Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1513564
55 W I N T E R Q 4 I S S U E F E A T U R E a movie focused on a godlike conductor. Instead, the script gave equal time — maybe even more than equal time — to Bernstein's wife Felicia, who had to navigate her love for her husband with the knowledge of his bisexuality. "Bradley set out to make a mov- ie about marriage," Tesoro said. "When he came aboard to be a co-writer, he and Josh rewrote the story to focus on Felicia and the marriage. That was what he found to be the most compelling story that he could tell." During postproduction, Tesoro never had to strain to give weight to Felicia's side of a scene because her perspective was already central to the script. "Sometimes, we really leaned so heavily into Felicia that it seemed like it was all her story," she said. "Then we had to backtrack and maybe put Lenny more into it to have the balance. Even if they did some improvisational scenes, it was always leaning towards her, or the two of them, or the family as a whole." Ber- nstein's three children are played by Maya Hawke, Gideon Glick, and Alexa Swinton. The f ilm, which was photographed by Matthew Libatique, ASC, transitions between 1940s-era black-and-white se- quences in the 1.33:1 aspect ratio, later color sequences also in 1.33, and a few bookend color segments in 1.85. The height of the 1.33 aspect ratio was especially useful during scenes of Bernstein at the podium. "When he's conducting, you can really take advan- tage of the height," Tesoro said. Although the choice to alter the size of the image, as well as to incorporate both black-and-white and color, was a bold one, Tesoro said that her goal was to make the transitions seamless. "Typically, I always aim for the invisible," she said. "I don't want to lose your attention. We experimented with certain kinds of long dissolves or superimpositions, but the film would just kick it back, like, 'This is not what I want.'" Cooper favored long takes that observed the complicated characters instead of commenting on them. "It's a more obser- vational style, instead of saying, 'Oh, now look here,'" Tesoro said. "He always felt that if we had more coverage, it would feel like a movie and it wouldn't feel like you're witnessing real people and real situations." A greater degree of intercutting between the black-and-white and color sequences was originally anticipated, but during postproduction, it was decided to let the two sequences play out with a minimum of switching back and forth. The shooting schedule ran from May through the end of July 2022, and then picked up again in September when addi- tional locations became available. "I was always very close to picture," Tesoro said. "That was probably informing [Cooper] of how things were coming together." The interruption in filming offered the unique opportunity for director and picture ed- Michelle Tesoro. itor to live with the film as it was coming i n to f o c u s. D u r i n g t h e p a u s e, C o o p e r had the chance to take stock of which to- be-shot scenes were needed and which possibly weren't; in the end, one sequence was scrapped altogether. "We kind of knew what the movie was and were really honing it," Tesoro said. Each time filming picked up again, Tesoro was left even more impressed with the makeup design. "Every time he went back, the makeup just got better and better," Tesoro said, pointing to one of the last scenes shot: an interview with a very aged Bernstein in a red sweater. "When I saw it, I went, 'Holy moly.' Many times with makeup, there are wig fixes we have to do. There are little things we have to do. Here, there was nothing we had to do. We color-timed it, which you would do with someone's regular face." In fact, the interview sequence was so compelling — and provided such an insight into the character of Bernstein — that Coo- per and Tesoro moved the scene to the very start of the picture (which would have origi- nally opened with a scene, still in the film, of Bernstein being invited to conduct the New York Philharmonic). "The red sweater scene was meant to go at the very end of the film in the timeline of the film," Tesoro said. "But we were looking for a way to ground the film in the story of Lenny and Felicia, so the byproduct of it is you are confronted with the makeup, with what Lenny looked like at that time. This was a way of saying: '"This is Lenny, not Bradley Cooper.'" Throughout the film, major structural elements stayed the same, but the film was refined and individual scenes altered or cut until late in the process. Tesoro began to see the film as a bit of a symphony of Bernstein's life. "The music of Leonard Bernstein, as we used it in the film, completely dictated the editing," Tesoro said. "That doesn't mean that we edited the picture to the music, but in thinking about his music and thinking about how we were editing the story to- gether." The film uses Bernstein-composed music as its score, some of which Cooper had already spotted and some of which the director was saving for the right moment. "It was more about waiting for the right moment when we had the right sequence where we wanted to try to add music," Tesoro said. "We'd go through the cues that weren't used, or weren't spotted for other places, to see which one would make sense not only in the timeline of Bernstein's life but the emotion and mood that the cue would bring." The interplay between music and picture was akin to a "conversation," the editor added. I n s e v e r a l s e q u e n c e s , t h e m u s i c itself takes center stage, especially a perfor- mance of Gustav Mahler's "Symphony No. 2" (the "Resurrection Symphony") at the Ely Cathedral in England — a performance that, at Cooper's insistence, was recorded live. Cooper turned to Ruder, the music