Bradley Cooper is not not happy to be on the press tour for A Star Is Born, the movie he specifically, exactingly, meticulously, perfectionistically, obsessively directed, cowrote and stars in. In fact, he’s very not not happy! He worked so hard on this movie. Every detail of it comes from a true thing—something he’s learned, something he’s seen, something he knows for sure. It’s such hard work to try for something true and to get it right and maybe he’s succeeded.
What a huge bet this was; what a long haul it’s been; what a full-on occupation of the last four years—years in which he, after an Oscar nomination for American Sniper, had his pick of just about any role he wanted. Years in which his heart was consumed by little else. How could he not be excited for people to see it?
“This is the joyous period,” he told me.
This is the third remake of the movie, the story of the big male star who plucks the little woman from obscurity and watches her celebrity and relevance rise above his, to tragic consequences. Each one is slightly different, a reflection of the filmmaker himself—the way different chefs can make a roast chicken at different levels of transcendence. Cooper liked that. He liked that there was an opportunity to reflect himself in there: his romantic view of creativity, his despair of what commerce can do to art. He liked that it was a love story above all those things.
He created Jackson Maine in that image: an earnest, rootsy, behatted rock star whose weary, substance-compromised heart can’t bear to see the star-making machinery overtake a sincere, poetic message—a character from another time who is reminiscent of Neil Young or John Fogerty or Cher-husband-era Gregg Allman, but is none of those guys exactly. Could a musician like Jackson really draw giant crowds in 2018 the way he does in the movie? It doesn’t matter. It’s taken on with such grand, Hollywood sexiness that it’s easy, when you’re watching it, to just round up.
Jackson is not so much jealous of Ally, the character Lady Gaga plays, like in previous incarnations of the movie, but he bemoans how the industry strangles her ability to say the kind of things she did when he found her singing “La Vie en Rose” in a drag bar.
Now, maybe you’ve guessed at all this because you are one of the more than 9 million people who have seen the trailer (or one of the people who has seen the trailer 9 million times). Yes, the trailer, which was the closet thing we’ll ever get to a trailer song of the summer: two-and-a-half minutes of such electricity that it immediately became the subject of actual think pieces and social-media obsession and maybe a meme or 12. If you haven’t watched it, let me see if I can conjure some of it from memory.
Let’s see, let’s see: Sultry, longhaired, slightly unwashed Bradley Cooper singing into a mic, “Maybe it’s time to let the old ways die,” then walking off the festival stage in his big, brown hat, and into a car and drinking. More lyrics: “It takes a lot to change a man; hell, it takes a lot to try,” then tinnitus tones come in like an alarm. Shirtless hearing test, Dave Chappelle, nightclub, more shirtless hearing test, more Dave Chappelle, walking into what may be a recovery meeting, following Ally onstage, a conversation about songwriting—She doesn’t sing her own songs! She thinks she’s ugly! He thinks she’s beautiful! Then, as summed up here in this meme:
Falling-in-love quick takes, he tells her to come onstage—No way, man—and he says, “All you got to do is trust me!” then she does and oh my God! Songwriting, motorcycle, private jet, single tear, Sam Elliott head grab, rocking, face in hands, crescendo: “I’m off the deep end, watch as I dive in, I’ll never meet the ground!” Punch, sex, blackout, him and her walk off the bus, she puts the hat on, he puts his arm around her.
If I remember correctly.
So, yes, Cooper is very excited to finally reveal this labor of love, this Everest of accomplishment. The things he’s not so excited about—the things that maybe if he had his way he wouldn’t do—involve the ways a person is expected and obligated to share it. Meaning, he’s not really excited to sit down and explain the thing.
Which brings us to a hotel in the West Village, a corner booth, him fingering his Porsche Carrera aviators on the table in front of us, where he is willing to tell me a lot about his movie, where he is willing to share the same set of facts about its making that he’s shared with many, many, many other reporters, but he is not willing to go much further. He doesn’t like my questions about the particular inspiration for certain details in the movie. He doesn’t like questions about his personal life and how it might relate to the big, sexy music movie I’d just seen.
These were typical interview questions. I wanted to talk about Cooper’s own sobriety, and how it was reflected in Jackson’s drug and alcohol addiction. I wanted to talk about fatherhood—how Cooper has both lost his father and become a father in the last few years—since fathers haunt the movie. I wanted to talk about love. But he wasn’t having it.
Listen, he said to me. I seem nice. He gets that I’m just doing my job. But he’s not going to get personal with me. He has to promote his movie—he wants to promote his movie—but beyond that? What would telling me anything truly personal really do? “I don’t necessarily see the upside of it. You know? I don’t.”
So he sat back and told me the same things he told everyone else, and I took notes and then spoke to some people who know him.
In 2011 A Star Is Born belonged to Eastwood, who directed American Sniper. Beyoncé was attached, but then her first pregnancy reportedly delayed filming and ultimately, there were too many scheduling conflicts to proceed. Eastwood talked to Cooper about the role, but Cooper was hesitant. He was 36; he didn’t think he could play someone that weathered.
“I knew I would be acting my balls off to try to be what that character was, because I was just too—I just hadn’t lived enough, I just knew it,” he said.
On the last day of filming The Hangover Part II, in 2011, he flew home to take care of his father, who was dying from lung cancer. Cooper had been caring him in the year before leaving for Thailand for filming, and now it looked like it was the end. He went home, took his father to an Eagles game, and two weeks later, he held him in his arms when he took his last breath. When he told me that, his arms were in the formation they’d been in when his father last lay in them. Right then, he looked down where his father had been, and then back up at me.
In that moment, everything changed for him. “It’s a new reality,” he said. “Everything, everything. It’s not even one thing, it’s a whole new world. And it was instantaneous. It wasn’t like, months later. It was like, his last exhale, and I was holding him, and it was like, everything changed.”
