‘Maestro’ is director, star, and co-writer Bradley Cooper’s chronicle of the life and times of Leonard Bernstein, the great American composer and conductor who was one of the most important musical figures of the 20th century. Co-starring with Cooper is Carey Mulligan (‘Promising Young Woman’) as Bernstein’s wife, actress Felicia Montealegre, along with Maya Hawke, Matt Bomer, Sarah Silverman, and Miriam Shor.
Although Bernstein was known for operas, symphonies, film scores (‘On the Waterfront’) and several iconic musicals (‘West Side Story’), as well as being a teacher and ceaseless advocate for music education, Cooper’s film – just his second as a director after 2018’s acclaimed ‘A Star is Born’ – focuses primarily on the relationship between Bernstein and Felicia. The couple had three children and shared a lifelong love for each other, despite Bernstein’s many dalliances with men and his abuse of drugs and alcohol.
‘Maestro’ probes into the peaks and valleys of their longstanding romance, while also providing an overview of Bernstein’s colorful life and career, and the sheer joy and passion he had for making music.
Moviefone recently had the pleasure of attending both a live and virtual press conference for ‘Maestro.’ Taking part in the first were Bradley Cooper and Carey Mulligan, while Mulligan returned for the second with Jamie Bernstein, daughter of Leonard Bernstein.
Here are 10 things we learned from the ‘Maestro’ press conferences, edited for clarity and length.
1) Leonard Who?
Bradley Cooper did not actually know a whole lot about Leonard Bernstein when he first came aboard the project. He was more interested in the art of conducting music.
Bradley Cooper: I did not know about Leonard Bernstein. I had an absolute obsession with fake conducting [laugh] when I was a kid. But I was obsessed with it. Like oddly obsessed with it. I spent hundreds of hours conducting. So I always felt this calling, quite honestly. Then when there was a project about a conductor…I asked Steven Spielberg, who was in control of the property at the time, if I could maybe take that on. That’s how it began. Then I started to research trying to figure out what was the script that I could write, what’s the story that I felt that I could tell. It was these two wonderful characters, Felicia and Lenny, and their relationship.
2) Sleep Was Not an Option
Even though Bradley Cooper was directing the movie and in almost every scene, Carey Mulligan says that there was one thing about him which she never noticed.
Carey Mulligan: I couldn’t tell you a day I saw him be tired. He must have been, because he was getting to work at two in the morning to be there to do the prosthetics and fully become Lenny five hours before anyone else got there. But I didn’t see tired, ever. Sarah Silverman was talking about this — the joy in the way that Bradley made the film. Every day. Just so delighted to be doing it, and to be making it, and to be able to tell this story. That was so infectious. So that part of it, it was only ever energizing to be around him.
3) Getting Leonard Bernstein’s Voice Right
One of the most distinctive characteristics of Leonard Bernstein — well-documented in interviews and recordings — was his voice. Cooper started working on it six years ago.
Bradley Cooper: Six years ago it was terrifying, and just became a little bit easier. There’d be like five steps back at certain points when I was, “I’m never going to get the voice.” I mean I don’t know what I sounded like, but it certainly didn’t sound like a human. But I just worked so hard for years. I mean, I really had the benefit of years. Six years of prep. I started working on Lenny’s voice before ‘A Star is Born’ even came out. Then Tim Monich, this incredible dialect coach that I started working with on ‘American Sniper‘ — and then we did ‘A Star is Born’ and ‘Nightmare Alley,’ and we have a wonderful way of working together — he moved basically into my house in New York. We worked five days a week for four and a half years until it was an organic thing where I could just inhabit the voice.
4) Bradley Cooper Cast Personal Friends in the Film
For a number of supporting roles in the film, Bradley Cooper cast people — mostly longtime friends — from his own private life.
Bradley Cooper: Aaron Copeland is [played by] my best friend since I’m 10 years old, Brian Klugman. They were best friends, Leonard and Aaron, and I thought, well, we don’t have to act. I just try to do anything I can not to act. The doctor in the film is actually my doctor. That’s Bernard Kruger, who was my doctor for years. Four and a half years ago, I was like, “Bernard, there’s going to be a scene. Will you play a doctor?” Actually, the first day of shooting, the first scene that we shot was the scene where older Lenny teaches William conducting. It was such a terrifying day just because it was the first time I was really being Lenny in front of a crew and having to direct. So I asked one of my best friends, Gabe Fazio, who I went to grad school with, to play Lenny’s assistant who arrives with him in the Jaguar. Just knowing Gabe was there, I thought I was going to be okay.
