Bradley Cooper’s “Maestro” is available on Netflix now and out in the world. Cooper’s second directorial effort, many heavy-hitting filmmakers seem to be going to bat for the film, including director Alfonso Cuaron and Steven Spielberg, though the latter may not be entirely a surprise given he is a producer on the film.
In a new In Conversation video discussion from Netflix, Spielberg joined Cooper for an illuminating 32-minute talk about “Maestro” and revealed a lot of the backstory of the project—primarily being that “Maestro,” a film about legendary composer Leonard Bernstein, was going to be something that he was going to direct initially. Co-starring Carey Mulligan, Cooper’s version is much different and is a love story that chronicles the lifelong relationship of conductor-composer Leonard Bernstein (Cooper) and actress Felicia Montealegre Cohn Bernstein (Mulligan; read our review here).
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In the conversation, Spielberg noted that Martin Scorsese was originally going to make a version of “Maestro” at one point before him, too (Scorsese is also one of the executive producers on the project). He also spoke about how Cooper and he knew each other well; they had already worked on and almost made “American Sniper” together, a film Spielberg eventually abandoned but Clint Eastwood directed instead (Spielberg says it’s one of his “best films”).
While working on ‘Sniper,’ Cooper and Spielberg got to know each other, and in that time, Cooper revealed that when he was a young boy, he was obsessed with conducting. Cooper says Bugs Bunny in “Looney Toons” was a big starting place influence. “When I was eight years old, I asked Santa Claus or a baton, ‘Tom and Jerry’ and Bugs Bunny, and I just loved the illusion of making music with your hands,” he said.
So when Spielberg debated making “Maestro” a few years later, remembering what Cooper had said about conducting, he sent him the script.
“[And you said,] ‘I might do this Bernstein thing, have a read,’ and that’s how it started,” Cooper recalled, noting that Spielberg sent him the script when he was on vacation. “And you also sort of know how much of a maniac I am when I love something. And how many texts did I send you almost an hour after you sent me the script? It was almost embarrassing.”
“The texts almost went on for seven months, at least seven months,” Spielberg laughed. “And the texts were really brilliant, but what was happening in all the text messaging, you were sending me, as you were also talking to[screenwriter] Josh [Singer] in the process. Was the fact that what I would have probably done with this—which is what I think Marty [Scorsese] was also thinking of doing with this— is a Leonard Bernstein biographical motion picture, and this is not a biographical Leonard Bernstein story this is an anatomy of a marriage and an anatomy of looking into yourself. How do you represent yourself, to yourself, and to the world, even though you and Felicia and your family knew exactly who Leonard Berstein was.”
Spielberg also noted that Paul Thomas Anderson visited the pre-production set one day—during early tests for the film— when Cooper was prepping for what would eventually be the film’s big crescendo, a six-minute conducting scene. Interestingly, Cooper says he shot the scene over two days, and the first day was nearly scrapped. He redid it all on the second day, and it finally came together when he got brave, threw out his “safe” version, and just went for it intuitively.
It’s an engaging talk, and you can watch the entire thing below.
