A Visit to the Factory

On Bradley Cooper’s Maestro (2023)

“Proxemics of images, promiscuity of images, tactile pornography images.”
– Jean Baudrillard

Bradley Cooper in an interview: “I like to do a lot of prep with the actors. Not rehearsal, serious prep. I expect – demand! – they do it on their own. I learned the only way we have a shot at making a great movie is if everyone is absolutely prepared. It’s not gonna work if you’re not.”1 For Maestro, his second film as an actor-director, Cooper took his own credo to heart and prepared obsessively for his role as American composer, conductor and pianist Leonard Bernstein. Years before the filming, he began working with a dialect coach, with whom he dissected Bernstein’s New York accent in minute detail. How did he move his mouth, his jaw, his tongue? Was he breathing through his nose or through his mouth? In what rhythm did he pronounce the words? “You break it down as it is a machine.”2 For six years, Cooper practiced Bernstein’s nasal accent, studied interviews incessantly, and even led meetings in “Lenny’s voice.” He also had to master three timbres; as Bernstein grew older, his voice dropped an octave.

To prepare for conducting, Cooper was mentored by Yannick Nézet-Séguin of the Metropolitan Opera in New York and Gustavo Dudamel of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. He attended rehearsals and sat in the orchestra pit several times to see them at work during concerts. Nézet-Séguin gave him insight into how the orchestra relates to his movements as conductor and the music in real time. He also provided videos with voiceovers in which he kept the beat and analysed Bernstein’s movements like a football analyst explaining patterns of play. He rehearsed intensively with Cooper and guided him during the filming through an earpiece, so he knew exactly where the beat should fall each time. Cooper also had to master Bernstein’s particular conducting style. “I need to conduct with every part of my body, with my shoulders, with my wrists, with my knees,” Bernstein himself described it.3 He conducted in an animated, emotional and demonstrative manner, full of big and small gestures. Flamboyant and unique for some, disruptive and distracting for others. For Cooper, that preparation culminated in the film’s grand musical finale in which he conducts the London Symphony Orchestra for a real-life performance of Mahler’s second symphony at Ely Cathedral. The music was recorded live on set and the scene was largely captured in one uninterrupted six-minute take, requiring Cooper to actually conduct the orchestra. “Sometimes it takes you four years to get to the shot that you need.”4

To physically transform into Bernstein, Cooper usually arrived on set around one o’clock in the morning. There he spent three to five hours in the makeup chair of make-up artist Kazu Hiro, who applied prosthetics to his arms and shoulders, as well as a bodysuit that changed his posture. (The use of a nose prosthesis sparked some controversy; because Bernstein was Jewish, some critics found the artificial nose “antisemitic” and Cooper’s performance “ethnic cosplay.”) By the time the first crew members arrived in the morning, Cooper’s transformation was complete. In Hiro’s makeup trailer, he ducked behind a curtain, put on his costume and “from that moment on, I’d become Lenny.”5 Both in front of and behind the camera, he stayed in his role. Whether he was giving stage directions, discussing the camera setup or having a conversation over lunch, he did it uninterruptedly as “Leonard Bernstein.” As Cooper himself describes it: “It was Lenny directing the movie.”6

This obsessive preparation was also what Cooper expected of his co-star Carey Mulligan. For her portrayal of Felicia Montealegre, actress and wife of the composer-conductor, she worked with a dialect coach to master her distinctive accent, shaped by her multilingual upbringing in Costa Rica and Chile. Mulligan imitated what she heard in recordings until her character’s voice felt natural and she had mastered Montealegre’s speech patterns. She also paid close attention to body language, especially how Montealegre moved while smoking. To better understand her character, Mulligan travelled to Santiago, where Montealegre spent most of her childhood. Finally, Mulligan learned to paint – Montealegre was also an active artist – and reproduced some of her works. Some of these paintings eventually ended up as set pieces in the film.

