David Remnick: In his years in the movies, Bradley Cooper has already lived a few distinct lives. We first got to know him as a kind of charming lunkhead in ensemble comedies like Wedding Crashers and The Hangover. Then came Bradley Cooper, the leading man, both a heartthrob on magazine covers and an intense presence in films like American Sniper.

In 2018, we saw a new Bradley Cooper emerge, the director, first with A Star Is Born and then last year with Maestro. Maestro is a film about Leonard Bernstein, the conductor and the composer, and teacher, someone whose skills ranged from the Broadway stage to the heights of classical music.

Leonard Bernstein: It's a funny thing about this meaning business in music, anyway. When you say, "What does it mean?" what you're really saying is, "What is it trying to tell me? What ideas does it make me have?"

David Remnick: Bradley Cooper stars as Bernstein opposite Carey Mulligan, who plays his wife, the actress, Felicia Montealegre.

Bradley Cooper/Leonard Bernstein: Hello. I'm Lenny.

Carey Mulligan/Felicia Montealegre: Hello. Felicia.

Bradley Cooper/Leonard Bernstein: Bernstein, like that one.

Carey Mulligan/Felicia Montealegre: Montealegre.

Bradley Cooper/Leonard Bernstein: Montealegre?

Carey Mulligan/Felicia Montealegre: Montealegre Cohn.

Bradley Cooper/Leonard Bernstein: Cohn? Montealegre Cohn? Well, that's an interesting marriage of words.

David Remnick: Maestro is nominated for no less than seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Actress, and Best Original Screenplay. I asked Cooper, when we spoke in November, what was the origin of his fascination.

Bradley Cooper: I would have to date it back to being a child and inundated with cartoons as a kid in front of the television and Tom and Jerry and Bugs Bunny conducting. We also simultaneously had a record player in the living room that would always have classical music. That was the first time I realized that you could move your hand up and down and sound comes out. I just became absolutely obsessed with that idea of power, quite honestly, and magical power.

David Remnick: It must be narcotic.

Bradley Cooper: It really felt that way as a kid, because I asked Santa Claus that coming Christmas for a baton. I don't think I knew--

David Remnick: How old were you?

Bradley Cooper: I must have been in between six to eight. I don't know exactly when, but right around then. I still remember when it showed up. I kept it. I just lost it last year, but I had it all the way through college. I kept it in my college dorm. In grad school. It was like a totem for me. Even in grad school, Ellen Burstyn came and did a workshop for four weeks, and the assignment was to create a character. I wrote a monologue for a conductor. It was always something that was inside of me since I was a kid. I spent hundreds of hours, David, conducting to music that I loved as a child. I'm not exaggerating that number.

When it rolled around seven years, six and a half years ago that Steven Spielberg was going to perhaps do a biopic about Leonard Bernstein, he happened to know that little fact about my obsession with conducting and said, "Would you read this script and would you ever consider playing Bernstein?" He wasn't going to direct it. I said, "Listen, would you let me investigate and see if there's a script that I could write, a story that I feel like I could tell that would allow me to enter into it and conduct?"

David Remnick: There was an existing script at that point?

Bradley Cooper: There was an existing--

David Remnick: By whom?

Bradley Cooper: By Josh Singer, who came on board. We wrote it together, the new script.

David Remnick: Just to be clear, Leonard Bernstein, I'm older than you are, he was a part of childhood for me. He was magnetic like nothing else in the classical music realm. He was a rock star.

Bradley Cooper: Yes, no question.

David Remnick: He acknowledged rock and roll and even brought in rock bands.

Bradley Cooper: He sure did.

David Remnick: You're younger. You're absorbing it purely from records?

Bradley Cooper: You're talking about once I started doing research?

David Remnick: As you're a kid and getting interested in Leonard Bernstein.

Bradley Cooper: Oh, as a kid, just records. Riccardo Muti was the music director of the Philadelphia Orchestra back then. I was lucky enough that my parents took my sister and I a couple of times. We spent a vacation in Boca Raton, Florida. Itzhak Perlman happened to be staying in the room next door. I'll never forget it. I just heard the violin all throughout the night and day when we were there. I was just obsessed with what creature's making this in the other room.

David Remnick: Incredible. Years go by and suddenly, Steven Spielberg has given you a blessing-

Bradley Cooper: That's right.

