SCOTT COOPER AND JEFF BRIDGES

Fresh off the overwhelming success of his first foray into directing, Crazy Heart's Scott Cooper spoke to us about working with Jeff Bridges, the difference between acting and directing, his future plans, and how "Robert Duvall" can be a magic word in Hollywood. Crazy Heart will be available on DVD April 20th:

BREE MCKENNEY: With Crazy Heart, you've transitioned from being a TV and film actor into being a director. Was directing always your goal, or did you come to it through a natural progression in your career?

SCOTT COOPER: My goal was primarily to be an actor, which I’d been since I was a child in Virginia. And you get to the point where you are a bridesmaid on too many occasions. You get to a point where you realize, ok, this is continually happening, why is it happening? So I decided to take a page out of my mentor, Robert Duvall’s, playbook, who I think is the complete filmmaker: a great actor, obviously, an amazing writer, and a great director. So I felt like I could best express myself if I could do that. Other actors I really respond to; Billy Bob Thorton, Sean Penn, Ed Harris, all are actors, writers and directors. So it was really a natural progression.

MCKENNEY: The actress Laura Linney said recently in an interview that she thinks film directors don’t pay attention to acting, that they are more like a ship’s captain with a thousand things to pay attention to, and that acting is de-prioritized. Do you think you have a special sensitivity to the acting on a film set since that is your background?

COOPER: Without question. I speak the same language, and I know what they go through, and I know that most actors don’t like to be over-directed, which is what most directors do because they feel like they need to be in utter control, and they don’t like to relinquish that control. What you need to do is allow them to be as free as they need to be, and allow them to fail, and allow them room to discover.  And if you do that, and you give them a safety net, and you give them an environment in which they are comfortable, they’ll give you their best work. But yeah, I understand what actors are going through, and I understand as a director I have to be very specific, and very minimal.

MCKENNEY: In terms of the origins of Crazy Heart, how did you come to adapt Thomas Cobb’s novel? Was it for this story specifically that you just had to make into a movie, or were you looking for a movie and then found the book?

COOPER: Originally what I wanted to do was tell Merle Haggard’s life story–Merle was kind of the poet laureate of country music and lived a very cinematic life. That’s the story I wanted to tell because I cut my teeth growing up in the Blue Ridge Virginia mountains listening to Merle Haggard, Waylon Jennings, Johnny Cash, a lot of bluegrass musicians–the greats. And I actually spent some time with Merle Haggard, but it turns out I couldn’t obtain his life rights because he had so many ex-wives and it was too difficult to navigate all of that. So I turned to this obscure, out-of-print novel that was presented to me by an acquaintance who knew I wanted to tell a story in this world.

MCKENNEY: Who brought lengendary producer T.Bone Burnett onto the project?

COOPER: After I wrote the screenplay, I sold it to Duvall, who was the first person to read it, and he said “I love it, let’s make it” and I told him that there were two things I needed to make this film, and if we don’t get them we shouldn’t make it. One was Jeff Bridges, who Duvall knew just in passing through Jeff’s father. And number two was T.Bone Burnett, who Duvall had never met. As it turned out T. Bone lived in my neighborhood, so I wrote him this impassioned letter. But I have to say I know that neither T.Bone nor Jeff Bridges would have read my screenplay if it didn’t have Robert Duvall’s name on it as a producer. I don’t fool myself into thinking these guys would have read it without that.