Bradley Cooper knows how much it can hurt a film if the director and the cinematographer aren’t seeing eye to eye. “I’ve been as an actor on movie sets for so many years, and if there’s not that synchronicity between the director and the DP, and if there’s not that ability to pivot, which is always really based on an insecurity about what somebody wants, that’s when things start to get murky,” he says.

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The actor filmmaker had already found that synchronicity with his Maestro cinematographer Matthew Libatique, whom he first worked with on A Star Is Born. For their second collaboration, the pair had an even more ambitious undertaking, taking years to trace iconic composer Leonard Bernstein’s (played by Cooper) artistic rise and his long relationship with his wife, Felicia (played by Carey Mulligan). The movie, shot on film, is a big, bold swing, switching between black and white and color and different aspect ratios, creating a dizzying and sometimes joyous cinematic experience.

Cooper says it was the fact that he and Libatique had years to prepare for Maestro, which hit Netflix on December 20, that allowed them to also have flexibility by the time they were actually shooting. “The thing that I love is that we’ve developed a trust and an unspoken language of how we create, which is prepping is everything,” says Cooper. “Prepping is everything, but on the day we have to keep asking ourselves the question, ‘Is this the best?’ And if it isn’t, we fucking pivot and we execute.” Libatique agrees, adding “I think working with Bradley, it’s like having your heart and mind open at all times.”

The pair have already been talking about a movie they hope to shoot in five years, but for now, they spoke in detail to Vanity Fair about six of their favorite and most challenging shots from Maestro.

Early on in the film, Bernstein gets an early morning call that he can, on short notice, make his New York Philharmonic conducting debut after guest conductor Bruno Walter came down with the flu. He leaps up on the windowsill, rips the curtains open, and jubilantly exclaims, “you got it boy!”

Bradley Cooper: This was the first sequence that I pitched to all the studios when I was trying to get this movie made. I was inspired by On the Waterfront as being the opening of the movie. When I learned about this 9:30 phone call that he got, that was his A Star Is Born moment. And then learning that he lived in the top of fucking Carnegie Hall, I was like, “Wait a second, this all can be exactly the thing cinematically I wanted to explore, which was his relationship to God, that he’s living above everybody in the heavens, gets this call from God to come down to us and for his destiny.”

So very early on, I remember talking to Matty about he gets this call, but at that time, I envisioned the camera being outside the window and the phone being in the center of the frame, and he falls down, picks up the call, and then I didn’t know how to solve that because I didn’t want to cut, but then we would find him jumping over the guy who’s naked, getting his robe, and everything else was exactly the same, but the only thing that changed was that first beginning image.

And the whole idea was having God, this point of view driving him—that we weren’t above him, but we were pulling him. And that was something that we spent months on with the rest of the crew. The other thing I have to say about Matty is all he cares about is story too. When that’s the case and your cinematographer cares about story, then it’s just kind of joyous as opposed to, “No, I have this shot in my head I want to do.”

Matthew Libatique: It’s funny, I take it as a compliment that all I care about is story, because I do, but on the same token, Bradley knows a lot about light. This is actually the first scene I remember reading, Bradley, because it said “God POV,” and it’s always stuck with me. GD POV. I was like, “Whose POV is that?”

Cooper: Personally, the things that I love about movies the most is when I’m not aware… If I’m thinking about the shot, then to me, the filmmaker hasn't done a great job, but if afterwards I’m reminiscing and I’m sort of in a nostalgic way thinking about the movie, and then I go, “Holy shit, how did they even do this?” That’s the goal, and to me, that’s what I love about this scene is because all we’re doing is letting the audience know how hyper energized this guy’s life is and this movie is.

Libatique: This scene right here, if you look at it, it starts in the dark, and that’s described in the screenplay. It just makes it easier from a cinematography standpoint. And what cinematographer doesn’t want to start a scene in the pitch dark? Bradley explained he wanted to see the outline of the window through the curtain.

