The “astonishing” filmmaker who left Steven Spielberg feeling “knocked out”
To make it to the very top of the industry as a director, it’s almost considered a prerequisite to be in love with the cinematic medium and its extensive history. Steven Spielberg had that from the very beginning, using his father’s camera to shoot his own features at a very young age before he made it to the big leagues with blockbusters like Jaws and Jurassic Park.
Spielberg’s love for cinema is obviously evident in the countless interviews he has given about his admiration for pioneers such as John Ford and Stanley Kubrick. In addition to those, it can also be felt in his directorial projects, such as The Fabelmans, which can only be described as love letters to the art form he has dedicated his entire life to.
Any director would be happy to have their work acknowledged by someone of Spielberg’s stature, but to be publicly praised by the Saving Private Ryan filmmaker means that you’re definitely doing something right. Bradley Cooper found himself in that position of privilege when, during a Q&A session following a screening of Maestro, Spielberg took the opportunity to tell him how impressed he was.
Highlighting how Cooper has been garnering both critical acclaim and commercial success since his massively popular directorial debut, A Star is Born, Spielberg admitted that he was in awe of Cooper’s meteoric rise as a filmmaker. It was only reinforced by his latest movie, Maestro, which also garnered a lot of traction during the awards season.
Spielberg began: “What’s astonishing—and I’m taking myself out of my producer role totally here because I sort of do have a sort of more of an insightful inside perspective—but I’m just going to sit here to ask the questions that have been asked of me about you and the film and your process.”
He added: “One of the things that really astonishes me, Bradley, is that when you first showed me A Star is Born, and of course, I think I saw—we’ve all seen—four ‘Stars Born’ before this one, what blew me away was I had never seen any ‘Stars Born’ like the one you made. And I could not possibly believe that was your first directed motion picture. And I am triply knocked out by the fact that Maestro is only your second motion picture. That just is incredible.”
Racking up seven nominations at the recent iteration of the Oscars, Maestro was exactly the kind of movie that was going to do well at the awards shows all along. Cooper’s handling of the Leonard Bernstein proved that he knew what he was doing, with the movie being elevated by the central performances of Carey Mulligan and Cooper himself.
