Bradley Cooper’s ‘Maestro’ Explores The Powerful Bond Between Musical Genius Leonard Bernstein And His Wife Felicia: “This Had To Be A Story About Their Relationship”
deadline.comLeonard Bernstein — the composer of West Side Story and considered one of the world’s greatest conductors — has lived rent-free in Bradley Cooper’s head since 2018, when Steven Spielberg met with him about what was going to be a straightforward biopic of a musical genius.
Somehow, Spielberg knew that Cooper had been obsessed with conducting since he was a child. Not because he was some kind of musical prodigy, but because of an episode of The Bugs Bunny Show in which the hero conducts the London Philharmonic Orchestra at the Hollywood Bowl, arms flailing wildly. “Growing up,there was always classical music playing in the house,” Cooper recalls. “So, because of the cartoons I was watching, I used to wave my hands about and pretend that I was creating the music that I was hearing.
One Christmas I asked Santa, and all of a sudden I had a baton that I was able to wield.” He spent hundreds of hours waving his arms, conducting, just like Bugs. “So, I always knew that, in a way, I’ve been prepping this character since I was little.
I guess it was the same thing with my last movie, A Star is Born: I’d been playing air guitar since I was a kid.” Spielberg elected not to advance with the project, but when he reached that conclusion, Cooper, who’d initially known nothing about the composer and conductor other than “what he looked like and that he was an icon”, was already hooked.
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