Jeremy Allen White, Jeremy Strong & Scott Cooper Telluride Q&A: How Bruce Springsteen’s Life Was Saved By Jon Landau And Making ‘Nebraska’

EXCLUSIVE: In between the albums Born To Run and Born In The USA that made him the world’s biggest rock star, Bruce Springsteen took a radical detour, channeling the crippling alienation and crushing depression he was feeling into the seminal album Nebraska. Accomplished in a bedroom with orange shag carpet and with a crude recording system, Springsteen confronted the dark side of the American dream, as ghosts from his past were catching up to him too quickly for mentor Jon Landau to help beat them back. Premiering last night at the Werner Herzog Theater in Telluride, Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere starts in a familiar place, startling as it is to see Emmy-winning The Bear star Jeremy Allen White channeling The Boss with the anthem Born To Run. The Scott Cooper-directed adaptation of the Warren Zanes book veers off into unexpected terrain, a terrifying plunge into depression and a love story between Springsteen and Jon Landau (played by Jeremy Strong) as they navigate the dangerous spiral of undiagnosed depression threatening to snuff out Springsteen’s spark and maybe his life. Unable to commit to a relationship, ill equipped to handle the fame that put him on the cover of Time and Newsweek the same week when those things mattered and haunted by a toxic relationship with his father Doug (Stephen Graham), Deliver Me From Nowhere is far from the usual rock star movie. Springsteen and Landau were full creative participants in a movie that charts as an awards season contender from Disney’s 20th Century Studios when it is released October 24.

DEADLINE: Scott, Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska was the album you played over and over as you worked out the beats of your film Out of the Furnace. What specific themes from that spare and dark album lent themselves to creating the tragic journey of the characters played by Christian Bale, Casey Affleck, Zoe Saldana?  

SCOTT COOPER: Alienation, quiet, despair, violence; characters who live on the margins, characters who reach for the American dream and fall short because that’s much of America. You can’t make a movie about who Springsteen is, and not feel like you’re making a movie about America’s soul. So as I was riding Out of the Furnace, it seemed to me I want to speak to the people that we never see in movies. People who live in Braddock, Pennsylvania are unfortunately sometimes forgotten. And even though that’s a tough, violent movie, I wanted to make it clear that part of Pennsylvania is not immune to violence. If you ask Braddock’s former mayor, John Fetterman, who’s now the Senator for Pennsylvania, that city has been forged through fire. Much like Bruce was, as he was writing a very healing but incredibly dark record, with characters that aren’t afraid to flinch at the darkest of times.

DEADLINE: In his book, Warren Zanes wrote about how this began with the persistence of Gotham Group’s Eric Robinson, who produced with Cooper, Ellen Goldsmith-Vein and Scott Stuber, to get these rights after hearing the author on Mark Maron’s podcast. I didn’t see an obvious movie there when I read the book. What did you see that lent itself to such cinematic and narrative potential?

COOPER: What I saw in Warren’s book is, it wasn’t a cradle to the present day biopic. After the success of my first film Crazy Heart, I was asked to make a lot of those, whether it be Elvis, Miles Davis, Chet Baker, artists I adored, but didn’t interest me [as film subjects]. What interested me about Warren’s book was the emotional honesty and the intimacy of an artist that most people didn’t realize was going through one of the most painful times of his life. It’s a very specific and deeply personal, and out of that came one of his most enduring works. That felt like a spine that I could run through the film and then I could build it out so it wasn’t just the story of a man in a room making a record. Warren’s book was the seed, and through a lot of discussion with Bruce and his manager, mentor, confidante and therapist Jon Landau, I was able to hang a narrative on it that worked on a number of levels. We wouldn’t have a film, without Warren’s book.

DEADLINE: I recall Bruce being last to the party when every band was making videos for MTV…

COOPER: There is a video for Atlantic City.

DEADLINE: And Bruce isn’t in it.  He finally relented for Born in the USA, but he has always been private for a global rock star and hasn’t gone Hollywood. He has shared a lot of personal stuff with his difficult relationship with his father, telling stories onstage between songs, in his memoir, and his Broadway show. Why did he spark to a narrative film that depicts his existential plunge to rock bottom, so bad that he nearly kills himself in a car driving top speed at night with no headlights.

COOPER: Why did he want to make this film?