David Remnick: -in a sense. What do you do next?

Bradley Cooper: Then the work began. I had to go and meet the three children, Nina, Alex, and Jamie, and try to convince them to trust me enough to give me the rights to the music for however long amount of years the contract would be. David, I had no story. There was no script. I showed them the movie, A Star Is Born. I told them what I just told you. I said, "It's a very big fire burning inside me for a conductor. I won't ever make a movie I don't believe in." They said yes.

David Remnick: At some point, you have to find the story within the story, the narrative within the big, sprawling biography. Clearly, the center of the film is the relationship between husband and wife, and it's a very complicated one. Why did you go for that as opposed to some other aspect of Bernstein's life?

Bradley Cooper: One thing I realized right off the bat is, first of all, I had no desire to make a biopic. You can make an incredible documentary about-- and some have been made already about this man because of just the sheer amount of primary footage out there. I also wanted to do right by his impact, but because they're sound, picture, colors, production value, as well as story, all of these things that encompass a film, I thought that I could achieve conveying his achievements through other means than just story. For example, I thought the whole movie could be set to his music. Right away, I thought, "I feel like I can take away that tranche of his legacy by just having the whole movie be scored to his music."

[MUSIC - London Symphony Orchestra & Yannick Nézet-Séguin: On the Town: Lonely Town. Pas de deux]

Bradley Cooper: That he also had a relationship to God was a big part of his life. Early on, I started to see the visual aspect of the film. That's what excites me about a filmmaker. That's where the 1.33 aspect ratio, which much of the film has, that's where that came because I liked the vertical element to it.

David Remnick: Explain what that aspect ratio is as opposed to other aspect ratios.

Bradley Cooper: That's more of a vertical. Either side of the frame, if you're watching it, is squeezed in and you have more top and bottom, almost like a television as opposed to scope, which is the Westerns, and you have more room on the left and right. It's wonderful for a close-up as well, the 1.33. I'm just explaining how things start to ruminate inside me. It's always visual. I thought, "Oh, this is going to be depth. This is foreground, background, low to high. That's how the movie's going to breathe." I want to be able to have him reach his hand all the way as high as he can with that baton, and not have it be out of frame, quite honestly. Otherwise, I'd have to squeeze the image down.

David Remnick: These are things that you're thinking about and many, many other things. At the same time, we live in the real world. This is not a cheap movie.

Bradley Cooper: No.

David Remnick: How much was the final budget in the end?

Bradley Cooper: We wound up going under what I had asked Netflix. I think I asked them for $90 million, and I think we were shy of that at the end, which is an enormous amount of money for a movie that's half black and white, shot on 35 millimeter black and white film, which, David, means that there's no going back.

David Remnick: No matter how successful you've been, both as a comic actor, as a serious actor, and then with A Star Is Born, it's still a film about a dead classical music conductor. I've got to figure that you probably had the experience--

Bradley Cooper: That half was in black and white, which is a huge thing for the studios.

David Remnick: How many nos did you get?

Bradley Cooper: Just to be clear, it's $90 million. It's all that money. The budget was so high because we shot live music with live orchestras and because we went on locations. I didn't know how to make the movie in any other way. Everybody said no, the answer is. It started at Paramount. They said no. Warner Brothers said no. Apple said no. I don't think we ever made it to Sony. Scott Stuber at Netflix, I sat down with him. He looked at me. He said, "This is absolutely nuts, but your enthusiasm is infectious, and I trust filmmakers that I believe in."

David Remnick: You're not chopped liver. You're Bradley Cooper at this point and you're going into some of the biggest offices in LA. What is the language you get for no? What does it sound like?

Bradley Cooper: Well, I think I have to set the stage for you about who I am first just as an example. My mother and I just put ourselves on tape last weekend so that we can hopefully get another T-Mobile Super Bowl commercial. [laughs] I think maybe that'll shatter your idea of--

Speaker 3: I'm trying to make a commercial with Bradley Cooper and his mother.

Bradley Cooper: I'm literally not making that up.

Bradley Cooper & Gloria Campano: America's largest 5G network.

Bradley Cooper: T-Mobile has price locked.

Gloria Campano: Okay. Whoa. Smile. You look like a clam.

