[singing] "Watch as I dive in.”
A Star is Born’s hit song “Shallow” isn’t just a catchy tune –
[singing] “In the shallow sh-ha-llow.”
it’s the key to the message this movie is trying to send.
The film asks what it takes to be a great artist,
and its answer?
You can’t stay in the shallows, you have to go deep.
“What I believe about singing in a film is that
what you have to say is so-- so deep and so powerful
that it can’t be said with just words, you have to break into song.”
Bradley Cooper’s directorial debut starring Lady Gaga is the fourth iteration
of this classic Hollywood tale.
You can watch The Take’s previous video on how it compares to the older verisions
on our Youtube channel.
But this movie feels fresh because it achieves powerful intimacy and raw emotion
as it peers inside the most private places within the artist’s heart and mind.
“How do you hear it?”
[singing] “Da da da da da da nah nah nah da da da…”
A Star is Born reminds us that, while it’s easy to get cynical about the
fame game
and feed audiences what you think they want, good art has to be real.
It has to be heartfelt.
And it has to be scary for the artist who’s revealing that intimate self.
Only then can it really have anything to say.
“If there’s one reason we’re supposed to be here
it’s to say something so that people can hear it.”
So here’s our take on how A Star is Born uses stellar chemistry,
cinematography and of course music, to show us what it feels like
to jump in the deep end and become a star.
We might often wonder what it is that makes someone become a star,
compared to all the other would-be’s out there who,
objectively, seem to be just as good
singers, actors or dancers.
“She said that that’s what star quality was,
that little something extra.
Well you’ve got it.”
The movie plays with this question through Ally’s dad’s OBSESSION with Frank
Sinatra:
“But Frank, he'd come on stage with the blue eyes, the sharkskin suit,
the patent leather shoes... he becomes Frank Sinatra.
And everybody else, all these other guys…
that really got it, that really have it inside...
just a bunch of nobodies."
According to this movie, what really makes someone star-worthy
is having something to say and the power to say it in the way only you
can.
“Bet you f----ing everbody in this bar is talented
in one thing or another but,
having something to say and the way to say it so people listen to
it,
that’s a whole other bag.”
“If there’s one thing th-that I hope people take from the movie it’s
yeah—what is it that you want to say?
And how do I want to say it?”
This movie very authentically captures just how scary it is to do this.
Most of us can relate to Ally at the beginning of the film.
We resist that urge to go for it and sing our own song,
even if we really want to.
And sure, it would be nice if some handsome famous person came along
and immediately sensed just how special we are.
“Unless you get out there and you try to do it,
you’ll never know.”
But even though there’s a wish-fulfillment in the way Jack sets up her huge moment—
“All you gotta do is trust me.
That’s all you gotta do.”
She still has to make the choice to walk out onto that stage.
In the concert scene, Ally does exactly what “Shallow”’s lyrics
say.
She jumps off the deep end.
[singing]“I’m off the deep end, watch as I dive in.
I’ll never meet the ground.”
This is especially scary for her because it’s her first time
performing her own song.
Covering Edith Piaf was a lot safer and easier,
because she could hide behind someone else’s persona.
Watching the power of Ally letting go onstage makes us understand
that this is what you have to do to be a great artist.
Go beyond the shallow or superficial, and tap into that most raw, real part of yourself.
Ally’s primal scream,
[singing] “Haa-ahh-ahh-ahh-ahh.”
captures that joy of truly expressing yourself --and transforming your pure feeling
into something others can perceive and enjoy.
Until this point Ally hasn’t believed in herself enough
to go deep.
“I don’t sing my own songs.”
“Why?”
“I just—I just don’t feel comfortable.”
“Our movie is a 31-year old musician who hasn’t made it.
She’s not an ingénue.
And she’s sort of relegated herself to singing someone else’s song in a drag
bar.”
You might say that the moment Ally really jumps in
comes sooner than the stage performance.
When she first sings to Jack in the parking lot.
“Ain’t it hard keeping it so hardcore.”
This seems to come out of a sudden instinct,
but how many of us could be so brave.