DEADLINE: It’s one of the most darkly personal films that I’ve ever seen about an iconic rock singer, where the artist participated…

JEREMY ALLEN WHITE: I think this is a period in Bruce’s life where he was making a big choice. He’s spoken a lot about it in in his memoir, and in Warren’s book a little bit. He talks about when he was a young man who wasn’t sure about his capabilities to be a good partner, to be a family man, to be a father. And I think in this period in his life, he was making a choice to change and follow that.

DEADLINE: There is a girlfriend played by Odessa Young, a fictional composite of women he dated just to show he would not be able to make the commitments you describe until he fixes himself…

WHITE: In the way I was approaching it, this man was fighting for the family that he hasn’t had yet. I think it was important that Bruce told this story in this time, because if he didn’t make that choice to go in the right direction to seek help, to listen to Jon Landau, I don’t know if he could have opened his life up for all of the beautiful things that he has now, Patti and his children.

JEREMY STRONG: Bruce is also a storyteller. He tells stories through music, but has a deep understanding of story. And I remember reading, and I don’t know if it’s in his autobiography or in one of Dave Marsh’s books, but it is Bruce’s Statement of the Blues. That is, essentially what it is that matters, how one might gain it and lose it, and the price paid for the attempt. And in a way that’s the dramatic structure of almost all of his songs, but he himself understands the power of that structure in human life, and in his own life. So while some people might feel that is such a vulnerable thing to share, being up against the ropes the way he was at this time, I think he understands the power of that vulnerability, and that the wound is inextricably connected to the gift. This movie explores that.

DEADLINE: What was most important to him and Jon Landau when they entrusted you guys to tell the story of the making of that album and Bruce’s breakdown?

COOPER: Bruce notoriously has said no to all overtures to make a narrative film since I think 1980. But once he understood that I was going to tell the story of a very specific and very personal time, and for Bruce most personal enduring work, he kept saying to me a couple things. He said, the truth about yourself isn’t always pretty. I don’t want you to look away or shy away from that truth about me. I know you weren’t going to make a hagiography. I said, Bruce, no, I’m going to strip away the mythology. This is not a film about The Boss. This is not about the icon. I said, Jeremy White and I have discussed it, this is a regular man who just happens to be Springsteen. His one directive to me, through the screenplay, production and post was, just make a Scott Cooper film. Don’t let anyone off the hook. Don’t sand off the edges. I said, Bruce, I’m not sure I know how to do it any other way.

DEADLINE: Jeremy White, Springsteen fans know how hard he was on himself and his band while they recorded Born To Run — which he wanted to scrap when it was finished — Darkness on the Edge of Town and others because he’s such a perfectionist. Did that make you think you’d be in for a tough time?

WHITE: I knew that about Bruce and the way he approached his work. And I think I understood how heavy it was for Bruce and for Jon to relinquish total control for the first time ever. They were present and they were always in communication with all of us. They were going to let Scott make the film that he was always going to make, and I was going to do what I did. But I was hyper-aware that they have been very careful and exacting, for about 50 years, about everything and that this was the first time that they’ve taken their hands off the wheel even for a moment. There was a gravity to that, absolutely.

DEADLINE: What was your biggest surprise in terms of how he nurtured, challenged and encouraged you as you prepared to step into his formidable shoes?

WHITE: The first thing that struck me was how available and accommodating he was and how he wanted me to succeed. I know that seems like an obvious thing, but I’m not sure that’s always the case necessarily. He was there all the way through in the preparation, always available and we spoke a lot. But then when we started filming, he was around a lot, but I had to keep my head down. I was in such a fragile place and he was so present that I needed to be in my own world because I feel like if we were to communicate too much during the process of filming, I might’ve shattered, I might have really buckled under the pressure. Our job as actors really is, how much delusion can we muster up? And it’s very difficult to live in delusion when you’re looking at the man.  

But he still carried me through. There were some nights I came home and I felt so beat up and like I wasn’t measuring up. Every time I felt that way, my phone would ding and I’d have a message from Bruce. It could have been about the smallest moment, a glance, the way that I turned a page in a book. But he always focused on a moment that he found particularly true or honest that I had achieved during that day. Those messages allowed me to close my eyes, get some rest, and wake up the next day and go to work.

DEADLINE: You learn guitar and how to sing like him, and from the opening moments with Born to Run, it’s kind of awe-inspiring. I have personally been mangling his songs in my car for over 40 years. It is hard to sing like him…

WHITE: Aw, I bet you would sound pretty good…

DEADLINE: I’m going to go with a sound approximating what you’d hear if you started the car and realize your cat got caught in the fan belt. But you, you fared so well, it left me thinking if this acting thing doesn’t work out, you could front a Springsteen tribute band and make a living.