Cooper: I cannot stand a storyboard. I just find it kills the creativity, so it means a lot of conversations. Luckily Matty understands me, but it did take us having to keep going over it with other people to be like, “No, no, there needs to be a square,” you need to see the outline of the light.

In our first glimpse of Felicia Montealegre, she arrives by bus for a party where she’ll meet Leonard Bernstein for the first time. Bernstein’s On the Town: Lonely Town plays in the background, creating a beautiful Old Hollywood moment.

Cooper: This an example of budget and availability and timing. I cut the movie together and she didn’t have an entrance, and luckily we were able to go back to this place and build this entrance. And at that point, I knew that it was going to be that piece of music, so it was really wonderful.

It also let the audience know: Here is the worthy adversary—actually, don’t forget this is what the movie’s about. It just felt very exciting. That bus, the leaves, the night. I can talk to Matty about how the night can look and how can we get depth, but it’s natural? That’s the other genius I have to say about this man I get to work with is we hate light that looks done for the camera. It’s just perfect to me.

Libatique: I think it’s funny, when we were prepping the film, I always had in the back of my head that I wanted it to look like we were transported into a real life and not into an old film. This one has that, but like Bradley was saying, it was painstaking. We’re shooting black and white at night, which it’s not very sensitive at all, and creating a naturalism— it takes some work.

Cooper: Very hard.

Libatique: Bradley had one note, “I want to see her come out of the darkness.” So, you see this bus come in and we lit up the inside of the bus, so there’d be sort of this resonance of light that moves through the frame and leaves camera right. And then you see this figure and just she walks into her key [light] and it is the only time where it was like this old movie thing really makes sense right here.

Cooper: It’s a key that actually looks like Matty just said, real life. I feel like it’s 1943 and I feel like, “Haven’t I seen this movie before?” But at the same time, it’s not falling prey to sort of what may be low-hanging fruit, lighting wise. It doesn’t dip into the noir.

Libatique: Exactly. I look at this still image and I’m like, “I want to know more about this person.”

After meeting at a party, Felicia takes Lenny to an empty playhouse where they playfully read a scene together, and then kiss before being interrupted by a janitor. It’s the beginning of their love story.

Cooper: Having been a creature of the theater, I’ve always been in love with that ghost light. We also knew just the beauty of the potential of having just one source light could be really amazing in the black and white and what it could provide with us in terms of flares and everything else. The first origin of the scene is that she takes him down to her stage and then the only thing that’s on is the ghost light, which is what would be on. And literally years ago, we shot test footage of this scene back in 2019. So, we really got to play with the potentials of this, and then it was really about: what does it look like when the janitor puts the lights on? How is that going to be?

And then with this space, which is very small, how do we create depth and what lens, and to maintain the language of the movie, which has a very specific language in terms of foreground, background within this very small space. So, this was a very challenging location, but it’s one of my favorites of how we lit and shot this.

Libatique: To me, it’s proof that there’s always a solution. This location, it’s tiny. It’s really small. The shot was so challenging. It was just them walking down the stairs and then moving into this space, and obviously you have your doubts, are we going to be able to accomplish this?

Cooper: Just another thing that I have to say is we move fast. For example, that scene where we’re shooting their first day: I wanted them to come down the stairs and then the camera to pan left, but actually retract because we hate pans. It was a tricky staircase, it was very narrow, but what never happens is then I get a grunt from Matty and he walks away. It was always like, “Yes, let’s figure out how to do this,” because there’s nothing worse than just having your ideas be killed because it seems tough.

Libatique: Absolutely. I operate on the notion that everything is possible. We just have to figure it out. It might take a little time.

A little more than 45 minutes in, the film switches to color for a bustling party at the Bernstein’s apartment in the historic Dakota building. Felicia catches Lenny kissing a party guest in the hallway, and when Lenny rushes to her to apologize, she scolds, “fix your hair.”

