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Fresh from a victory tour of the fall festivals, four of the key creatives behind Netflix awards favorite Maestro stopped by Contenders London to reveal some of the secrets behind the scenes. Speaking to Baz Bamigboye, producer Kristie Macosko Krieger, makeup designer Kazu Hiro, costume designer Mark Bridges and production designer Kevin Thompson shared their thoughts and experiences on Bradley Cooper’s poignant biographical portrait of world-famous New York conductor and composer Leonard Bernstein, who died in 1990 aged 72.
Praising the performance by Cooper’s co-star Carey Mulligan, Kreiger noted that Bernstein’s passionate but tortured love for his wife Felicia formed the backbone of the film. “It’s a movie about a really complicated love story and a movie about art,” she said. “In order to make the music he made, Leonard needed that complexity in his life. Felicia was the scaffolding — she really was his rock, and she was there for him. But the movie is everything: it’s his entire life, it’s who Leonard Bernstein was. And also the music is a major character. It’s the nuclear energy in the film.”
Makeup designer Hiro was on hand to talk about the many challenges he faced. “The whole movie has five different stages,” he said, “from when Lenny was 25 or 26, all the way to 70. And so in the first conversation I had with Bradley, he told me he wanted to be as authentic as possible, in the aging stages too. That was the beginning. And he also asked me, ‘Can you make a nose plug?’ Because Lenny had kind of a nasal voice, and so Bradley wanted something to help change his voice. He did a lots of voice training, but there was a missing element. After I did a head cast and a body scan, I sculpted five different stages, progressing from youngest. The last stage pretty much covered his whole body.”
As a result, Cooper spent a vast amount of time in the makeup chair. “The first stage took about a little over two hours,” said Hiro, “the middle one took about three, and the last stage was five hours because it involved bodysuits. And so for the last stage, call time had to be 1am or 2am, because he wanted to be made up as Lenny before the crew call. He wanted to be in character, and he also had to set up the whole shoot for the day. It wasn’t like a normal actor, who needs to be ready when we start to shoot. So it was quite hard for everybody because we worked such long hours.”
Surprisingly, Hiro added that Bernstein was something of a hero for him, growing up.
“When I was 18,” he said, “I’d just started doing makeup, and Lenny was one of the biggest inspirations for me. I wasn’t so much into classical music, but I saw a documentary about him where he was talking to his students during rehearsal. It really inspired me, and it stuck with me. At the time, I thought, ‘Someday I want to work on a film about Lenny.’ And then it came true, so it was really important for me to represent him in a respectful way. He’s such an attractive-looking person. It’s like his passion for the music really shows in his face.”
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