. That night he had a dream about the opening scene of the movie. The actual beginning of the movie is not what he dreamed, but he won’t tell me what it was because maybe he’ll use it if he’s ever allowed to make another movie. Anyway, he pitched his “A Star Is Born” to Warner Bros. the next day.
He wanted to make a version of the movie in which the man isn’t jealous of the woman. He wanted it to be closer to the truth of the way things generally go with people: They fall in love and begin to heal, but eventually, it becomes clear that love cannot heal you completely.
He still needed to find his born star, his Ally. He attended a celebration for the opening of the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy at Sean Parker’s house in Los Angeles — Cooper has been involved in cancer benefits since his father died in his arms in 2011 — and that’s where he saw Lady Gaga perform “La Vie en Rose.”
“My mind was blown,” he said.
She was plutonium, he thought. She would be the thing his movie had that no other movie had. He called her agent and asked for a meeting. He went to her home in Malibu and there was a piano in the living room.
“She was so open,” he said. He asked her if they could sing a song, and he began to sing “Midnight Special.” They downloaded the sheet music and sang it together, with her on piano. After one verse, she stopped him and began to record a video on his phone.
He wanted to make a movie about a man who wears his hat all the time except for when he’s singing — usually musicians wear their hats to sing but take them off afterward. Not Jackson. He’s vulnerable only on a stage. He wanted to make a movie about a man who had something to say and held himself and the people in his life to the rigors of that ethic.
“What he says in the bar is, you know, ‘Talent’s everywhere, you know, everybody’s talented at one thing or another, but having something to say and a way to say it, that’s a whole other bag.’ I believe that, you know what I mean?’”