A Last-Minute Hail Mary From Bradley Cooper Saved Maestro's Most Important Scene
"Maestro" is an audacious title for Bradley Cooper's freshly released Leonard Bernstein biopic. Sure, at first glance, it's just referring to the title bestowed upon the conductor of a classic orchestra. Bernstein, one of the great musicians of the 20th century, more than earned the title. However, it ropes back around considering Cooper cast himself in the lead part; he's boasting about what he can do. It's not surprising he sees kinship with Bernstein either, since directing and composing are easily comparable. Both are the art of guiding many moving pieces into a perfect whole.
Cooper was paired with Emma Stone for Variety's Actors on Actors series; the conversation eventually turned to how his acting and directing intersected on "Maestro." Particularly, his difficulties crafting the movie's high point; Bernstein conducting Gustav Mahler's Resurrection Symphony at the Ely Cathedral in England in 1973. The scene, never interrupted by dialogue or copious reaction shots, is the first time the film shows Lenny being a maestro at length. While the shots are framed wide, Bernstein is the most active subject in the frame by far so your eyes stay focused on him. The scene isn't just technically important either.
Like Cooper's directorial debut, 2018's "A Star is Born," "Maestro" is a tragic love story about a self-destructive man and his frustrated yet loving wife. During one of their arguments, Bernstein's wife Felicia (Carey Mulligan) tells him there's "hate in his heart" and he plays music as such. After she witnesses his Ely performance and they reconcile, she reassures him that the hate is not there anymore; he's conducting with joy and helping the audience experience that.
For Cooper, though, the scene was a challenge and it took some impulsiveness to perfect it.
A Maestro must stay on tempo
The conducting scene was shot on-site at the Ely Cathedral, initially with five different cameras; Bernstein is standing in the center of the orchestra so coverage from many angles makes sense. As Cooper recounts to Stone (and Variety), the rest of the movie used only two cameras and the turnaround time on scenes was rather quick, but this was a different animal.
The actors appearing as Bernstein's orchestra were all professional musicians (Cooper says, "They're the best at what they do. The concertmaster showed me a still of him at four years old with two wooden spoons like, 'That's when I started.'").
So now, for the scene's sake, Cooper had to conduct this A-Team orchestra in the craft they'd excelled in. The eyes of the camera were all on him, so there was no getting around the performance, and the resulting music had to sound good to not break the scene's immersion.
Cooper was, as Stone put it, "in the finals" like an athlete before a big game, and feeling all the pressure that brings. He also admits that conducting is "the hardest thing." That he was doing it in front of professionals, while playing a legendary conductor, only added to his embarrassment as he struggled to keep up. As Cooper tells it:
"[As a conductor], you're keeping tempo a little bit ahead to make sure, and you're also reminding everybody of these things that you'd worked on in rehearsal. Luckily they're the greatest orchestra in the world. But still, I had to conduct them because the shot is seeing everybody. So I messed up the whole first day. I kept messing up. And the minute I was behind tempo, it's over. Like, I'm lost."
Becoming Lenny
Lenny in the film ends the performance as if it has lifted him onto a blissful high, but once Cooper finished shooting the scene, he felt more and more stressed:
"I went to bed and I texted the sound mixer. Which, he gets a text at like 2 AM – from the director! — saying, like, 'Do we have it?' Question mark? That's how vulnerable I was, I'm texting the sound mixer. And then he wrote me back, he's like, 'I think so?' And I text Jason Ruder, the [supervising music editor] and I'm like, 'Do we have it?' You know, it's an insecure like, 'We got it right?'"
However, as Cooper admits, they did not have "it" (the best-sounding version of the scene) — not until the next day, anyway.
Cooper says he often felt Bernstein's spirit guiding him during the production of "Maestro." He developed a habit during the shoot of getting ready early ("five or six hours before crew call") and so had extra time to "become Lenny" every day. The day after his conducting experience, he wandered into the cathedral and decided, against the shooting schedule, "I gotta give it one more shot." And so he did.
A Maestro of both music and filmmaking
Cooper brought the crew back into the cathedral (not to mention a Technocrane camera they had planned to use for an exterior scene). He then said "a prayer to Lenny in front of everybody" and started conducting again. The resulting one-take is what's in the movie. This one-take, with rapturous joy on Lenny's face as he conducts, assumes a new layer when you know the relief that was going through Cooper's mind during the shot. Once the shoot was over, the orchestra's timpanist approached Cooper and told him:
'You know, what you did yesterday, it was total s**t you know. Today, you conducted us.' And I was like, 'No, no, I know.' 'No, no, you don't understand. You can't use yesterday at all.' I was like, 'No, no, no, we're not, we got it."
I'm the most amateur of amateur musicians, but I do know that live music is all about anticipation and if needed, improvisation. It's not too different from filmmaking that way. Cooper used his sound instincts as a director to ensure he was the best composer he could be (or play, at least).