Bradley Cooper: I think I know what I'm doing. I have no problem asking and pitching something that I believe in. No is something that you become so well acquainted with that Warner Brothers was a tough no, that was the one that hurt a little bit.

David Remnick: Why?

Bradley Cooper: Just because I had made A Star is Born there, and American Sniper, and Joker. I just thought, "Oh, trust me guys. Even if it doesn't work, I don't think it'll look bad on you because I have been so successful for you in the past on projects that were very also risky, a fourth remake of a movie."

David Remnick: What was their explanation for no? What's the rationale?

Bradley Cooper: I think it was nothing other than logical.

David Remnick: (chuckles] That we'll take a [unintelligible 00:10:34].

Bradley Cooper: It makes sense what they're saying. It's a huge budget. It's a subject matter that no one will be interested in. We can't justify it.

David Remnick: Before we talk about a series of scenes in the film, I want to talk about a scene that's not in the film because writing is often a process of leaving things out, as well as- [crosstalk]-

Bradley Cooper: I'm so glad you're bringing that up.

David Remnick: -you're making decisions.

Bradley Cooper: That's so true.

David Remnick: One of the most famous incidents in Bernstein's public life and Felicia's public life is a moment at the height of this-- I forget what the year is. The Black Panthers are in town and they're going to have a benefit. The benefit is at the Bernstein's. They host it. All the swell people of New York are there. It becomes immortalized first in the New York Times and then much more famously, Tom Wolfe writes a piece called Radical Chic. The Bernsteins look, just to put a quick tag on it, ridiculous. They seem like silly people in a way that's now familiar, trying to be down, and trying to be hip, and coming off absurdly.

I don't think, my understanding is from reading about Bernstein is that Felicia in particular ever quite recovered from Tom Wolfe's piece. It was really tough on her in particular. It's not in the film. Tell me about that. It's obviously something you must have thought about.

Bradley Cooper: Oh, and wrote.

David Remnick: You wrote the scene of that party?

Bradley Cooper: Yes. That party was that party for a long time. Again, the movie tells you what it wants; the spine of the film is their relationship. The thing that was so clear to us was, there can be only one villain. I don't want to have another outside incident that brings them together. The villain is part of Lenny, he's the villain. He's the thing that I wanted to focus on breaking up their marriage, or the caustic element of this dynamic. It really diluted his accountability for her state by introducing that into this narrative, what this movie was about. That's why I ultimately took it out.

Also because in terms of people have asked about you're jumping timeline, that switch from Black and white to color, which would've been when that scene would've occurred, was all about their lifestyles having been stressed by this agreement that they made. If you add in another villain of a Tom Wolfe sitting there, it's not as strong. It just wasn't as strong. I'm al for spine.

David Remnick: Tell us what the marital agreement was for those who haven't seen the film or read lots of biographies.

Bradley Cooper: Two people who were absolutely enthralled with each other on so many levels, culturally, artistically, cerebrally, soulfully, and were open about expressing who they were. Part of that was Felicia knowing all of Lenny, this dragon, who also found men sexually attractive as well as women, and would pursue that. She went into this marriage knowing all of those things. At the time, that was a very unorthodox thing. For many people, it wouldn't make it even any sense but to her, and to him, this was just part of what it is to accept another person.

David Remnick: One of the most moving scenes is there comes a point when one of the daughters finds out or hears rumors, and she goes to Bernstein and asks him about these rumors. On the advice of Felicia, in fact, maybe the insistence, he lies. He tells her it's not true.

Bradley Cooper: Pivotal scene for both characters, both Felicia and Lenny. In fact, in terms of what occurs sometimes when you're acting, if you recall that scene, his daughter has spent the summer at Tanglewood, and there are these rumors that he has been having extramarital affairs with men. She's upset by it. She shared that with her mother, and her mother told him, go outside and tell Jamie that that's not true. He goes out there to try to justify, and he talks about jealousy, and tells this tale that's hilarious.

Bradley Cooper/Leonard Bernstein: -enlightened, or shed some understanding on what could have happened. I can only imagine that it was burned on by jealousy, darling. Jealousy of whatever it is that I do. It's plagued me all my life, and I apologize, we're plaguing you now.

Bradley Cooper: Then she just asked point blank to her father, are the rumors true? He says, "No, darling."

Maya Hawke/Jaime Bernstein: I'm relieved.

