by Gill Pringle
“I became obsessed with conducting. I went from like Tom and Jerry and Bugs Bunny to asking Santa Claus for a baton when I was seven or eight years old. And then just spending hundreds of hours fake conducting – something about the seeming power of just moving my hand to the music,” recalls the actor whose extraordinary transformation into legendary conductor and composer Leonard Bernstein in Maestro has made him a keen favourite for Best Actor Oscar.
But the plaudits don’t stop there. Such is his dedication to bringing the prodigious Bernstein to life, he also directs the film – often working 18 hours a day to accommodate a 5-hour prosthetic process before he even began to work.
In truth, Cooper was not especially familiar with Bernstein’s work – despite the fact that he famously wrote the music for West Side Story, On The Waterfront and the operetta Candide – when the prospect of a movie about the composer first came up six years ago.
“Having been oddly obsessed with conducting, I always felt this sort of calling, quite honestly, whenever there was a project about a conductor,” recalls Cooper, 48, who learnt that Steven Spielberg had control of the property at the time.
“I asked if I could maybe take that on and that’s how it began when I started to research to try to figure out the script that I could write; ‘what’s the story that I felt that I could tell?’ And it came down to these two wonderful characters, Lenny and Felicia and their relationship,” he says of Bernstein and his actress and fashion icon wife Felicia Montealegre.
Throughout his life, Bernstein had affairs with both women and men, Montealegre willingly entering into their 1951 marriage with the knowledge that her future husband was gay.
Nevertheless, the couple enjoyed a happy marriage, welcoming three children – all of whom gave Cooper their full support to portray their father honestly.
And while Bernstein left his wife for a period of time to live with another man in 1976, such was his love for Felicia that he later returned to New York to care for her after her diagnosis with lung cancer, staying together until her death in 1978.
For Cooper, it was vital to get the casting of Felicia just right and he was immediately impressed by Carey Mulligan, bonding with her, knowing that the audience’s belief in their relationship was crucial. “‘If they don’t care about us, there is nothing, and we can’t act,’” Cooper recalls telling his co-star.
That preparation included “baring our souls to each other” in dream workshops. “We spent five days doing it together and there are specific things one does, but it ends in a ritual where you create and perform for the other person. After that, that was it. I knew we were set,” he says.
Mulligan agrees, “On one of those days, we went to the Bernstein’s house in Connecticut and walked around and did a workshop there, having these conversations in the bedroom they lived in and in the garden where she gardened. Even us sitting back to back … That started in the dream workshop and it became such an important part of the film,” she says.
Bonding as their characters in that way allowed them to explore the complexity of the Bernstein marriage. “That was a major, major part of cracking how I could make a love story about these two and have it be honest,” says Cooper.
“I wanted to dedicate the real estate of the film to them so, how could I serve the truth of his life within this marriage while not shifting the focus away from them? Lenny’s sexual fluidity could be explored fully as a film but that’s another movie. I wanted to make a movie about these two because that’s frankly what I found encapsulated everything. What is it to be these people at these certain time periods? What’s it like to be in this heterosexual nuclear family structure, but yet have these truths about each other?”
Talking about the enormity of Cooper’s undertaking – in both directing and acting every day – Mulligan says, “I couldn’t tell you a day I saw him be tired. I mean, he must have been because he was getting to work at two in the morning to be there to do the processing and fully become Lenny five hours before anyone else got there but I didn’t see tired.
“It was only ever energizing to be around him. But the amount of effort that was going into [his performance] I’m sure was enormous, but I didn’t see someone being effortful. He would just sort of take a second and then would know exactly what the next thing to do was. And he was so instinctive with me because he had done so much to become him,” adds Mulligan.
Cooper was grateful that Spielberg’s original screenwriter Josh Singer agreed to come on board to create a new script.
“He had been a part of the original project about Bernstein. And then when I came on, I asked him if he would want to go on this new journey. He had done all the research and then I met the people that he had met, and we just dove in together. I’ve never loved doing research as much as on this movie because it was just so fascinating. I would come away from a day of research just sort of filled with their energy after talking to people who were still alive and knew them,” says Cooper, chatting at The Aster Hotel in Hollywood.
“It was always clear that both Lenny and Felicia had really made an impact on people. I was just so happy to take the project into a direction of a movie about marriage because that’s what seemed very fascinating. This unorthodox, mysterious, also very open, wistful, haunting, funny relationship that I thought, well, ‘if we can really explore this truthfully, it would be cinematic because it will be through his music and melody with which they spoke’. And then if we could really be truthful to them, then we had a shot at making something about this iconic and mythological figure,” he adds.
For Cooper, the making of Maestro really has been a labour of love, revealing how he first started working on Bernstein’s voice even before he directed and starred in A Star is Born.
“I worked on the voice for six years, which was terrifying but it also just became a little bit easier. There’d be like, five steps back at certain points when I was like, ‘I’m never gonna get the voice’. But I just worked so hard for years so I really had the benefit of years of prep,” he says, claiming he could never have achieved a flawless Bernstein accent without the help of dialect coach, Tim Monich.
“I started working with him on American Sniper. And then we did A Star is Born and Nightmare Alley, and we just have a wonderful way of working together and he basically moved in at my house in New York. We worked five days a week for four and a half years once I moved to New York from LA. It was an organic thing where I could just inhabit the voice,” recalls Cooper.
Working with special make-up effects artist Kazu Hiro, they were careful to never make Cooper’s face look like a mask. “Kazu Hiro is an incredible makeup artist who we worked for years doing tons of tests way before we ever even begun shooting the tests on film, where we would just keep working and refining Lenny’s look – even throughout the process of shooting the movie,” he says of the celebrated Japanese prosthetics specialist who designed Gary Oldman’s make-up to play Winston Churchill in Darkest Hour.
“Some people think when you go in the makeup chair, you sort of fall asleep, but it was a very active morning. It was five hours of active work because, for the two of us, it’s always about getting it just right. Like, ‘can we maybe make this even better for tomorrow? Should we make a new mould, amen’. It was relentless,” recalls Cooper.
Maestro is in cinemas 7 December 2023