COOPER: And he did that in only six months.

DEADLINE: What was the key for you to find his voice in your voice, and was there a moment that you, Scott, Bruce and Jon said, yeah, he’s got this.

WHITE: There was. I had never really sang before, and I worked with a wonderful vocal coach, Eric Vitro. During the process of working with Eric, my focus was, can I sound like him? Can I sing in key? Can I sing at all? And then as we were working, what should be the most obvious thing to me as an actor when approaching this is, what story are you telling? Where are you at? Have you written this down a hundred times? Where are you coming from? What character is Bruce playing? All these were questions that I ignored because I was so focused on sounding like him. It only happened when I let go of trying to sound like him, and I got to sing his songs like they were my own. That was when I was really able to get closer to him. And then it was in Nashville when it clicked for me. That’s where me, Scott, and our music supervisor Dave Cobb recorded the majority of the songs for Nebraska. And that’s where I found my confidence. Bruce listened to those songs about a week after we recorded them and he said, you sound enough like me, but you’re making the songs your own. And he was like, I want that to be what the process of making this movie is like. That gave me such permission to go into the filming process. It put me at such ease to hear that he was pleased with the music, but also that he was supportive of me following my voice throughout the process, not just in the song recordings.

COOPER: I’ll only add that from the beginning when I said to Bruce and then to Jeremy White, this is not about imitation or mimicry, it’s about the embodiment of Bruce’s soul. Jeremy has a very nice warm voice that Bruce happens to really like. I think the first song we approached was Nebraska, in Nashville. At that point, look, I knew that Jeremy had the intensity, the vulnerability, the authenticity. He had the two things that most embody Bruce, which is humility and swagger. He’s got that. But that day in Nashville, I said, oh man, we’re going to be in great shape here.  

DEADLINE: The darker parts of this movie brought up things for me, as they will for a lot of people. Though he eventually quit cold turkey one day, my own dad was an alcoholic when I grew up. I had some frightening childhood moments. It’s like you’re in a club, and I felt I understood why Will Smith slapped Chris Rock at the Oscars. I’d just read his memoir and the shame he felt as a boy, unable to  protect his mother from being hit by his father when he drank. When he felt his wife had been insulted, he was triggered to do what he did, even though it destroyed what should have been the pinnacle moment of his career. Bruce is part of that club, and you don’t shy from it in this film. Can you guys talk a little bit about that all common relationship of fathers and sons of a certain generation, and why they create the kind of darkness and scars that caught up to and crippled Bruce when his career was soaring?

COOPER: The film’s about many things, right? It’s about a neglected soul repairing itself through music. It’s a film about fathers and sons. It’s a film about untreated mental health illness, unresolved trauma. You have to remember, Bruce grew up in incredibly poor circumstances. He didn’t have warm running water until he was 18 years old. And he had a father who was cold and dispassionate. As Bruce said once, when I’m on stage for three and a half hours performing, I’m really connecting to people, I’m connecting to my fans. I’m reading into that and extrapolating that he didn’t connect with some of the most important people in his life, like his father. He said, it’s the other 21 hours that are very difficult for me. And much of that came from this relationship, the fathers and the son thing. In Douglas Springsteen’s case from that era, men didn’t know how to, or couldn’t give voice to their pain.

He didn’t know that he was suffering from undiagnosed mental illness, he didn’t have the means to seek out therapy, and was never told or directed toward therapy. He just had to live with it, every day. Unfortunately when that happens, the people closest to you suffer. And I’ll tell you, Mike, after hearing your story, the amount of people who have seen the film who were there when I was filming, who told me they had the same relationship to their father, it shocked me. It’s a very common occurrence. I think a lot of that is men who can’t express themselves. And when that bubbles into rage, it comes out like the antidote. The episode with Will Smith, and certainly with Bruce and his father…I know what Bruce has with his own children. I don’t know if you overcompensate, but I’ve seen Bruce with his kids and it’s so loving, caring, and warm. I happen to know that his two sons have seen the movie with Bruce, and watching their reaction to the film about their grandfather and their father, I will take that to my grave because it was so moving. It was moving for Bruce to see his kids understand what he endured and that those boys don’t have to. I don’t know that I can speak directly to your question except to say that a lot of art deals with damage and repairing damage.