What was the point of this excessive homework? Cooper, with his maniacal abandon, seems to want above all to blur the line between fiction and reality: he isn’t playing Bernstein, he is the American conductor. His total immersion in the character lifts the separation between the world in front of and behind the camera. The actor must disappear; the illusion must become reality. Cooper wants to play Bernstein as if he were a documentary character playing himself in the film about his own life.

Ironically, this obsessive eagerness to imitate has just the opposite effect: It’s Cooper’s (and Mulligan’s) performance in particular that catches the eye. Using a score of gestures, tics, accents and facial expressions, he brings Bernstein to life like a man possessed. It’s precisely because of this that the acting itself becomes visible, as a conscious act of heroism. In Maestro, there’s not acting but performing, craftsmanship is emphatically displayed. Every gesture, every expression of sound, every glance is ostentatiously highlighted. In this sense, Maestro is not so much about Bernstein as it is about Cooper himself performing an extravagant feat.

There is something indecent about this emphasis on preparation, intention and performance. Jean Baudrillard described obscenity as an excess of visibility, an excess of transparency in which nothing more is suggested or concealed, where there’s no room for seduction as a game of distance and mystery. Maestro succumbs to exhibitionism in this sense: Cooper forces all his effort and skill on the viewer unasked. The illusion – Cooper plays Bernstein – remains incomplete. The film is a constant reminder of the performance itself, of the blood, sweat and tears that made Maestro possible. The acting process is emphatically exposed, as if revealing something that should have remained hidden, something that doesn’t need to be seen.

This obscenity also arises from the reality claim the film makes. It’s not necessarily a shortcoming when actor and character don’t fully merge. In Hong Sang-soo’s films, for example, by consciously assuming acting as an action, a certain transparency in the creative process is kept visible. That distance is not a defect but rather a source of acting and viewing pleasure. In Maestro, by contrast, that distance is merely a side effect of Cooper’s pursuit of a realistic rendition, the most exact possible copy of a historical figure. The distance between actor and character works here not as a productive tension but as a lack of credibility. Cooper’s transformation and zeal are not unique to recent Hollywood: Rami Malek as Freddie Mercury in Bohemian Rhapsody (2018), Austin Butler as Elvis Presley in Elvis (2022) and, now recently, Timothée Chalamet as Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown (2024), all of these films float more on the demonstration of skill and physical change than on the power of fiction itself.

The proliferation of biographical films and true stories in recent decades points to an underlying tension: the belief and desire that film can not only depict but also confirm a particular reality – such as the life of Leonard Bernstein. It is only through filming that this reality seems to exist, as if the film acts as an ontological proof of its own false truth. There’s a paradox in this urge: Cooper’s desire for imitation simultaneously points to an inability to accept fiction as something purely illusory, as a construction as ephemeral and elusive as reality itself. Cooper’s obsession with perfection, with the most exact copy possible, is an attempt to strip fiction precisely of its artificiality, a compulsive belief that illusion can only work when it is not recognized as illusion, a desire to create a more real reality through images.

Moreover, formally, Maestro constantly hovers between two worlds. Despite its obsession with realistic detail, the film simultaneously evokes a lyrical dream world reminiscent of the American musicals of the 1950s. Cooper depicts Bernstein’s professional dream through choreographed scenes, dream sequences that lose any sense of realism and are therefore among the film’s most valuable moments. Here Cooper unequivocally embraces illusion and turns his own mania, just for a moment, into quasi-psychotic, boundless acting pleasure.

At the beginning of the film, in a conversation with Serge Koussevitzky and Aaron Copland in which Bernstein’s “waste of time” in Hollywood is brought up, Montealegre whispers to him that she wants to see his musical work, which is precisely what his colleagues disdain. She gets ready to leave, but Bernstein looks at her in surprise. “We can’t just leave.” – “Oh yes, we can,” Montealegre objects. To the tones of Bernstein’s Fancy Free: Enter Three Sailors, she drags him from lunch in Massachusetts straight onto the Broadway stage in New York. The camera hovers above them as they run effortlessly from one space to another. In the theatre, they watch the performance of Fancy Free (1944), a dance piece about three sailors going ashore in New York, composed by Bernstein. Like in a dream, Leonard and Felicia move through the spaces, witnessing scenes that take place solely before their eyes, such as the three sailors dancing exclusively in front of them. This prompts Felicia to ask a question: why would he turn his back on the musical? A conversation that, unlike the meticulously realistic claim of other aspects of the film, does not actually take place there but as if in a utopian dream in an impossible reality. Cooper’s professional psychosis is at its best in this scene: The illusion shows itself as illusion, the mania takes on a lyrical energy, propelled by the music of the American composer. Bernstein’s character seems unable to believe it himself. Then, thanks to a cinematic intervention of editing, the crossing becomes total: Bernstein becomes one of the sailors and dances for Felicia. It’s a rare moment in which Bernstein’s and Cooper’s mania seem briefly to coincide.