5) The Most Terrifying Scene in the Movie
Bradley Cooper revealed that the scene recreating Leonard Bernstein’s legendary 1973 conducting of the London Symphony Orchestra at Ely Cathedral — in which Bernstein seems almost transcendently possessed by the music as he conducts Mahler’s 2nd Symphony — was the scene he was most afraid of.
Bradley Cooper: If I mess that up, the whole movie doesn’t work…That’s me conducting the London Symphony Orchestra, and that’s six minutes and 21 or 23 seconds of music that luckily, I had Gustavo Dudamel and Yannick Nézet-Séguin (music directors of the Los Angeles Philharmonic and Philadelphia Orchestra, respectively) who were kind enough for years to teach it to me. I had the video of him conducting that orchestra in the ’70s in that space. But even with all that, conducting is impossible. So the first day I messed up, I kept getting behind tempo. I was forgetting where the time change happened. It was that moment where you’re like, “I can’t believe actually I’m messing it up in front of one of the top three orchestras in the world.” I went to bed, texted Steve Morrow, the sound mixer. “Do we have it?” He wrote back like, “I think we have it.” I knew we didn’t…I asked everybody back in, I actually said a prayer in front of everybody to Lenny, thanking him, and we did it one more time. That’s what’s in the movie. I did conduct them and it was crazy.
Related Article: Christian Bale and Bradley Cooper to Play Spies in ‘Best of Enemies’
6) Having the Bernstein Children Around Was Invaluable
It can be a nerve-wracking experience for actors to meet the real person they’re portraying, or in the case of Carey Mulligan, the children of the woman she plays in ‘Maestro,’ Felicia Montealegre Bernstein. But Mulligan’s experience with the Bernstein kids was incredibly helpful to her.
Carey Mulligan: I think it just helped, honestly, having the family. Once I’d met them and they were so sweet, and once we did our first couple of Zooms where they were just full of the most amazing anecdotes and stories about Felicia, I suddenly just felt like all I had from them was blessing and encouragement, so I didn’t feel like they were waiting for me to not get her right. I just felt like they were like, “Here’s more about her. Here’s why we loved her. Here’s more things that you should know about her,” and all of that stuff was just like gold.
Jamie Bernstein: One of the elements that we anticipated would make it difficult to portray our mother is that she had this weird combination of confidence and fragility, and that was what Carey was so good at conveying, this very tricky combination. It’s like a tightrope walk, really. Somehow both of those elements were very palpable in her performance.
7) Bradley Cooper Is a Lot Like Leonard Bernstein
Jamie Bernstein says that her dad was a multifaceted, complicated man, and that Bradley Cooper nailed the performance because he operates on much of the same wavelength.
Jamie Bernstein: Bradley’s portrayal is incredibly multifaceted, which made it very authentic to the way my father actually was. He himself was incredibly multifaceted, and it was a complicated business to have him for a father. He was, in many ways, a fantastic dad, and he loved having us around. I never felt, and neither did my brother and sister, unwelcome in his presence. He loved having us around. He took us with him on the road and loved taking trips with us and hanging out in the swimming pool with us and playing tennis and word games, so there was this conviviality that was really there. But he was also a larger-than-life public figure with an ego to go along with that, and he was very competitive, so that made things complicated as well. It turns out that Bradley actually is quite a lot like our dad, principally in his open-heartedness and his emotionality. We didn’t see that in the beginning. We didn’t grasp it until the whole process was underway. Then the more time went by, the more we realized that everything he did came from this essential emotional core. That was so like our own dad, because that was the way he worked with everyone, all his colleagues, and his process with orchestras and collaborators always came from this incredibly open-hearted emotional place.
8) Carey Mulligan Shared Similar Feelings About Acting with Felicia
Before she married Leonard Bernstein, Felicia Montealegre was a screen star with her own career — although she was ambivalent about the craft of acting herself. Carey Mulligan says she and Felicia were alike in that way.
