“Each movie dictates the rhythm of itself,” Guillermo del Toro explained, early in a Tribeca Talk conversation with Bradley Cooper on Sunday. “If you’re lucky and you’re open, and your pores are open… The movie finds you, right?”Cooper and del Toro had the opportunity to test that operating principle, in a very direct way, in the collaboration that led them to Sunday’s conversation. Cooper is the star of del Toro’s next feature, “Nightmare Alley,” based on Lindsay Gresham’s 1946 novel and its film adaptation by Edmund Goulding the following year.
They were in mid-production on the film, which co-stars Cate Blanchett, Willem Dafoe, Toni Collette, Richard Jenkins, and Rooney Mara, when the pandemic hit, so they took several months off to wait out lockdown, and returned to shoot the back half once a safe set was possible.
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Many filmmakers would find such a break to be an inconvenience at best and a spirit-breaker at worst. Cooper and del Toro felt quite the opposite. “We’ve had an artistic experience like none other, because of the sheer nature of just what happened to the world and us, and also the material itself,” Cooper said. “I’ve learned so many things from Clint Eastwood. But one of the things is just how much he would love to, you know, work, and then sit back for two and a half weeks, do something else, and then come back to it.”
Cooper plays Stanton Carlisle, who begins as an uncertain but ambitious carny; the film tracks his rise to power, first as a carnival performer and then as a renowned psychic, which he parlays into darker schemes. The covid break fell roughly halfway through the production – but at a strange point for Cooper’s character arc. “We shoot the second half before the first half, to a large degree,” he said.
“We didn’t want to do it that way,” del Toro interjected. “That’s important to say. Things happened to us. I mean, because of the sets, because of other actors’ availability, we had to shoot the second half first.” But when the time came to make the call, he did not hesitate. “It happened very organically because we both were very concerned, the stopping was not mandatory back then,” del Toro recalled. “We both felt, If we don’t stop now, and somebody gets sick, nothing trumps that. And we cut for lunch and came back from lunch nine months later.”
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But in the rearview, del Toro believes that “It was a blessing. I believe wholeheartedly that life gives you what you need, not what you want. And if you have the wisdom to look at everything, you’ll be full of blessings – whatever it is, a broken limb, a change of weather, whatever it is. And what we got, which was incredible, is we got to see this character, Stanton Carlisle, when he is full of himself and arrogant, and certain, thinking in a different way. And then we were able to go back. And we had six months in between, and we were able to analyze, not only that character, but we could rewrite, we were able to go back to a set…. We quite literally had shot this side of a scene. And we were able to turn around nine months later to get the rest.”
“Yeah, we stopped on March 10th,” Cooper chuckled, “during a scene, and then when we came back, and we were joking, I would say like, ‘Okay, where were we?’”
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Cooper, too, felt that the reset was a revelation. “I don’t think we realized just how much it demanded of us at the beginning,” he shrugged. “That was the that was the discovery. But looking back… there is an arrogance, when you start a movie, that you actually feel like you can do it. But once you start doing it, you just think what? How is this even possible?”
Over the course of their conversation, Cooper chimed in with a few of his own lessons and observations about directing, which he learned when helming his remake of “A Star is Born.” ”I think I’ve been training to be a filmmaker since I was eight,” he said. “It was just about my willingness to jump off and take a chance, meeting my desire to do it, and love for the medium.” His main lesson, he recalled, was learning how to adjust a specific vision “under the constraints of budget and time. Sometimes the fun part is seeing through that vision, but being under these constraints. Because you’re like, ‘Okay, so I can’t do that. But how can I evoke that same thing, through different means, within the restraints of what I’m doing,’ which by the way, you and I dealt with all the time on ‘Nightmare Alley’.”
And Cooper explained a bit about his approach to film acting, then and now. “So much of my career in the beginning was just trying to be relaxed on film, and trying to tell the truth,” he said. “Like that was the first 15 years, really, all I was trying to do is like, ‘Can I just be alive and open and be on film?’ And then I felt like, you know what, I feel like that’s happening. And then it was like, ‘Can I actually inhabit another human being, like, truly inhabit another human being? Is that even possible?’ Chris Kyle was the first one on film that I really was able to that that demanded a completely different instrument.”
And through that process, he discovered how important finding a voice was to finding the character. With Kyle, the protagonist of Eastwood’s “American Sniper,” once Cooper nailed the Texas accent, he could bring him to life. On “Nightmare Alley,” he and del Toro “placed him in Mississippi, in Canton, Mississippi. And it wasn’t until we unlocked his voice that all of a sudden, all this stuff that’s just like effortless, right? I don’t even remember doing it. It just started to happen, I think because of the voice, you know. You started playing the instrument and once you hear, as an actor, that you’re in tune, then everything becomes even more alive and effortless.”
According to del Toro, he and Cooper are good collaborators because “we are both equally excited about creation. I remember we would go and find one thing and go. ‘That’s it. That’s it. We did it!’ Then like three weeks later… ‘meh.’”
“Or even five minutes later!” Cooper laughed. “But that’s one of the things I love about working with you is that you believe one cannot be precious about anything, except serving the story.”
“And serving the truth,” del Toro added.
“And the story is, whatever the truth is of that story is,” Cooper agreed.
And with this strange experience behind him, del Toro finds his theories confirmed. “The older I get, the more I’m open to just seeing what happens,” he said. “You accept grace, and you’re comfortable in grace, and you know that there is something above you dictating these things. And if you relax and just be, it’ll be fine. And that is the mystery of the directing, isn’t it?”
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