To sing our own song, partially made up on the spot
to one of the world’s most famous musicians?
“The movie knows she’s a star before she does it.
And the movie’s almost searching for her.
And with this scene where she stands up and starts singing,
the camera’s over her shoulder looking down at him.”
Here the camera angle emphasizes that Jack is already Ally’s adoring fan,
as he gazes up at her.
“You know there was all those lights behind her,
as if she’s up on a huge stage at Coachella or something,
without even realizing it.”
Later, as their relationship hits rough times when Jack is upset over the direction
Ally takes with her solo career, we feel for Ally.
“You’re embarrassing, it’s just you know--”
“I’m embarrassing?!”
He acts out in overbearing, destructive ways.
But at the same time, he’s right that she’s taking a shortcut
and not doing her talent justice by imitating what’s popular
instead of doing the hard work of looking inward at what she
really wants to say in her music.
The movie makes us understand that if you’re not *terrified*,
if it’s not a *struggle*, if you’re not *floored* by your own emotion,
then you’re not digging deep enough.
In the final scene, Ally has to call on a strength
she didn’t know she had.
“I’d like to sing it for you tonight.
And with your help, maybe I can.”
In her time of the most unspeakable emotional pain,
after losing the love of her life, she has to connect with that emotion as an
artist,
instead of pushing it away or getting buried underneath it.
[singing] “Don’t want to give my heart away,
to another stranger.”
As she performs “I’ll Never Love Again”,
this is her moment of truly becoming the star.
“That's the moment the star is born.
To me the movie ends with the star being born.
Because she's finally able to be herself, and she's willing to look out to you,
the viewer, and say, 'Here I am’.”
She’s finally willing to go as deep as she possibly can,
and that’s why she’s just going to get better from this moment on.
“Ally at the end of the movie is just starting.
What she’s going to create is going to be even larger
than what we’ve seen prior.”.
Meanwhile Jack’s career, and ultimately his life,
ends because he could no longer face his innermost feelings.
“I’m trying to hold it together.
I’m Jack, I’m an alcoholic.”
While his connection with Ally gave him one last rush of fertility as an artist,
he’s become disconnected from himself, thanks to decades of numbing himself
through his addictions, tuning out painful emotions,
and not dealing with his complex family issues.
“All Dad ever did for you is make you his f---ing drinking buddy.
And you’d be right there with him if he was still alive
and you f---ing know it.”
The ringing in his ears symbolizes that.
He’s been slowly losing his ability to hear the music.
“Well tinnitus can’t be fixed.”
“Right.”
“Intimacy is uh, it’s equal parts performance and proximity.”
The movie’s cinematography by Matthew Libatique,
is all about giving us a subjective experience.
The camera and lighting put us In Ally’s and Jackson’s point of view,
And even more impressively, they make us feel what the characters feel.
“The hope is that you’re feeling these things
but you’re not quite sure why, but it’s because I’m manipulating it
through the choice of the shot.”
This subjectivity is used to give us a deeper understanding of three things:
One, what it is to be a performer or celebrity.
Two, what it is to be in love.
And three, what it is to be in deep emotional pain.
First, the camera puts us in the shoes of the performer,
so in the concert scenes we’re right there onstage,
not watching from the crowd.
So often music films situate us in the audience below,
looking up at musicians like distant god-like icons.
Libatique said, quote,
“The minute you get into the audience’s perspective,
it becomes about the stage show and you lose a little bit
of feeling for the character.”
In Jack’s opening performance the lights are almost blinding.
The sound is overwhelming, and the handheld camerawork
creates a sense of frenzy.
So we understand the intensity of this experience,
but then we get to see what it’s like after the performance too,
when he’s suddenly alone.
“To me it’s like it’s sonic, and it’s this cacophony of noise
where it’s like pppppppfffft.
And then it’s silence.”
In the pivotal scene when Ally is deciding whether to
join Jack onstage to sing “Shallow,” the camera stays with her
as she summons up the courage.