Carey Mulligan: She talks about how she went to the Actor’s Studio as a young actress, and she was sort of forced to go, because she didn’t want to go, and she found the whole thing really embarrassing. It was all actors pretending to be animals or fried eggs and writhing around on the floor and crying a lot. She said it just seemed sort of psychotic, and she was sort of really dismissive of it. I remember thinking that sounds exactly like the way I felt as an untrained actor. I didn’t go to drama school. My first job was when I was 18, and then I went into theater and I felt like these people are all crazy and I have no idea what they’re doing. For years and years, I would keep work at somewhat of a distance, like, “Well, I’m not going to stay in the accent all time, and I’m not going to do this. I’m not going to do that,” all the things that make you a proper actor, like, “That’s not for me,” and for some reason was just always really afraid of it — until this job. I really felt like ‘Maestro’ was the first job where I felt like I gave my craft everything, and it was the most amazing experience because of it, but it was terrifying to do it.
9) The Movie Became About Both Leonard and Felicia
As he and screenwriter Josh Singer dove into their research for the film, Bradley Cooper realized that it wasn’t just about Leonard Bernstein, but about Felicia Montealegre as well.
Bradley Cooper: I would come away from a day of research just sort of filled with their energy. I mean, they really were very powerful people. They were always spoken about as “Lenny and Felicia.” They never said “Lenny and his wife.” It was always clear that both had made an impact on people. That’s what seemed very fascinating: this unorthodox, mysterious, also very open, wistful, haunting, funny relationship that I thought, wow, if we can really explore this truthfully, it’s, number one, cinematic because it will be [set] to his music…and then if we could really be truthful to them, we have a shot at making something [where you say], “I wouldn’t think I would have anything in common with Leonard, this iconic, sort of mythological figure.” But hopefully with this movie, you do.
10) The Journey From ‘A Star is Born’ to ‘Maestro.’
Bradley Cooper’s only other directorial effort before ‘Maestro’ was ‘A Star is Born,’ and he says that he took lessons from that film — and other movies on which he was solely an actor — and applied them to ‘Maestro.’
Bradley Cooper: I learned so much in making that film, and then also shooting ‘Nightmare Alley’ after that with Guillermo Del Toro and then ‘Licorice Pizza‘ with Paul Thomas Anderson. He was kind enough to let me be a part of his prep. I spent three weeks with him just looking at lenses and watching camera tests and just soaking up everything I could…each project I’ve ever been involved with, I’ve just soaked up everything I can and I think hopefully I just keep evolving as a filmmaker. With ‘A Star is Born,’ more than anything, I found something that felt like this is exactly what I’m supposed to do. My major takeaway from ‘A Star is Born’ was, “Oh, wow, I finally have found my center as an artist.”
‘Maestro’ will be in theaters in limited release on November 22nd before it premieres on Netflix December 20th.
FqmEtOOicND6oW8RNB1EU5What is the plot of ‘Maestro’?
This fearless love story chronicles the complicated lifelong relationship between music legend Leonard Bernstein (Bradley Cooper) and Felicia Montealegre Cohn Bernstein (Carey Mulligan).
Who is in the cast of ‘Maestro’?
- Carey Mulligan (‘Drive‘) as Felicia Montealegre
- Bradley Cooper (‘The A-Team‘) as Leonard Bernstein
- Matt Bomer (‘Magic Mike‘) as David Oppenheim
- Maya Hawke (‘Asteroid City‘) as Jamie Bernstein
- Sarah Silverman (‘Wreck-It-Ralph‘) as Shirley Bernstein
Other Movies Similar to ‘Maestro’:
- ‘The Buddy Holly Story‘ (1978)
- ‘The Doors‘ (1991)
- ‘Malcolm X‘ (1992)
- ‘Ali‘ (2001)
- ‘Nowhere Boy‘ (2010)
- ‘Love & Mercy‘ (2015)
- ‘A Star Is Born‘ (2018)
- ‘Bohemian Rhapsody‘ (2018)
- ‘Rocketman‘ (2019)
- ‘Mank‘ (2020)
- ‘Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance with Somebody‘ (2022)
- ‘Elvis‘ (2022)
- ‘Big George Foreman: The Miraculous Story of the Once and Future Heavyweight Champion of the World‘ (2023)
- ‘Oppenheimer‘ (2023)