In The Band Wagon, a 1953 musical film by Vincente Minnelli, Gabrielle Gerard (played by Cyd Charisse) asks her prescribed dance partner Tony Hunter (Fred Astaire), an important question. “Tony, can you and I really dance together?” “I don't know. Let’s find out.” They come from different worlds: he’s an aging Hollywood star returning to Broadway, she a sophisticated ballerina from modern dance. The central question is whether they can dance together. To find a way out of this situation, Hunter invites her to dance at a club, but she isn’t dressed for it. They decide to take a walk through Central Park, where the couple will eventually find the dance and music that will bring them together.

In 1983, Eric de Kuyper devoted an extensive text to this scene, ‘Step by Step’. With great precision he describes how in the musical the dance emerges from something seemingly banal like walking, and how the transition from the narrative to the lyrical thus takes place. From the walk, step by step, a first dance step magically arises, a measured arm movement, and then a pirouette accompanied by gently swelling music; solitary movements that eventually merge into a pas de deux. The improbable has happened, Hunter and Gerard can dance together.

This sequence also instructively demonstrates how the new field is created. “The choreography is didactic, contains its own meta-language: it shows what it is, how it comes into being and what it stands for.” From the simple walk, a new space emerges – “a utopian space, ‘there’ where ‘that’ has become possible” – which has its foundation in the banal.7 De Kuyper points out that as a genre the musical takes on this “strange didactic task” in which it unfolds its own transgressive processes. The lyrical retains its colour of improbability, and upon returning to the story’s probability, everything is different. “Something has begun to falter in the obviousness of narrative, of realism, of probability. Language, movement, time and space have been different for a few minutes; have at best partially lifted the veil.”8 This explains why so many musicals take place in the tension between the world behind the scenes – like the rehearsals in The Band Wagon – and the world in front of the screens, where the musical itself comes to life. The magic cannot simply be shown; it must be formed “step by step.” Because in films, as in real life, characters don’t just start singing and dancing. The path to this realm of possibility must be carefully mapped out.

Although Maestro alludes to such scenes from old musicals by switching between the world in front of and behind the curtains, the transgression is irrevocably prevented by Cooper’s showy acting. Caught in the construction of his own realism, everything remains coloured by an impossible probability. Above all, Cooper seems intent on defusing the fiction itself.

At the same time, these two films present a fundamentally different vision of craftsmanship. In The Band Wagon, the virtuosity of the actor-dancers is light and natural. The stars of the time, De Kuyper emphasizes, fully mastered their style and acted with and through their persona. Cooper’s performance in Maestro, on the other hand, mainly angles for approval and admiration. Virtuosity becomes a chore, a parade of technique and labour in which everything and everyone is involved. The actors don’t act together but stage an “image” of acting together, glorifying especially inflated enthusiasm and intent. The result is an unintentional pastiche of authenticity in which Cooper’s fellow actors are reduced to set pieces whose primary purpose is to cast light on his performance. Cooper’s intended realism thus culminates in an intolerable mannerism. His obsession ultimately focuses not on a piece of reality, but on an image that loses all connection with its origins. What remains is not a portrait of Bernstein as an artist but an artificially inflated construction of expression and originality, detached from the world of the real composer-conductor.