STRONG: In a piece with David Remnick maybe 20 years ago, Bruce talked about being a repairman, and using music to repair parts of himself. And I think that artists, great artists, are healers, they’re wounded heroes. If they have the courage to face and address and heal their own wounds, they can then heal others through their work. To me, that is what this is. Exploring the inheritance of the past…in a lyric, Bruce sang. ‘we inherit the sins, we inherit the flames.’ He did inherit that in Freehold as a child. What do you then do with these flames so that they don’t completely engulf you, so that you can survive? I think he was white-knuckling a lot of his life until this inflection point in 1982. And then he walked through the fire and got to the other side.

DEADLINE: Jeremy White, you played him. How did you connect to the backstory that so haunted Bruce?  

WHITE: I think he grew up in an environment and felt incredibly unsafe like so many children do. It’s a sliding scale. It doesn’t matter if your parent is mentally ill, alcoholic, narcissistic, whatever it is, unsafe is unsafe, and you grow up and it’s difficult to trust and form thorough connection with other people and ultimately trust other people. I knew Bruce was coming from that environment. I spoke to Bruce very often about that panic attack that he had had at the county fair while he was on the road trip going to Los Angeles. And it was one of the first things we spoke about. I said, what did that feel like? What were you thinking about? And he said, I realized I was just an observer in my own life. And what Jeremy said about him performing is true. He was able to find some presence and be truly present and feel like he was connecting when he was playing music. It was the other 21 hours of the day that were very difficult, when he had this period where he just realized he was observing. It was the scariest moment of his life because he just felt like he was a complete outsider, had no control, had no say. And for me, I have my tools, but I am always trying to become more present in my own life. That is a fear that I am very familiar with, of just kind of stepping outside of yourself and being an observer in your own life. When Bruce told me that story, it was something I connected with immediately and very deeply. That was another point for me along with the Nashville recordings where I thought, okay, maybe this is a way in that I could really understand, this is something that Bruce and I share, and I can do his story justice.  

DEADLINE: I got to do a deep dive piece in Deadline’s Cannes Disruptors issue this year on Bono. He turned his one-man stage show into a terrific movie for Apple TV+. Jeremy, you mention a sliding scale, and the emotional neglect that came from Bono’s father was different from Bruce’s. He was 14 when he watched his mother collapse at her father’s funeral and she died of a brain aneurysm. His father grieved by never mentioning her name again in the house, and the fatherly approval Bono craved was in short supply. Bono spent his career trying to prove his father wrong and it lent edge to everything that he wrote and did. I knew all that about Bruce from listening to Darkness on the Edge of Town so many times, and from the stories about his father he told between songs in those bootleg concert albums. That became my North Star in trying to defy the terrible self-image I had. I asked Bono, if Bruce had grown up with love from his father, robbing him of that edge, would he have achieved greatness, or been a mechanic who on weekends moonlit as a great wedding singer? Bono said he’d seen Bruce in concert enough to feel he was the world’s greatest wedding singer, bringing a congregation of thousands together each time he performs. What do you guys think? Is there a straight road to the top for the talented, or is it that pain that distinguishes the ones who really rise to the top? Those guys are the top voices in the soundtrack of my adult life, maybe because they’ve bottled that pain and made people like me feel not alone.

STRONG: I don’t know if I think you can necessarily pathologize greatness in that way. I do think that that’s a force that’s operating. But from the very beginning, there was also simply the drive to become a great musician. He worked harder than anybody, and he was ready for it when it came. So yes, there’s the devil at your back and you’re outrunning something, but I think it would be a mistake to simply say that it’s about that. It’s also an aspiration towards something transcendent that is a positive thing.

WHITE: I think you can be born with the fire as well. And I think in Bruce’s case, he was born with the fire and then also his environment built into that fire.

STRONG: When he saw Elvis on that TV set…

WHITE: And started dancing in the mirror, that was it.

COOPER: I’m interested to hear this. I’m sitting across from two of the best actors of their generation and to hear them espouse about Bruce or other great artists is fascinating. You always wonder because we never really speak about that, what it is that drives him to reach the levels that these two reach.

DEADLINE: Bono chalked up the fatherly emotional neglect to being an Irish thing. His friend Jimmy Iovine would tell him that as the first son in an Italian family, every idea that came out of his mouth, every act was treated as brilliant. The exact opposite of being Irish, which I am…

STRONG: Jon Landau wrote this collection of essays called It’s Too Late to Stop Now. He said that ‘when I was 19, I aimed for messianic.’ They weren’t after small potatoes. They knew that they wanted to bring big medicine to the world, I believe. And they’ve done that.  