Bradley Cooper: Then she says, "I'm so relieved." When she says, I'm so relieved, you see on his face this disappointment, "Oh, why are we teaching our daughter something that we ourselves don't believe in?" He is so strong, Leonard Bernstein, and was so strong in the making of this movie that what actually is occurring and why I stay on that shot for so long is because me, Bradley, as Leonard Bernstein in that moment, it was as if Lenny was screaming inside me saying, "Tell her the truth." I started to think- honestly, David, I was like, "I'm going to tell her. I'm going to tell her." I started to think, "Well, if I tell her I'm going to have to rewrite and re-shoot-

David Remnick: The entire movie.

Bradley Cooper: -so much of the movie, and I started going through in real-time, that's on film, going through what I'll have to do." In the end, I thought, it's impossible. Then he goes, and you could see his head shake for a second. That's me going through it. Then he goes, "Okay, let's just go." [crosstalk]

David Remnick: One of the incredible things to me, there's another moment where they have an argument on Thanksgiving. This is an incredible scene at Thanksgiving Day at the Dakota, as balloons are floating by the window Snoopy, or I forget what it was.

Bradley Cooper: Snoopy. Yes.

David Remnick: The argument begins with this tremendous crosstalk. You are actually not following what one is saying to the other, except in emotion. Then the dialogue settles down. They say, as couples can, the most hurtful things imaginable to each other -

Bradley Cooper/Leonard Bernstein: That you are letting your sadness,

Carey Mulligan/Felicia Montealegre: Oh, stop it. This has nothing to do with me.

Bradley Cooper/Leonard Bernstein: Let me finish, what I'm going to say.

Carey Mulligan/Felicia Montealegre: No.

Bradley Cooper/Leonard Bernstein: I think you are letting your sadness get the better of you.

Carey Mulligan/Felicia Montealegre: This has nothing to do with me. It's about you, so you should love it. You want to be sleepless and depressed and sick. You want to be all of those things so you can avoid fulfilling your obligations.

Bradley Cooper/Leonard Bernstein: What obligations?

Carey Mulligan/Felicia Montealegre: To what you've been given to the gift you've been given-

Bradley Cooper/Leonard Bernstein: Oh, please, please.

Carey Mulligan/Felicia Montealegre: -by God.

Bradley Cooper/Leonard Bernstein: The gift comes with burdens. If you had any idea.

Carey Mulligan/Felicia Montealegre: Oh, the burden of failing, honesty, and love.

Bradley Cooper/Leonard Bernstein: I'm sorry to just admit it, but that's the truth.

Carey Mulligan/Felicia Montealegre: That above all, you love people.

Bradley Cooper/Leonard Bernstein: I do love people.

Carey Mulligan/Felicia Montealegre: [unintelligible 00:17:35] that well spring of love the complications arise in your life.

Bradley Cooper/Leonard Bernstein: That's exactly right.

Carey Mulligan/Felicia Montealegre: Wake up, wake up, take off your glasses.

David Remnick: You think if you didn't know the story, that's it. No marriage can survive that exchange, despite Snoopy coming by the window, which is a great touch. Not long after we have Leonard Bernstein conducting the climactic passages of Mahler's second symphony at a cathedral in England. His first instinct after the booming applause is to rush off the stage and into her embrace, which she gives back totally. That, to me, is the spine.

Bradley Cooper: That is the spine of the whole film. Again, I hope you heard some of it because she was really laying into him at the beginning, but it's all about-

David Remnick: Oh, it's fast and furious. You know what I mean?

Bradley Cooper: It is.

David Remnick: It's like life not like a script.

Bradley Cooper: That is her laying into him. We've just watched him have an extramarital affair that he has brought into their home and into his artistry, which is the huge betrayal for her, at least in her mind. I think she's been heartfully betrayed for years, but she still cannot articulate it. That argument is about her saying to him, you're not fulfilling your gifts that you've been given.

David Remnick: You're going to end up--

Bradley Cooper: You're going to end up a lonely old queen. She doesn't say, "You've crushed me. How dare you. You've betrayed--" She doesn't say anything to that. It's not until you get to the part when she has her realization. She says, "I used to envy my children who would wait once so longingly for his attention." She would always say to herself, "I don't need, I don't need, but I do. I'm the one who's been a fool." Then we have the scene where he's conducting, which is really live. That's me conducting the London Symphony Orchestra because it was the only way to achieve that magic that he was able to achieve.

