The last time I saw Bradley Cooper he was stepping off a speedboat onto a red-carpeted dock outside the Excelsior Hotel, on the lovely spit of land across the water from Venice, Italy, known as the Lido. The Lido hosts the Venice International Film Festival. Lady Gaga was by Cooper’s side. An unidentified male held an umbrella aloft, attempting to keep the co-workers relatively dry and ready for an onslaught of paparazzi, in the country where the word “paparazzi” was born.
The occasion was the world premiere of Cooper’s feature directorial debut, “A Star is Born,” for which Cooper co-wrote the script and co-stars opposite Lady Gaga in their formidable turns as musicians, vocalists and lovers whose destinies become beautifully, tragically intertwined.
It went well there. It has gone well for “A Star is Born” everywhere since. (The film opens in Chicago on Oct. 4.) A few days after Venice festival, Cooper, Gaga and company reunited in Toronto for the movie’s North American premiere.
Monday night at the AMC River East multiplex, Cooper conducted question-and-answer sessions with friend and “Chicago Med” star Oliver Platt and Richard Roeper of the Sun-Times after a pair of overlapping promotional screenings. Before the screenings Cooper, 43, sat for an interview in a conference room adjoining the AMC River East manager’s office. There was nothing Italian or Lido or glam about it.
In “A Star is Born” Cooper plays Jackson Maine, a hard-living country rocker who meets Ally (Lady Gaga), an up-and-coming powerhouse vocalist. He becomes her champion and mentor and husband, and then presides over his own downfall. Cooper postponed the start of filming two months so that he and Gaga (real name: Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta) could develop their characters with the guidance of two acting coaches. The goal, Cooper says, was to get to his preferred destination as a performer: the point of no acting, only behaving and reacting.
When he was performing the role of John Merrick in “The Elephant Man” on Broadway, he says, it was easy. The demands of getting the body language and the breathing right, he says, meant that “the last thing I was ever thinking about was his emotional life. So it just happened, which was wonderful.”
A 21st-century version of “A Star is Born” has been kicking around in various stages of development for years. For a time Clint Eastwood had dibs, and Beyonce was rumored for the project.
“I was 38 when Clint brought it to my attention,” Cooper says. “It was a different character (from Maine, the Cooper version) but we talked about it and I just knew I was too young. I felt like I hadn’t lived enough. Deep down I knew I would’ve had to really act.” With a laugh, he adds: “A lot.”
So he told Eastwood no thanks, which hurt. “I mean, I’d put myself on (audition) tape for so many of his movies, from ‘Flags of Our Fathers’ to the priest in ‘Gran Torino’ to J. Edgar Hoover’s lover (in ‘J. Edgar.’) I thought: I can’t believe I’m sitting here saying I don’t think I can do this.” But then, after they did the cultural touchstone “American Sniper” and Cooper transitioned into a yearlong commitment to “The Elephant Man,” he felt ready.
“I just kept thinking about it,” Cooper says of the well-worn, endlessly adaptable “Star is Born” narrative. He’d been working toward directing for years, hanging around editing suites on everything from his short-lived run on the ABC-TV series “Alias” to his fruitful collaborations with David O. Russell. “I felt I always wanted to be a director, but I needed something I had my own point of view on. The structure (of the story) allowed me to investigate the themes and ideas I wanted to investigate.”
Cooper has been clean and sober for 14 years, after some rocky years in his late 20s with alcohol and painkillers. He has discussed that period, guardedly and occasionally, in a handful of interviews. “I was just talking to a friend today,” he says, “and I said, ‘I hate to say it, and I’m a pretty practical person, but … I feel vulnerable putting this movie out. Because it is so personal.”
He stresses that the character in “A Star is Born” is “nothing like me in a lot of ways.” Those differences took time to prepare. He worked with dialect coach Tim Monich for many hours a day, for several months, to lower Cooper’s natural speaking voice a full octave. Low enough to sound like Sam Elliott’s brother. (Sam Elliott plays his brother.)
In the writing phase early on, Cooper reflects, he and screenwriter Eric Roth steered clear of whatever they personally couldn’t care about. “What doesn’t interest me,” Cooper says, “is a character who puts all his stock in his fame, and so the loss of that fame breeds resentment. And then there’s the (parallel) rise of someone else’s fame. None of that I wanted to deal with. I wouldn’t want to watch a movie about that.”
What interested him, he says, “was the idea of family, the effects of a (broken) family on a child, trauma and two people actually in love with each other who ask themselves: Now what? That’s what interests me. Also, I liked the idea of the female character as someone who’d really pounded the pavement, trying to make it, but now she’s 31, also filled with resentments towards the business. She doesn’t feel like her voice is being heard. And that’s when they meet.”
This fourth official version of “A Star is Born” is likely to find a big popular audience, like the three previous versions in 1937 (Janet Gaynor and Fredric March), 1954 (Judy Garland and James Mason) and 1976 (Barbra Streisand and Kris Kristofferson). Cooper, previously Academy Award-nominated for his performances in Russell’s “Silver Linings Playbook” and Eastwood’s “American Sniper,” has emerged as a highly likely double nominee for “A Star is Born.” And maybe a triple, if you factor in the adapted screenplay.
Cooper says he had a hunch his version would work “the first time I met Stefani (Lady Gaga), at her house. I said, ‘I’m thinking about this movie, I saw you perform at the cancer benefit last night, and you did ‘La Vie En Rose,’ which blew my mind, and by the way, I’m thinking about putting that song in the movie so I’d want you to sing that song if you do this project. And she said, ‘Are you hungry?’ and I said yes, and we were eating, and I said, ‘Before we go any further, would you want to sing a song? Because if this doesn’t work, then there’s no reason to waste your time.’” They sang “Midnight Special” at Lady Gaga’s piano, once through.
“I knew how I’d shoot it as a scene. And I knew that if I could just get that right, and capture what I’d just experienced, we’d be OK.”
Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.
mjphillips@chicagotribune.com
Twitter @phillipstribune
