Leonard Bernstein’s Daughter Says Upcoming Film ‘Maestro’ a ‘Love Story,’ Dives Into ‘Intimate’ Details
The eldest child of the late and renowned Jewish composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein said Bradley Cooper’s upcoming film Maestro about her father is at its essence a look into the private details of his marriage and family life.
“Bradley arrived at this concept that was really not a biopic anymore at all,” Jamie Bernstein told Vanity Fair in an interview published on Monday. “It became a portrait of a marriage, it was a love story about our parents, and of course, what could be more personal for us? He had found a way into the story of our dad that wasn’t just about his career and his fame and all of that. It was instead something very personal, very intimate, really about who he was as a human being.”
Maestro is directed by Cooper, who made his directorial debut with the 2018 film A Star Is Born. Cooper co-wrote the script with Josh Singer and also stars as Bernstein, who won 16 Grammy Awards and two Tony Awards and was conductor of the New York Philharmonic, among his many accomplishments throughout his illustrious career. He died in 1990.
The film is a love story and focuses on Bernstein’s lifelong relationship with his wife and the mother of his three children, Costa Rican-American actress Felicia Montealegre Cohn Bernstein, who is played in the movie by Carey Mulligan. The couple met in 1946 and married in 1951, even though Montealegre knew of the gay relationships Bernstein had and the extramarital affairs he continued to have throughout their marriage. She died in 1978.
Maestro, which features Bernstein’s original musical compositions and works he conducted, focuses on the hardships and triumphs the couple faced during their relationship. It includes a scene where Jamie — played by Maya Hawke — confronts her father about the rumors surrounding his affairs, according to Vanity Fair. The moment was taken from Jamie’s 2018 memoir Famous Father Girl, which served as a basis for the Maestro script.
“Our whole family just had this fantastic quality of love and connectedness, and it really began with our parents, even when they had their troubles,” Jamie told Vanity Fair. “We all came out the other side of it, all of us still feeling like a cohesive unit, and still loving each other.”
She added that Cooper had “a million questions” for her family in an effort to make Maestro as authentic as possible. “He really wanted to kind of get under the skin of who Leonard Bernstein was, who Felicia Montealegre was, and who we were as a family,” she explained.
Jamie also briefly addressed the criticism surrounding Cooper’s decision to wear a prosthetic nose in his portrayal of the Jewish West Side Story composer. She told the magazine: “It’s just such an annoying distraction. The people who were waiting to get mad about something were just waiting to pounce.” She added that following Cooper’s transformation with makeup and prosthetics, she and her siblings were shocked by the uncanny resemblance between the four-time Oscar nominee and their father.
“It just made us gasp at what they were able to achieve,” she said. “He would send us photographs on his phone, and some of them were so spot on that we would think, ‘Oh, come on now, he just sneaked in a picture of our dad.'”
Jamie added: “[Cooper’s] energy was so similar to our dad’s, and his way of being in the world and relating to people reminded us more and more of our dad, and we began to see how right he was for the role in ways that wouldn’t even have occurred to us at first.”
Maestro will make its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival on Sept. 2 and its North American premiere at the New York Film Festival (NYFF) on Oct. 2. The film’s NYFF premiere will be held at David Geffen Hall, where Bernstein conducted for over a decade. The film will then have a limited theatrical release on Nov. 22 before being released on Netflix on Dec. 20.
Watch the first teaser trailer for Maestro below.
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