Cooper: We built this whole thing. This is the Dakota that Kevin Thompson built, and we were able to go to the actual second floor of the Dakota, and the owner of it was kind enough to let us shoot exactly, and we then changed the foyer because of how we wanted to put the cameras and made it larger. This was always going to be the introduction into the color part of the movie, but I always wanted to ease the audience into it like, “What the fuck is going on?” And we talked about what’s the best way, “Oh, we should be in the foyer. We should be in that vestibule,” kind of like, “Is this safe?”

This is one of my favorite sequences, quite honestly, that we’ve shot because it was so organic in terms of how we shot it once we did it, but it is so studied in its execution. There’s nothing arbitrary. There’s nothing loose about it. We were in two different rooms that had two different lighting palettes based on where they are emotionally. On the left side of the room, you have Felicia, and then on the right side filled with men, you have Lenny. And originally in the script, this was actually two different locations.

And then because I’m a sucker for truth, and I know what it’s like to be in a room where there’s a lot of dialogue and everybody’s miming and nothing’s real, which I fucking hate. And having worked with David O. Russell who speaks a lot during takes and knowing, because we did it, you could take that out in the editing room, I thought, any time a sound person says, “No, no, no, you’re overlapping dialogue,” and so I was like, “That’s actually okay, dude.” And Matty and I share the exact same sensibility: It has to feel real, otherwise people aren’t going to be truthful, period.

Libatique: It’s the only time really that they’re together in the entire scene at their own party.

Cooper: So, you have two cameras that are moving in exactly the same way. And you have all of this choreography that we worked hours on and we didn’t bring anybody in. We worked on this for hours, and it ends with this last thing. So, you have this sort of proscenium within a proscenium, and it’s one of my favorite things about the whole movie, quite honestly. It ends with them in this place where she leaves him in the frame.

Just as the real Bernstein did in 1973, Cooper conducted the London Symphony Orchestra in Mahler’s “Resurrection” Symphony at Ely Cathedral in England for this scene, a six-minute take that also features Felicia standing in the wings, watching her husband.

Cooper: I think I went to Ely Cathedral three times before anybody else went. I just wanted to see what it was like at night and see it in the space because it was a lot to talk Netflix into. We went across the Atlantic for one day, for one location. At some points, there was a moment where we were going to shoot a week there and do three other locations, but in the end, we only went there for this and then one actual half a day on a lot, so it was a lot. And they wanted us to, “Can’t we greenscreen it? Can’t we shoot it up at Columbia at this church up there?”

And I looked at all those places and there just wasn’t anything that compared to this for many reasons. The main reason being that this is actually where he did the “Resurrection” in the ’70s with the London Symphony Orchestra. And then the other thing is just being there, you could feel it and the depth, the vertical. By the third time I went there, it was a no-brainer, we had to shoot there.

Libatique: Well, Bradley and I discussed it, and there was sort of a broad lighting to it because we had so much to see. So, using a couple balloons in the right place, we were able to illuminate everybody democratically, let’s say, where we didn’t have to choose. Originally, this was a shot and televised event. We wanted to see the things that we should be seeing and seeing the audience. The depth was so important.

Cooper: And the other thing that is a nightmare for the DP when you say, “It’s at night.” So, how do we create a world in which there’s not light coming through the stained glass, and that it’s still believable that this is happening at night? So again, that’s not a situation where the DP is like, “Go fuck yourself.” That church at night, it just changed—it came alive.

Libatique: Walking into the place for the first time, I have to admit, I was completely terrified. It was so big, it was stone, it was immense. I put a lot of faith in the crew that we got in London because they had done this stuff before, and I’ve learned over the years that I need to let go and trust people who’ve done things before.

In all cases, I want to give the performance the most amount of room to move, and I want to be able to move the camera any way that the performance is requiring, and it’s about how do you create mood without a flatness?