And as we walk out with her, we get a rush as if it’s us there
in front of all those people.
This scene is exhilarating because it captures how terrifying,
surreal and fun it would be to perform your own song
in front of such a crowd.
Then when they’re performing,
[singing] “I’ll never hit the ground.”
the visuals make us feel the way that these two artists
are so electric onstage because they see only each other.
Editor Jay Cassidy said that in this reverse two-shot, quote,
“It is as if the whole surroundings have receded,
the band, the audience, and they are alone together.
As the song ends and they come back to earth,
all she can say is ‘so many people.'”
In his lighting, Libatique used the color palette
of cyan and red to connect us to the heightened beauty
of Ally’s and Jack’s artistic connection, the beautiful creativity they access
when they sing together.
We see these colors when they’re onstage together,
as well as the first time Jack watches Ally perform,
and after Jack’s suicide.
In the last scene when Ally introduces herself as,
“Ally Maine.”
she’s standing in a column of blue light, as if bathed in Jack’s influence
and love coming down from the heavens, while she looks up as if to him.
Once Ally starts to become a solo pop star, the lighting veers into ultra-bright
but more superficial-feeling colors.
Libatique said, quote,
“I wanted everything to build to a larger-than-life feeling,
with vivid color.
She’s playing in front of tens of thousands of people,
and I wanted it to be beautiful, like a drug.
Nothing could be better — but then that drug starts to wear off.”
In this scene, Ally’s elegant dress and the song itself
suggest that she’s neither returning to her folksy beginnings with Jack
nor sticking to her pop star persona.
We’re seeing a third, new style that represents her true creative personality.
The lighting echoes this – we don’t get the red and blue
of her connection with Jack, nor the vivid candy pop-star colors.
Instead, the white light underscores that this is Ally at her most authentic and
mature.
Libatique said that, after Ally’s drug-like pop colors,
the neutral, pure light, quote, “Represents a kind of sobriety.”
The second thing the cinematography is doing is making us feel the couple’s love story
from the inside.
During Ally’s performance at the drag bar, the close-up where she looks right at Jack
lets us see her as he does – we feel how that look
strikes him like a lightning bolt.
When they officially meet soon after, It’s like the camera just wants
to be close to Ally, mirrioring Jack’s urge
to touch her and reveal her natural beauty.
“Why are you covering your eye?”
“Oh just because I don’t have my eyebrow on anymore.”
“Oh no no, the whole point is that I can see your face.
This first night together is played out
almost in real time.
We get to feel the way that meeting someone special
changes our sense of time; how we remember each moment
of those early interactions.
“You kind of have a real-time experience with them.
It’s one full night.”
“Yeah.”
“In that it’s really the opportunity to have a 20-minute sort of intro to them
where we can really just take moments, cause it’s all about moments.”
In the parking lot scene the camera stays close on them,
bringing us into the tenderness that’s growing between them.
“Don’t change the subject.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Nobody ever asks you about you, huh?”
Even the breeze in this scene adds a sensory element,
letting us feel the environment, and not just see it.
Finally, the third aspect of the cinematography’s subjectivity,
is bringing us into the pain of Jack’s personal struggles.
If we were viewing him from a distance,
it would be all to easy to dismiss him as just another
indulgent, self-destructive celebrity.
“Jackson Maine.”
“I’m gonna wake up in a minute.”
“That’s the thing about when you get famous.
People start staying your full name.”
[laughs]
“Well what do you want me…”
“I’m just Jack.”
But the intimate camera makes us see him as just Jack,
never Jackson Maine.
The sound helps with this, we hear Jack’s tinnitus as he does,
so we’re brought into the physical experience of his pain.
To outside observers, the scene where he
drunkenly wets himself at the Grammys would be fodder for some harsh memes –
but we’re so involved in the lead-up to and the aftermath of that moment
that we just feel empathy and sadness for both Jack and Ally.
[screaming] “Oh god!”
Near the end of the movie, when Jack is reeling
from his conversation with Rez,
“Just by staying married to you, she looks like a joke.
