The meeting happens over 3 continents. There’s one digital zoom home window ignoring 4 living-room: 2 in New york city, one in New Zealand, and one at THR Roma’s workplace in Italy.
Genius, Bradley Cooper‘s take on the life, personal and professional, of legendary conductor Leonard Bernstein and his wife Felicia Montealegre, played by Carey Mulligan, has just dropped worldwide on Netflix. Bernstein’ s 3 children, Jamie, Alexander and Nina, have actually collected to speak about the motion picture and their memories.
The brother or sisters took spotlight at the Venice Movie Event this year, jumping up after the movie’s testing to amusingly carry out the overblown applause that welcomed the movie’s opening night, mimicing their papa’s irregular and vivid performing design.
“It was cathartic in a moment when joy and tears, memories and pain were overwhelming,” claims Alexander. “We became children again. And of course, we had to fill those seven minutes of applause with something!” Includes Nina: “We just did what used to happen when the Overture of Candide was on TV, we watched our father and imitated him in the living room.”
The triad talk together, completing each various other’s sentences, and grabbing a word or remark to dilate in an additional instructions. Constantly, extremely, harmonic. A small band. Hundreds of miles and 2 seas separate them, however they seem like the youngsters received Genius, babbling on the grass of the Bernstein household estate in Connecticut.
“Do you know, that they actually filmed there?” claims Alexander. “It was strange for us, surreal. Nina said it’s like those dreams you have when you’re in your house, but it somehow isn’t your house. My parents were there, but they sort of weren’t my parents. It was like a dream.”
“We would see Bradley and Carey there, and they would come already in makeup and stage clothes, to get into character. They would walk around the garden, around the rooms, and to us, it seemed both strange and natural,” claims Nina.
Leonard Bernstein and household in Fairfield, CT in June 1996.
Thanks To Leonard Bernstein collection.
“At a screening the other day, when we were photographed with Bradley and Carey, Jamie and I looked at each other and said, ‘This is a very strange family picture, our parents are younger than us!’” keeps in mind Alexander.
It’s difficult to obtain a word in edgewise. The 3 go back and forth, blending individual fond memories with their interest for a movie that stimulates memories both pleasant and uncomfortable. They show on the lengthy trip to obtain their household’s tale to the display.
“They’ve been trying to make this film for 15 years,” claims Alexander. “Originally it was with Martin Scorsese. He kept renewing the option, but no decision was made. Fred Berner and Amy Durning were already attached as producers. We agreed with them, we just asked to be able to read the script, to talk to the writer or the director who would do it.”
“At a certain point it had become a joke between us, all this talk of life rights, of options. We had resigned ourselves to the fact that this film would never be made,” claims Jamie.
Alexander gets:“When everything had stopped moving, when it seemed impossible to bring it to the screen, came the twist: Steven Spielberg. Well before he remade West Side Story, he entered the production team, and it looked like he might go behind the camera as well. The idea of Bradley playing the lead came from him. But the more Bradley got involved in the project, the more he talked to us, the more he felt the story was his.”
Jamie was the very first amongst the brother or sisters to see Bradley Cooper’s directorial launching, A Celebrity is Birthed.
“She just told us: ‘Go see it.’ We did, and we fell out of our chairs,” claims Alexander. “We were really impressed with his work. And when we found him in front of us, he was like we imagined him to be after seeing the film: Focused, attentive, committed, and full of generosity.”
“And respectful,” includes Nina. “His approach won us over. When Jamie also met him, and they connected, it was a crescendo. He included us in his work, made sure that we got, without saying anything, all the drafts of the script, and then he screened the work in progress for us at various stages of the project. He asked us a lot of questions, and we tried to not ask for too many corrections. Ultimately, it’s his movie and if he wants to take a certain artistic license, that’s up to him. Only if there was a glaring error would we say: Actually, it happened this way.”
“There was an atmosphere of mutual trust,” Jamie anxieties.
The triad rapidly brushes over the dispute entailing the prosthetic nose Cooper uses to play Bernstein, calling the “scandal” silly and unworthy of more remark. A lot more uncomfortable, they claim, was enjoying several of the darkest minutes of their moms and dad’s lives disclosed on display.
“The most difficult part, of course, was when our mother gets sick and then dies,” claims Jamie. “We had read the script, we knew it would be in the film, but seeing it was a real punch in the gut, even though Bradley handled everything with wonderful delicacy. In shooting it, in narrating it, even and especially in pitching it to us: If we had seen it all at once, in a preview, it would have destroyed us, we would have fallen apart.”
Bradley Cooper as Leonard Bernstein in‘Maestro’
Jason McDonald/Netflix.
“I don’t know if by seeing the film I learned more about our family or about Lenny Bernstein,” includes Alexander.“But I do know that I learned a lot about Bradley Cooper. Now we are far enough removed from everything, I think I am able to say that he and our dad are so much alike. A lot more than we could have imagined. There’s the same intensity, focus, and perfectionism. The ability to devote oneself to art around the clock if necessary. Being able to handle tension better than anyone else, not sleeping for days when inspiration comes. The same charisma. And love.”
They stop. They grin at each various other as if they remained in the very same area. And, practically in carolers, they claim:“And the hugging. They hug in the same way. They are both full of love, of warmth, of wanting to connect.”
Genius checks out the unbelievable obstacle Felicia Montealegre encountered being the other half of the wizard LennyBernstein Yet what is it like to be his children, to birth the obligation of his heritage?
“It is tremendously difficult,” Nina confesses.
“You have expectations of yourself that you can never meet,” claims Jamie.
“We had a book when we were little, tiny kids,” Alexander bears in mind. “On the cover, it was called ‘Just like mommy.’ Then you would turn it upside down and the back cover said, ‘Just like daddy.’ It was all about a businessman getting up in the morning and having breakfast with his children. And his wife is making breakfast. And he goes to work with his briefcase. Takes the train and all that. Just what you would expect. I used to read this book and say, ‘Wow. That sounds like an amazing life.’ But also I just knew there was something else going on in my life, that was pretty extraordinary. And that there was never going to be a book about me being like daddy.”