The hope is, as an audience member, there's no hate in his heart because clearly I didn't see any hate in his heart. There's no way she would've loved him because that's what she attacks him for at the Thanksgiving Day Parade party fight. She says it's hate, "You're up there showing people that they'll never hold a candle to you, that you are so much better than them."

Then when we're watching him conduct, it's the exact opposite. it's exaltation. He's the angel that God asked to come down in the beginning of the movie, because he can be a crystal, and can ingest all of that light, all of that power of the music, and then beam it out to all of us in the audience. Then, me, then, making a movie. He was able to stand in the center of the sun and not only, not burn, but reflect it back to us in a way that we could appreciate it and not burn ourselves.

That's why when he rushes off and he's crying in her dress that-- I love when he leaves and you just see the sweat stains on her blue dress. Then, she says to him, there's no hate in your heart. That's the pure love they had for each other.

David Remnick: I've got to ask you about conducting in the Ely Cathedral in England with a full orchestra, the London Symphony Orchestra, and a full chorus. You're conducting Mahler. That's got to be a childhood fantasy come true.

Bradley Cooper: Yes. Sure is.

David Remnick: Some kids dream of hitting the ball out of Yankee Stadium.

Bradley Cooper: That's it.

David Remnick: You got to do that.

Bradley Cooper: I know.

David Remnick: What was the experience like? How does the filming work?

Bradley Cooper: Well, I knew I was going to do that piece of music six years ago, so I started working on it then, and there's a wonderful recording of that performance. I was able to get the raw footage where it's just seeing his conducting. Then, I just spent all of the time I could. Number one, going to the New York Phil, three or four times a week just watching conductors, the LA Phil. The Philadelphia Orchestra became very close with Gustavo Dudamel and Yannick Seguin.

David Remnick: Those are two of the very top conductors working today.

Bradley Cooper: Then, Yannick, who's been just a whole part of Lenny in this film, I had an earpiece and he was counting tempo for me when I was doing it. Because I was conducting them, that is live.

[music]

Then, the problem was I couldn't really hear it because the music is so loud. I couldn't really hear it. We shot that over one day. We were only going to shoot that one day, and I messed it up the entire day. I kept getting behind the tempo, and the minute you lose tempo, it's over, and they are not following.

David Remnick: What happens? The music stops, you have to do it again?

Bradley Cooper: No, they keep playing because they're the best orchestra in the world, but it's not the same, and I know it. The camera knows and the audience knows it. I went to bed that night. The next morning I texted the sound mixer, Steve Morrow, and asked him if we had it, which I think if you're getting a call from your filmmaker, "Do you have it?" and you're the sound mixer, that's not a very optimistic sign.

He said, "I think we do." Because I always would show up before crew call, really a couple of minutes, at least 20. Because I'd been in the makeup chair, I walked into the empty Ely, and it was Lenny saying to me, "Just do it one more time. Do not give up." The 75 orchestra members of the London Symphony Orchestra brought everybody back one shot.

For whatever reason, David, all of that prep for six years came to me effortlessly, and I was able to let go and conduct the orchestra so much so the [unintelligible 00:23:14] came running afterwards. "Yesterday, everything you did was absolute. This is the one you have to use." I was like, "No, no, no, I know."

David Remnick: Really?

Bradley Cooper: Yes. I said, "No." He said, "No, you actually conducted us there, Lenny." I said, "I know. Yes, that's what's going to be in," and that was it. You'd have to ask Lenny, but I think he'd be very happy. I hope he would.

David Remnick: Wow. That's incredible.

Bradley Cooper: It was really incredible. I'll never forget it. Scariest thing I've ever done by far, I mean, not even close to singing at the Oscars live, performing at Glastonbury. Nothing even comes close.

David Remnick: My conversation with Bradley Cooper continues in a moment. This is The New Yorker Radio Hour stick around.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. I'm speaking today with Bradley Cooper, the director, star, and co-screenwriter of Maestro. Cooper's performance playing the conductor Leonard Bernstein is nominated for an Academy Award. The film itself is also up for Best Picture and other awards.

Even as he gained huge success as an actor, both in comedies and serious roles like The Elephant Man, Cooper told me that all along, he wanted to get behind the camera. The old cliche was true.