Instead of taking as many good roles as he could find, he decided to apply an even more stringent standard of perfection to his work than before.
He signed on to do The Elephant Man on Broadway and in London.
By 2015 he felt ready to play the role in A Star Is Born. Now he looked in the mirror and saw it. “Honestly,” he said. “I could see it on my face. I just felt it.”
But Eastwood had moved on. Then one evening, Cooper watched Annie Lennox sing “I Put a Spell on You” on TV. That night he had a dream about the opening scene of the movie. The actual beginning of the movie is not what he dreamed, but he won’t tell me what it was because maybe he’ll use it if he’s ever allowed to make another movie. Anyway, he pitched his A Star Is Born to Warner Bros. the next day.
He wanted to make a version of the movie in which the man isn’t jealous of the woman. He wanted it to be closer to the truth of the way things generally go with people: They fall in love and begin to heal, but eventually it becomes clear that love cannot heal you completely.
He still needed to find his born star, his Ally. He attended a celebration for the opening of the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy at Sean Parker’s house in Los Angeles—Cooper has been involved in cancer benefits since his father died—and that’s where he saw Lady Gaga perform “La Vie en Rose.”
“My mind was blown,” he said.
She was plutonium, he thought. She would be the thing his movie had that no other movie had. He called her agent and asked for a meeting. He went to her home in Malibu and there was a piano in the living room.
“She was so open,” he said. He asked her if they could sing a song, and he began to sing “Midnight Special.” They downloaded the sheet music and sang it together, with her on piano. After one verse, she stopped him and began to record a video on his phone.
He wanted to make a movie about a man who wears his hat all the time except for when he’s singing—usually musicians wear their hats to sing but take them off afterward. Not Jackson. He’s vulnerable only on a stage. He wanted to make a movie about a man who had something to say and held himself and the people in his life to the rigors of that ethic. “What he says in the bar is, you know, ‘Talent’s everywhere, you know, everybody’s talented at one thing or another, but having something to say and a way to say it, that’s a whole other bag.’ I believe that, you know what I mean?”
This is all great, I told him. It’s good information. But now I had follow-up questions, ones based on clues from the movies and biographical information I know from previous interviews—was anything inspired by a specific relationship? What was he thinking in that final devastating scene?
These are the questions that annoy him. Do I really want to know about his love life? Do I really want to know what specific thing he was thinking in that scene? Do I really want to know about his sobriety, and the events that led to it? Uh, yes, I said. I suggested that people like to know the artists behind the art—my job hinges on this notion.
He thinks that’s silly. “Any time you do anything, you have to find personal things of yourself, but no, I mean, I felt like I was him. I wasn’t, like, going, like, back to a moment of my life in that scene.”
The movie isn’t about him in that way, he said. It’s just by him and of him. There’s no one-to-one correlation of events in his life to events in the movie. There’s no one-to-one correlation of emotion, either, and in the parts that are specific, well, they’re for him to know. He made the movie to contribute to humanity, to speak to a viewer in the audience. He made it because creating art helps us heal one another.
“That’s the whole point of creating art, trying to somehow deal with the desperate reality of being alive, you know?”
OK, I say. OK. But what are we healing from? What was the wound? What was your wound?
All he’ll say is this: “The wound was just the wound of being a human being.”
Once again, I tried to draw the lines: So time is breathing down your neck and you realize you must do something hugely ambitious? No, he says, not really. Or maybe there’s some catharsis in acting out demons? Not exactly.
I have a story to write, I told him. I’m not sure what to do. Coming back with a good story is my thing, I said. He saw I was dismayed, and again, I seemed nice, so he tried to explain it. “It’s wonderful that people want to ask me questions. I just find that no matter how much time we spend together, it’s only by spending time and doing something with somebody that you start to get to see how they work and how they interact with other people and who they are, you know? You couldn’t get to know me in this scenario just as much as I don’t know who you are.”
I told him I was going to see the movie again. He gave me his number and told me to call him if I had any questions about the movie or the songs in it. He was nice, too. He just didn’t want to be known the way I wanted to know him.
It was time to go. He took out his phone and asked me to shut off my tape recorder. He played me the “Midnight Special” video with Lady Gaga. In it, his voice is not yet as good as it would become, but he was reaching far down into his body for it. Later, Phillips told me that about two years ago, he was meeting with some Warner Bros. executives and Cooper walked into the office. He asked if anyone wanted to hear him and Lady Gaga sing, and he sat on the floor and played this very video to show them how excited he was to cast her. They watched him watch the video, the way I did, seeing that he had become an organ of his own movie—its heart and its skin.
We watched the whole five minutes of the video. His face was smiling and giddy while he saw it for the thousandth time.
A Star Is Born is a portrait of self-destruction. It’s a story of love between two superstars and the codependence that festers between them. It’s about being cruel to people you love. It’s about the lure of the drunken haze and the way people can enable you. Ally’s rise doesn’t diminish Jackson’s star; he is the agent of his own ruin.
I saw the movie again, and then I reread my transcript, and this time I understood. The movie is about all the things above, but mostly it’s about the way that commerce interferes with art—how people who aren’t artists pretend to know what art is, and how an artist has to protect himself from what the machine asks of him. Meaning that, in its own way, it’s also about this profile.
Maybe what he was saying was that the movie tells me everything I need to know about him and what he values and who he trusts.
It tells me what happened to him in the past to make him reticent about being open with someone who is trying to make her own art out of his story—so that she can heal her own wound on her own terms, and, well, he’s the director now. He told me all of this. I just didn’t know how to hear it.
Image credits: Ryan Pfluger for The New York Times