In a letter to Serge Daney – which served as a preface to Daney’s 1986 Ciné journal – Gilles Deleuze described the effect of the new images they had seen on their screens since the 1980s, which Daney described as examples of “mannerism”:

“when there’s nothing to see behind it, not much to see in it or on the surface, but just an image constantly slipping across pre-existing, presupposed images, when ‘the background in any image is always another image,’ and so on endlessly, and that’s what we have to see.”9

The world behind these images, Deleuze continues, has disappeared; it has itself become film. In this mirror palace of images, the only thing remaining is the question of how we ourselves can become part of it, how we can be absorbed into the image. The resulting fascination is rooted both in contact with the image itself and in the process of its creation – a process in which the “privileged spectator [is] allowed into the wings.” Deleuze refers to a survey that showed that attending a television recording in the studio was considered one of the most valued forms of entertainment: “It’s nothing to do with beauty or thought, it’s about being in contact with the technology, touching the machinery.”10

Maestro contains several scenes depicting the fictional filming of television programs, beginning with a scene that immediately takes the viewer behind the scenes of a documentary report on Bernstein. The film opens with a series of panels listing the funders and production houses, while music by Bernstein immediately sounds, a piano version of A Quiet Place: Postlude. The first image in colour shows Cooper as an older Bernstein playing the piano in a domestic setting. Behind the piano, two cameramen, their cameras, some lights, a sound man and a journalist can be seen. Maestro’s camera moves slowly toward Cooper, gradually making the film crew more visible. Cooper plays the piano, his hands moving over the keyboard; but then he stops, sighs, takes off his glasses and lets his head hang. The montage cuts to a closer shot of Cooper, taken from the position of the cameras and the journalist. “It’s always better on the piano, I don’t know why,” he snorts. “So to answer your question, yes. I carry her around with me quite a bit. [...] I miss her terribly.” Next we see a shot of his back, the journalist’s face now clearly visible. Then there’s a black-and-white image in a bedroom that marks the end of the prologue.

This opening scene of Maestro not only gives a glimpse of future events but also immediately allows the story’s themes to come forth, such as Bernstein’s turbulent marriage to Montealegre and the profound impact of his hushed affairs with men. At the same time, the scene also makes us witness the fictional creation of an image. Cooper films the staged creation of documentary footage and thus seems to partially lift the veil on it, as if to pierce the illusion immediately. He presents us with his own (fictitious) evidence without artificial manipulation, reality behind the scenes as it is. Here sits Leonard Bernstein giving an interview for American television.

But Cooper isn’t Bernstein, of course. Still this “unmasking” doesn’t matter. The spectator also shares the fascination with and desire for technology. “A visit to the factory, with its rigid discipline, becomes ideal entertainment.”11 These scenes of fictionalized revelation – a sublimated look behind the scenes – transport the viewer into an abstracted game of construction, in which the enjoyment of the delivered work, the touch of the image, is the point. In Maestro, fiction is a construct of skills and knowledge, to be verified and validated. The trip to the factory does not partially lift the veil but rather makes the veil completely transparent and offers us “a world of controllers and controlled communing in their admiration for technology, mere technology.”12

• 1Variety, “Bradley Cooper & Spike Lee l Directors on Directors,” uploaded 14 December 2023, YouTube video, 46:27.
• 2Variety, “Bradley Cooper & Spike Lee l Directors on Directors.”
• 3John DiLillo, “Bradley Cooper on Conducting the Gorgeous Ending of Maestro,” Tudum by Netflix, 23 December 2023.
• 4Rebecca Ford, “The Maestro Shot That Took Four Years to Get Right,” Vanity Fair, 21 December 2023.
• 5Variety, “Bradley Cooper & Spike Lee l Directors on Directors.”
• 6Ibid.
• 7Eric de Kuyper, “Step by Step. Aantekeningen bij ‘Dancing in the Dark’,” Versus, nr. 3 (1983).
• 8Ibid.
• 9Gilles Deleuze, “Letter to Serge Daney: Optimism, Pessimism, and Travel,” in Negotations, 1972-1990, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 75.
• 10Ibid., 72.
• 11Ibid.
• 12Ibid.