DEADLINE: It brings up an interesting follow-up. You did a lot of research on the relationship between those two guys, a mentor far different than you played last time we were here and it was Roy Cohn showing Donald Trump the ropes in The Apprentice. I don’t mean to disparage, but in the docu for Western Stars, Bruce said that if you try to get close to him, his instinct is still to push you away, in a hurtful manner. How much of Jon Landau’s heroic efforts to save Bruce from his demons came from his love for the man, versus his determination to see a genius artist reach his potential? Landau after all was the music critic who famously proclaimed Bruce the future rock and roll.  

STRONG: It’s a longer conversation than we have time for, but in the period that this film explores, Jon was instrumental in helping Bruce understand and define the nature and beauty of his vision, and give him a broader context for that vision. I think John was indispensable in that way. And of course, as a friend. Over the course of time, they’ve individuated in their own ways and have had their separate lives. But one of the first things that I witnessed when I went to see them, I saw them play a concert in Denmark. I watched this ritual they have before every show, where they kind of hold each other, and touch each other’s foreheads before Bruce goes up the gangplank to the most thunderous sound you’ve ever heard in your life. And then Jon is the first person there to greet him after the show and they embrace each other. When I saw that, that was everything I needed to know about what this relationship is, how deep it is. They are blood brothers.

DEADLINE: Hardcore Bruce fans know that those father-son fights in the movie that take place in his childhood continued as he got older. His dad would sit in the kitchen, brooding, and turn on these gas jets on the stove that went up to Bruce’s bedroom, to smoke out Bruce and his ‘goddamn guitar,’ trying to get him to stop playing. He brought in a guy who forced a haircut on Bruce when he when he was laid up after a motorcycle accident leading the son to say he hated his father and would never forgive him. And the father kept telling his son that he couldn’t wait for the Army to draft him in Vietnam and straighten him out. But in the same speech onstage, Bruce said his father was relieved when the Army rejected him. The movie climaxes with this slightly awkward moment of grace between father and son that just cut me to the core because I fought with my father, and when we got close he died in Hurricane Sandy. Leaving me with nothing but guilt and shame over our conflicts, because he’s not here and we never discussed them and I never said I love you dad. Bono gave his dad a graceful sendoff in his movie. What did that resolution in Deliver Me From Nowhere between father and son mean to you guys, when the father asks the son to sit on his lap? Stevie Graham played the father so touchingly…

WHITE: This allows us to take a moment to just talk about Stephen Graham and how excellent he is as Bruce’s father. The quiet despair.  It was remarkable. I remember reading that scene on the page. I mean, I know it happened, but it’s an uncomfortable moment. It’s a grown man sitting on his father’s lap. And I was like, is this going to be, are people going to laugh at this? Is it too uncomfortable or too awkward? Or something like that. But what it is, or what it was for me is just another moment to show Bruce’s humility and compassion. Ultimately, he’s just making room for his father. And that’s what this was about. And I think what father and sons are, it’s difficult business regardless of how you grow up. It’s tough. He was so desperate for that connection. I remember singing My Father’s House, over and over again in Nashville, and I called my dad right after. Because, what it really was for me, that song and that moment is just…like a warning. It was, pick up the phone, tell your dad you love him. You think we’ll find a richer connection here or there, but the time is now. You’re going to regret it if you don’t. I think that moment at the end was, Bruce’s forgiveness, opening his arms and making room for connection. If he didn’t do it, he would regret it.

DEADLINE: It’s a moment to love in a movie with a bunch of them. Like when Jeremy’s Jon Landau character is matter of fact-ly telling CBS Record exec Al Teller how Bruce wanted Nebraska released. This stripped down album recorded crudely in a bedroom must be released with no singles. And oh yeah, there will be no tour and Bruce’s picture will not be on the album cover, and he will do no press to promote it. It took me back to John Candy talking to the cop who pulled him over for speeding in Planes, Trains and Automobiles. Candy and Steve Martin are in a torched husk of a car, trying to get Martin home for Thanksgiving dinner. The cop says, do you have any idea how fast you were going, and Candy said no, the speedometer melted in the fire. The cop says, no mirrors and no gauges, no roof, and Candy says, true, but the radio plays clear as a bell. Jeremy, you lend Jon Landau the same kind of deadpan sincerity…

STRONG: I remember talking to Jimmy Iovine who was the studio engineer with those guys back in the day, and Jimmy said Jon was always the steady hand, but also the bodyguard between Bruce and the world. That scene was a chance to make that case in Jon’s wry manner. But you know, Jon Landau has the strength of a mountain. He’s a killer.  As Jeremy said, these guys were so generous with us and just opened up the treasure trove of stuff to drawn from. But I love that scene as well. This is important to me, and I think it’s one of the things that I relate to most is something Bruce said once. This ain’t a job. This ain’t a business. This is a reason to live. The music. All of us here, we feel this way about what we do. It’s not a job, it’s not a business. And so what I like in that scene is it’s a chance to express that.

