“The more I got to know about Lenny and sort of got the music inside of my soul, I started to realize that the guy sort of defied definition and description pretty much in every aspect of his life. And so the breadth of it seemed deeply theatrical,” reveals “Maestro” producer Fred Berner about what interested him in telling the story of composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein‘s life and career. We talked to Berner as part of our “Meet the Experts” film producers panel. Watch our exclusive video interview above.
Co-written by, directed by and starring Bradley Cooper as Bernstein, the film follows the music legend over a period of decades, with special attention given to his complicated relationship with wife Felicia Montealegre (Carey Mulligan). Berner was struck by “that kind of voracious appetite and commitment to art and to passion and to love, and ultimately to family and to his own callings and sirens.” He was a man whose story “would essentially reflect the times, and maybe we could all learn something ourselves about how to live a creative life.”
“Maestro” underwent a long journey from Berner’s conception of it in 2008 to its release in 2023. Martin Scorsese was interested in directing, and then the project passed to Steven Spielberg before finally coming Cooper’s way. “That’s about six years ago,” Berner remembers. “And the consensus after watching ‘A Star is Born’ was this guy’s deeply talented and deeply, deeply immersive in the work that he does.” The final film is “not anywhere close to being the same movie that I had thought about 15 years ago, but in so many ways it’s truer to that form, and it’s thematically very much the same … It’s kind of the same movie miraculously.”
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