Cooper: There were two days that I felt like I, at least as a filmmaker, was working out of fear. [In this one] I always wanted the movie to understand his impact on her, but by the time we got to shooting this scene, I had already known the long shot that I wanted, which was the dolly shot on the tracking shot of her receiving the guest after she’s been diagnosed with cancer—that was the shot. So, there was another shot here that we had built for fucking years, this cable camp shot in this cathedral, but it wouldn’t work then because I had already shot the thing that I wanted.

So, the first day—we did this over a day and a half—it was all really done out of fear that I couldn’t pull off conducting this properly for six minutes and wanting a way out of jail, quite honestly editorially, but I kept messing it up the whole day. I kept getting behind tempo, forgetting to cue the brass at a certain area, and the minute that happened, I knew that I wasn’t conducting them. For me, I knew that I wasn’t Lenny and the whole thing’s fucked. So I went to bed that night, and it was the first day of the whole movie that I really felt like I had failed.

The next day, when we did one take, and for whatever miraculous reason, I actually did conduct the orchestra, didn’t fuck up, and we did one setup, one take, and that’s what’s in the movie.

Libatique: It graduates. The end of this shot is the introduction of Felicia into the scene, which it’s not just a beautiful shot and a great performance, it’s also storytelling.

Cooper: I’m almost embarrassed that wasn’t the way I always thought of it, but sometimes it takes you four years to get to the shot that you need.

It’s Thanksgiving and Lenny returns home as the parade is going by outside their home’s window. He enters the room where Felicia waits alone, angry at Lenny for his relationships outside of their marriage. “There’s a saying in Chile about not standing under a bird that’s full of shit. And I’ve just been living under that bird for so long that it’s becoming comedic,” she says to him. She scolds him for his anger and hubris and absence from their family. The explosive fight scene is framed as a wide one-shot take without any cuts, and wraps with Snoopy floating by the window outside.

Cooper: This fight scene was always ideally meant to be in a one wide shot for a couple reasons, but the main reason was these two characters always share a frame the whole film. I always wanted them to share the frame when they were there together. The only time they’re apart is when they’re apart, and they both bear witness to us, the audience. Any time that they were disconnected, I still wanted them to share the frame, but we are seeing it from much farther away, mainly because we’re upset and also because this idea of public and private and should we be watching this?

The deeper origin of it for me was me and my sister watching my parents fight when I was a kid was from upstairs looking down on a wide shot. I was never in between them, and to me, if I was going to put the camera in between them, it was going to feel like I’m watching a movie.

Libatique: It was an incredible thing to watch, to be quite honest. I was by myself sitting at the camera, watching this, and I felt what Bradley just said about watching his parents fight—I felt like I was watching my parents fight.

Cooper: For the first two takes, she was on that chaise lounge, and it wasn’t working. She was coming off as a victim and it was sort of needy and emotional. The scene needed to be a scolding and a reckoning for him. And then we just put her on that windowsill, and I believe we changed the lighting slightly from up above, so she’s slightly haloed, and then he comes in and it’s like she’s the queen and he’s coming in and the whole thing just worked.

Libatique: But what’s striking about this image to me is that there’s a lot of light coming in through the windows, but look at the design, look at the color—all these choices that were made. I think the color photography, I’m as proud of it in the film as the black and white, because it actually more exemplifies all departments’ dedication to the visuals of this movie that look at how the palette works, the light works with the palette, and the framing. It’s just like it’s just true synchronicity. I think this shot is a good example of that.

Cooper: The last thing was the only way the joke works is if you stay in the wide because you can’t go to coverage, come back for the wide, and have Snoopy pass, then it’s just not funny. So, this was always our goal, and this is what I’m talking about in terms of so much prep, we were able to go to this place and say, “Okay, here we go. Let’s see if we can pull this off.” Luckily, we have Carey Mulligan who’s such a beast of an actor that can keep this six-page scene afloat.