Director: Bradley Cooper
Synopsis[]
This love story chronicles the lifelong relationship of conductor-composer Leonard Bernstein (Bradley Cooper) and actress Felicia Montealegre Cohn Bernstein (Carey Mulligan).
Male Deaths[]
- None
Female Deaths[]
- Carey Mulligan [Felicia Montealegre Cohn Bernstein]
Trivia[]
- Steven Spielberg was considering directing the movie, but when Bradley Cooper showed him an early cut of A Star Is Born (2018), Spielberg walked over to Cooper after the "Shallow" scene and said to him, "You're directing Maestro."
- Both Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg were attached to direct, before Bradley Cooper showed them A Star Is Born (2018).
- Of the scene in which Leonard Bernstein conducts the London Symphony Orchestra at the Ely Cathedral in 1976, Bradley Cooper said, "That scene I was so worried about because we did it live... I was recorded live. I had to conduct them. And I spent six years learning how to conduct six minutes and 21 seconds of music. I was able to get the raw take where I just watched Leonard Bernstein [conduct] at Ely Cathedral... And so I had that to study."
- Paramount Pictures was the original distributor before the film moved to Netflix.
- This is Bradley Cooper and Carey Mulligan's first joint venture, but not the first time the pair met. Mulligan suffered a head injury during the 2018 Broadway preview of playwright Dennis Kelly's "Girls & Boys" after a heavy stage curtain struck her unexpectedly. Cooper happened to be in the theater audience and he accompanied her to urgent care in Manhattan.
- The project got the rights to Bernstein's music instead of Cary Joji Fukunaga's Bernstein biopic, The American, which would have starred Jake Gyllenhaal.
- Bradley Cooper said his interest in Leonard Bernstein "started with Tom and Jerry and Bugs Bunny as a kid, watching them conduct, and asking Santa Claus for a baton when I was about 8 or so, and then, just being obsessed with conducting. There was a magical quality that you just do that, and sound comes out, you know, and that's where it began, and it was just this incredible feeling of being a maestro, really."
- Bradley Cooper admitted that one of the challenges in playing Leonard Bernstein was that so much footage of him conducting exists, and he couldn't possibly replicate his talent. Cooper therefore focused on a single performance, Mahler's second symphony, in which he spent years learning how to conduct convincingly as Bernstein.
- Bradley Cooper's daughter, Lea, is visible very briefly in Maestro as Jamie Bernstein standing outdoors on the property of the Bernstein's Fairfield, Connecticut home next to Carey Mulligan, who is playing Felicia and holding a baby.
- First R-rated film produced by Amblin Entertainment since Letters from Iwo Jima (2006).
- For the title role, Bradley Cooper wore a prosthetic nose to better amplify his resemblance to Leonard Bernstein, a decision that initially caused quite a stir, with criticism from writers Daniel Fienberg and Ben M Freeman and actress Tracy-Ann Oberman, among others. However, Bernstein's children Alexander Bernstein, Jamie Bernstein and Nina Bernstein defended Cooper's decision, calling the criticism "disingenuous," and received a statement of support from the ADL.
- Bradley Cooper claimed that during makeup tests it was determined that his nose was actually similar to Leonard Bernstein's nose, and he would have gladly passed on using a prosthetic nose to save time, but ultimately the facial makeup was not seamless without covering his nose especially during the old age scenes.
- Bradley Cooper would give direction to the camera operators while acting on camera by speaking to them when his back was turned or giving them gestures when his hands were out of frame.
- At one point, Lenny is seen wearing a shirt with Hebrew lettering. It says "Harvard" spelled out phonetically in Hebrew.
- Carey Mulligan dropped out of her next project, Fingernails (2023), due to supplementary filming for this film. And she was 12 weeks pregnant at the time of filming.