Bradley Cooper nailed his directorial debut, the fourth remake of the movie A Star Is Born.
Cooper also starred in the film alongside Lady Gaga, and they melted all of our hearts.
Of course, making a movie this big comes with a lot of behind-the-scenes secrets and interesting
facts.
Spoilers ahead!
Real life inspiration
Bradley Cooper and Lady Gaga first met at a Saturday Night Live taping a few years ago,
but it was their second interaction that really made an impact.
In 2016, after signing on to make A Star Is Born, Cooper was searching for an actress
to play Ally.
He went to a cancer benefit in Sean Parker's backyard in Los Angeles where Gaga was performing,
and the rest is history.
"And then quite honestly, when I saw Lady Gaga perform and she did La Vie En Rose which
is a scene in the movie.”
“Oh dude it's heartbreaking."
He knew then that he wanted her in the movie, and that performance helped to inspire one
of the first scenes in A Star Is Born, when their characters meet - Ally is singing "La
Vie en Rose" when Jackson Maine falls for her.
Gaga told Vogue that when they met the next day to discuss the film, "it was an instant
connection, instant understanding of one another."
Cooper basically offered her the part that day, and then they had spaghetti and meatballs
together.
Awww.
Talent switch
The fourth remake of A Star Is Born could have been completely different than the version
we all witnessed.
According to Vogue, Clint Eastwood was originally set to direct the film, and he had asked Cooper
to play the part of Jackson.
At some point, Cooper took over the director role.
In 2011, Deadline reported that Eastwood was also in talks with Leonardo DiCaprio and Beyoncé
to play the starring roles in the film.
Years before that, according to People, Will Smith was interested in remaking the film.
Although Smith didn't want to direct, he did want to play the role of Jackson.
He even had a production deal with Sony Pictures, and supposedly wanted Jennifer Lopez to play
the role of Ally.
None of this ever materialized, of course, and Cooper ended up scooping up the project.
Confidence boost
Throughout the film, Cooper has a lot of scenes where he's playing guitar and singing - something
we've never seen him do before, but that's really him.
According to Vogue, Cooper trained for the film by learning how to play guitar and working
with a vocal coach and a piano teacher for more than a year.
When the two first met to discuss the movie, they sat down at Gaga's piano to play one
of the songs together to see how they sounded.
Gaga had Cooper sing, which he described as "awkward" to W magazine.
But Gaga could see he had talent, and that seemed to boost his confidence.
"So I was playing it on the piano and he started to sing, and I was like, ‘Oh my gosh Bradley!’”
Co-star code
After Gaga and Cooper's instant connection, the two quickly became very close.
In an interview with W, Cooper said they bonded over both coming from Italian families, explaining,
"We were immediately comfortable with each other.
We made a kind of deal: I believed in her as an actress, and she believed in me as a
musician."
While on set together, the two developed a shorthand, according to The Los Angeles Times,
which said, "If Cooper wanted Gaga to evoke a feeling of warmth, he'd whisper, 'Tony.'"
This was because of her very close relationship with singer Tony Bennett.
He would whisper "ninja" or "assassin" if he needed her to focus.
It paid off, as Cooper raved about her acting to the newspaper, saying:
"Her learning curve was insane, just from the first day to the second day."
Natural look
Even if you've only seen clips from A Star Is Born, it's clear that Gaga looks completely
different than she normally does.
There are no elaborate costumes or makeup - instead, she has brown hair, and she's wearing
almost no makeup at all.
Gaga told The Los Angeles Times that one of the first times they met for the film, Cooper
handed Gaga a makeup wipe and told her to leave her face bare.
She realized she had to trust Cooper.
"All you gotta do is trust me.
That's all you gotta do."
Gaga decided to go with it, later saying:
"It put me right in the place I needed to be, because when my character talks about
how ugly she feels - that was real."
Adjusting to not wearing makeup was difficult for Gaga.
On The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, she said that she changed her hair and removed
her makeup months before filming.
"Because I had to get into character and I had to get used to it.
And it was actually kinda liberating cuz nobody knew who I was."
Live performances
A lot of the scenes in the movie show Gaga and Cooper performing on stage together, in
front of huge crowds, as Ally and Jackson.
As it turns out, many of those crowds were real.
According to Entertainment Weekly, they shot some of their major performance scenes at
big festivals, like Coachella, Stagecoach, and Glastonbury.
"We had eight minutes at Stagecoach and we had four minutes at Glastonbury.”
“What if people started booing you?”
“That would be a problem.”
Coachella was a little more difficult, since Gaga was headlining.
She shot her scenes between sets, and Bradley sang live with her as Jackson Maine.
He told W,
"At first, I was terrified.
You forget everything when you're onstage in front of 30,000 people.
I almost couldn't breathe.
But then I looked at Stefani and relaxed: Her belief in me as a musician gave me courage."
Song collaboration
Although Cooper and Gaga both wrote a few of the songs for the film, they didn't do
it all on their own.
Lukas Nelson, Willie Nelson's son, helped them write a lot of the music.
Cooper noticed him when they were shooting at Coachella and Lukas was playing guitar
for Neil Young.
Nelson told Rolling Stone:
"He looked at me and said to himself, 'I want this guy to teach me how to present myself
as a musician in this movie.'"
Although Nelson was originally just going to be a music consultant, he eventually started
writing with Gaga, and Cooper had him and his band, the Promise of the Real, become
his onscreen backing band for the film.
The relationship between all of them was so great that Nelson even asked Gaga to sing
background vocals on his song "Carolina," which is on their 2017 self-titled LP.
A tragic scene
Without giving away any huge spoilers, let's just say that the end of A Star Is Born is
pretty devastating.
The final scene is Gaga singing the song "Never Love Again" on stage, and the day she shot
that scene happened to be very difficult for her in real life, too.
In an interview with Apple Music, Gaga revealed that the day she had to film that scene was
also the day she found out her friend Sonja, who had been battling cancer for years, had
died.
Gaga said she left the set to see her friend, but she didn't make it in time before she
passed.
After spending some time with Sonja's family, she went back to set and shot the final scene,
singing the song in her friend's memory.
Pearl jamming
Cooper's version of Jackson isn't based completely on any one person, although he was a riff
on the character Kristofferson played in the 1976 version.
He also revealed to Yahoo News that much of Jackson's onstage persona was influenced by
a real musician: Eddie Vedder from Pearl Jam.
He said that he became good friends with Vedder, who acted as his source and inspiration behind
Jackson.
Cooper said,
"I went up to Seattle and spent four or five days with him and I asked him 9,000 questions."
He joked that Vedder was surprised Cooper was going to actually sing on stage, saying:
"Bro, don't do that."
But in the end, Vedder ended up helping him tremendously, and Cooper described him as
"wonderful."
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