Cooper as a younger Bernstein
and Carey Mulligan as his wife, Felicia Montealegre.
Jason McDonald/Netflix
Maestro was editor Michelle Tesoro’s first collaboration with director Bradley Cooper, who also stars as iconic composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein in the now-streaming Netflix drama. While they worked closely on the edit — “Bradley loves to be in the cutting room,” she notes — Tesoro says their work always centered on character and performance when viewing his takes: “Whenever we would talk about his performance — or anybody else’s for that matter — we would never reference him as in ‘you, Bradley.’ We always talked about the characters as who they were, where ‘Lenny’ does this.”
The Emmy-winning editor of Netflix limited series The Queen’s Gambit says that Cooper (who also co-wrote Maestro’s screenplay with Josh Singer) is incredibly collaborative. “We try things and we show the assistants and the VFX crew, and they really loved being asked what they thought,” she says. “It was great to have fresh opinions and work them into [the cut].”
Cooper also would screen the film for friends and colleagues. “He wants everyone’s opinion. If you’re not giving an opinion, he’s wondering whether you liked the movie or not,” she adds.
Tesoro was no stranger to biographical drama. Her credits include the Ruth Bader Ginsburg biopic On the Basis of Sex. “I want to tell a story that they feel is truthful,” she says of such films. In the case of Maestro, the story doesn’t focus on Bernstein’s career or famous works including On the Town and West Side Story. Rather, the center of the drama is the relationship between the artist and his wife, Felicia, played by Carey Mulligan. “Bradley wanted to focus on the love story and how that affected him and [Bernstein’s] career and how it affected her,” explains Tesoro.
Take, for instance, the memorable scene during which Bernstein conducts Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 in C minor, which was recorded at Ely Cathedral in England with the London Symphony Orchestra and London Symphony Choir.
In the prior scene, Felicia — already separated from her husband — reflects on their relationship. Tesoro notes that when the film then gets to the performance, the edit was about “watching Lenny and staying with him [as he] gets swept away with the music — which is a way for us as an audience [to] understand why she’s in love with him … and seeing what made him special and seeing why he’s so in love with the music, in love with everything, because to him, music is everything.” Most of the scene involved the use of the master shot of Cooper conducting the orchestra. “You’re so enthralled with watching not only Bradley’s performance as Leonard Bernstein but also watching these real musicians,” says Tesoro.
That performance concludes with the camera showing Lenny and the orchestra over Felicia’s shoulder. Says Tesoro, “Her watching … is just a culmination of why she always loved him.”
This story first appeared in a January standalone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.