It's embarrassing.”
the camera is right above him, on top of him,
visualizing his feeling that he’s trapped
and can’t escape the shame of his past mistakes.
[mumbling]
Most painfully of all, we’re present in the lead-up
to Jack’s suicide, and the excruciating purposefulness in this
scene
heightens its tragedy.
As we watch the slow build-up, we know what’s going to happen
but can’t stop it.
We look right into his face as he seems to mentally prepare.
This realistic, personal moment is far from the distant, cinematic drowning
scenes
in the 1937 and 1954 A Star is Born movies, which feel removed from our reality,
like something that only happens in a movie.
So throughout the film the camera, lighting and sound
help us live this story with the characters.
We feel the euphoric highs, the unbearable lows
and the final breakthrough.
One of the most rewarding parts of A Star is Born is,
of course, the music.
But these are not just song breaks; they’re acting moments,
woven into the fabric of the story and revealing the characters’ development
in a way that the spoken word alone couldn’t.
“It’s not like the movie takes a break and
all of a sudden there’s a song.
It actually has everything to do with what’s going on,
it’s almost, it is a scene.
My favorite scene of Lady Gaga is actually, acting wise, is the final song,
because you rewatch this character going through the grieving process
through the song.”
From the beginning, music is the bridge
between Ally and Jack.
“I’m falling…”.
They fall in love through each other’s singing –
he’s captivated by her performance in the drag bar,
[shouting] “Are you crying?”
and she’s intrigued by seeing him sing.
“She hears him sing this song in this drag club
and is completely moved and inspired
in a way that surprises her.”
Music allows each to see deeply into the other person’s heart,
so this is why they can fall in love so suddenly,
and we buy that this is a profound connection.
So on one level, the lyrics to “Shallow”
are about Ally’s and Jack’s relationship.
“We’re far from the shallow now.”
They dive headfirst into love.
The very first night they meet they skip the small talk and the games,
falling immediately into a natural connection and comfort with each other.
“That’s when I came into the picture.”
“Okay, the son of an 18 year old.”
[laughing]
“Well she died at childbirth.”
And the song comes out of this night together.
“Shallow” begins as just a few lines that Ally puts together
inspired by feelings Jack brings out in her.
[singing]“Tell me something, boy.
Aren't you tired, trying to fill that void?
Or do you need more?”
And the next time she sees him, he’s polished the song
with an arrangement inspired by his feelings for her.
“Tell me something, girl.
Are you happy in this modern world?
Or do you need more?”
This duet in front of a packed stadium of fans
delivers the emotional ecstasy that,
in most movies, is reserved for the love scene.
As Nate Jones wrote for Vulture, quote,
“They have sex later, but the movie doesn’t linger on it —
singing together onstage is the real consummation.”
[singing] “In the shall-la-la-low.”
The final creation of “I’ll Never Love Again”
reverses the songwriting process of “Shallow,”
signaling how these two have traded places.
this time the song begins as Jack’s scribblings,
“I started puttin' it down to paper when we were at home.
I don't know, it sort of fell out of me, I guess,
and onto this page.”
and it’s Ally who completes the arrangement.
“Only heard it in my mind for so many weeks
so it was good to hear the, ya know, in the real thing.”
In the final scene, Ally’s performance smash-cuts
to a flashback of Jack singing it for her –
so like “Shallow”, this song is presented as a duet,
even though they’re separated in time.
“I’ll Never Love Again” expresses that this couple’s love has become
immortal through their music – even death can’t really part them.
[singing] “I’ll never love again.”
A Star is Born is a movie that’s not ashamed to be emotional –
and in today’s world, that’s exceedingly rare.
This isn’t a film to be watched or listened to –
but to be felt.
So if great art means having something to say,
and the power to say it in a way that gets through to audiences,
A Star is Born achieves both – through its performances, direction and,
most of all, its heart.
After it’s over, we might feel inspired
to bring a more courageous honesty into our own work and lives.
We have to push ourselves to go deeper,
far from the shallow now.
[singing] “We’re far from the shallow now.”
[cheering]
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