A STAR IS BORN directed by Bradley Cooper, written by Eric Roth, Cooper and Will Fetters from a screenplay by William A. Wellman and Robert Carson, with Cooper, Lady Gaga, Sam Elliott and Anthony Ramos. A Warner Bros. release. 135 minutes. Opens Friday (October 5). See listing. See review here.
There have been many versions of A Star Is Born, but I’m not sure there’s been one as piercing and as affecting as the one Bradley Cooper brought to TIFF last month.
It’s precise in a way the others haven’t been. Not only does it give us the electric moment of watching Lady Gaga’s unknown Ally ignite her career (and her life) by joining Cooper’s Jackson Maine on a festival stage, it lets us see how terrified she is to do it.
Despite the speed with which this version of A Star Is Born rushes through its time-worn story – in which a disintegrating superstar encourages a bright new talent only to see her eclipse him – this movie breathes. It feels as intimate and as real as possible.
That’s not something anyone expected from a big studio production, and it’s something Cooper very badly wanted to accomplish in his directorial debut.
“Anthony Hopkins said, ‘A person has one line in a movie and in that moment they’re the star of the movie,’” he says, flanked by Gaga and co-stars Sam Elliott and Anthony Ramos the day before the film’s TIFF premiere. “I always knew that I wanted to create a world [in this film], and people are living in that world so they better be interesting if you want to pay attention to them.”
Elliott, for example, packs an entire emotional arc into the background as Maine’s older brother – an arc that pays off beautifully in the last act with a small, silent moment in a pickup truck most directors would have sliced out in order to get to the next scene. I ask Cooper if he kept it because he spent so many years watching other filmmakers chop up his own performances.
“In the editing room, I’m relentless,” Cooper says. “I’m serving one master. It’s the story, that’s it, period . But Sam Elliott fucking crushed it in the truck, so you’re damn right it’s going to be in the movie.”
As for his leading Lady, well, she’d acted before – in dozens of videos, and in small roles on Machete Kills, Sin City: A Dame To Kill For and American Horror Story – but this was a whole new challenge.
Playing the ingénue in A Star Is Born, a role interpreted in earlier editions by Janet Gaynor, Judy Garland and Barbra freaking Streisand, meant divesting herself of her identity as a pop icon, effectively starting from scratch.
“We worked together doing some workshops with [acting coaches] Elizabeth Kemp and Susan Batson and I dyed my hair and took my makeup off a few months before we started filming, to get into the character,” she says. “It was a challenge, but Bradley says it to me in the film, and he said it to me every day, ‘All you’ve got to do is trust me.’”
Not that there wasn’t a learning curve, mind you. Their first day of shooting was a little wobbly.
“I had memorized my lines, and we sat down,” Gaga says. “And he said something off-script to me, and I just said the line that I had memorized. And then he said something else to me and I kept repeating [my] same line over and over again because I didn’t know what to do. And he said to me, ‘Are you okay? Do you feel like you need to cry?’ And then I cried for a second, and then I just threw the lines out the window. I still had them with me, but I was able to be in a more present conversation with him.
“It really taught me something about being an actor,” she continues. “You have to know the story that you’re going to tell, and you have to know the lines. But at the end of the day, you have to be as honest as possible in the moment.”
“I’m just glad I didn’t have to have a lot of those discussions with the male lead,” Cooper says with a laugh, referring to his own performance. “I saved myself a lot of time.”
normw@nowtoronto.com | @normwilner