Bradley Cooper: I didn't allow myself to dream as big as I really wanted to dream when I was a kid, so acting is what I thought I wanted. The truth is, it wasn't just what Hopkins and Hurt did in The Elephant Man, it was what David Lynch was doing in The Elephant Man, it was the sound design. That's what really got me excited. It wasn't until I spent years in this business, and as I was on these sets, acknowledging that all I really think about is how they're making this movie.

That's all I really care about. That's what gets me excited. I was lucky enough to work with filmmakers who saw that in me and invited me very much into their process.

There's so many times I'd be with an actor and they said, "Wait a second, you're in the editing room. How did you ever get let in the editing room?" I think the reason was because these filmmakers realized that, "Oh, this is a like-minded person, they're not just thinking about their performance."

It became sort of an organic evolution that then led me to-- and also quite honestly, frustration that these directors who I really love, just don't want to work with me, and I'm 40 years old and I can't just sit around and wait and do movies that I actually think that aren't what I want to be doing.

David Remnick: What directors don't want to work with you and why?

Bradley Cooper: Well, you'd have to ask them why, but any actor will have a list of directors that just don't-- at that time, I had written David Fincher an email years ago, never heard a response. Martin Scorsese at that time, Paul Thomas Sanderson, Quentin Tarantino. I could go on and on.

David Remnick: You worked with one of the most difficult people. You did three films with David O. Russell who couldn't be more difficult [unintelligible 00:26:13].

Bradley Cooper: Well, I love David and we had an incredible time together. Hopefully, I'm not coming across anyway, not acknowledging how lucky I've been with the people I have gotten to work with. I'm just speaking to the fact that there were other people, and I just got to a point where I just thought, "Let me try to do it myself." It's always what I wanted to do anyway."

David Remnick: Are you done with fun? In other words, if a kind of fun comic role came along, it was three months of your time. It's not Hangover 5, but something of a similar spirit.

Bradley Cooper: I would do Hangover 5. It would be four first, but yes.

David Remnick: Well, I want to get ahead of ourselves. You would do that in a flash and not just to pay the bills.

Bradley Cooper: I would probably do Hangover 4 in an instant. Yes. Just because I love Todd. I love Zach. I love Ed so much. I probably would, yes.

David Remnick: Okay. I think we just made news. Hangover 4 is coming around the corner.

Bradley Cooper: I don't think Todd's ever going to do that. Real quick, just to--

David Remnick: Oh, go, go.

Bradley Cooper: -just to end. You said the word fun. If there was just something fun. There's nothing more fun that I've ever experienced than Maestro and A Star Is Born. This is me having fun.

David Remnick: It is--

Bradley Cooper: I wouldn't do it if it wasn't.

David Remnick: -but the higher fun.

Bradley Cooper: I don't know what you mean, comedy?

David Remnick: One is just less consuming and exhausting.

Bradley Cooper: Yes. You [unintelligible 00:27:31].

David Remnick: You don't have too many maestros in you. There's only one life to live.

Bradley Cooper: That's correct. I also realized that, and I'd rather make-- if I'm lucky enough to have another idea come in that I'm willing to exert this much energy, if I could do it two more, three more times in my life, I'd be very lucky.

David Remnick: I find it hard to believe that you can inhabit the personality, the voice, the intelligence of Leonard Bernstein. Think about him, walk around in his shoes and even his nose for five or six years. Do that all with total consumption and passion and focus, and then walk away from it. How do you move on from an experience like that? How do you take the mask off and then just move on?

Bradley Cooper: You don't move on. That's the beauty about what I get to do. Chris Kyle lives inside me. Joseph Merrick's right here in my wall. There's Lenny. I don't think they ever go away. There were many months where I was talking with a bit of a thing when I would-- I was like, "Oh, that's not really my voice." Like experiences, like your time in Russia. I don't think that's-- I assume those four years will always be inside of you.

David Remnick: It's true.

Bradley Cooper: It's the same exact thing.

David Remnick: Bradley Cooper, thank you so much.

Bradley Cooper: Thank you.

[music]

David Remnick: Bradley Cooper is the director of Maestro and he stars in the film alongside Carrie Mulligan. Both of them are nominated for Oscars and it's up for best picture as well. I spoke with Bradley Cooper in November of last year.

[music]

 

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