DEADLINE: Scott, how did you, Bruce and Jon decide how much music to include without making it feel like a jukebox musical?

COOPER: For me, it was never a traditional biopic. It was always about Nebraska. And what were some of the influences that we might hear that really influenced Bruce, like the band Suicide and the song Frankie Teardrop. That was crazy stuff and one of Bruce’s all time favorite records.  

WHITE: Bruce said, if Elvis was making music today, he’d sound like Suicide. I kind of love that.  

COOPER: the way I pitched the movie to Bruce, I said, look, there’s not going to be the type of music that an audience expects. This is not spectacle. It’s about a very quiet interior time in your life. We do hear a rousing Born in the USA, which Jeremy performs incredibly. And which both Jon Landau and Bruce said to me was maybe the one time during those Power Station sessions or any other time they were recording, that wow, we have lightning in a bottle. And what does Bruce do? He takes a song that’s going to be an anthem, one of his greatest selling hits of all time, and he puts it on the shelf. So the reason I included that was to show, yes, this was where Bruce was going.

DEADLINE: Why do you think he fixated on the spree killer Charles Starkweather, played by Martin Sheen in Terrence Malick’s Badlands? He seemed to become a symbol of the darkness Springsteen was going through but that guy was an unrepentant murderer who killed like 10 people.  

COOPER: I know exactly why. He had never seen the film until its first airing on national TV. He saw the rage that fueled this young man’s rampage or murder across the American West. But what Bruce saw was, there must be something in this young man to push him to that point. What is that? Was that a father-son relationship or something with his mother? What was he not getting as a young child? It’s that sense of disconnection, isolation, alienation, or not belonging. And that was a feeling that at that time, Bruce felt very close to. Starkweather was the first celebrity serial killer. So he was a bit of a rock star in his own way, for doing something terribly wrong. I think Bruce, having been on the cover of Time and Newsweek, this rock star, still carried around inside of him the feeling of being, as he writes in the album, unfit to live. And so I think there’s something in that character that existentially spiritually he could relate to. Bruce hadn’t gone around killing people, but I think he felt on some level that he had. He always said to me, you never know what you’re capable of.

DEADLINE: But if you’re not a sociopath, if you have a conscience, those mechanisms limit what you’re capable of. The thing that upset me after seeing the movie was how close Springsteen came to harming himself. If he was going to act on that darkness, it would be at his own expense. True?

WHITE: Well, he nearly did on a couple occasions in the film, like the one that you mentioned earlier, driving at 110 miles an hour on a country road at night and feeling like, now’s the time I’m going to end it. And the last second he spins out and says, I just can’t do it.

DEADLINE: After you introduced the film last night at the Werner Herzog Theater, Bruce’s only comment to Scott’s speech was, gimme me back my house. Scott, talk a little bit about how your family came to live in Springsteen’s LA home, and what happened when your daughter’s guitar burned up during those Palisades wildfires.

COOPER: This is my seventh film, and in some ways the most challenging. The day before I started shooting, my father died. The man who introduced me to the album Nebraska. His spirit carried me through a film that’s about many things, but a lot about fathers and sons. On that day we shot that touching and awkward scene of reconciliation between Bruce and his father backstage at the LA Sports Arena, I received the devastating news that my house was burning, like so many others in the Palisades fires. I made certain that my wife and daughters were safely ensconced in a hotel. Bruce, who was standing next to me on set, said, Scott, get them out of the hotel, put them into my Los Angeles house. And there we lived, until we got back on our feet. My daughter Stella’s guitar burned, and Bruce sent her one from the Born in the USA tour. And if the next house ever burns up, that’ll be the first thing that’s coming with us.

And that’s who Bruce Springsteen is. He’s humble, generous, he’s endlessly supportive. That’s what makes this experience, this journey through memory and regret, truth and a lot of pain, so transformative for me. I’ll forever be joined with Jeremy White and Jeremy Strong in ways that I hope will carry me for the rest of my life.