Not only was Nebraska one of the most important albums for Bruce Springsteen, it turns out it also held great meaning for writer-director Scott Cooper. “Nebraska is one of my favorite albums,” Cooper said on a panel for his 20th Century Studios movie Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere at Deadline’s Contenders Film: Los Angeles event. “It was my introduction to Bruce Springsteen.”
Actually getting the film created was a “Sisyphean” task, as fellow panelist and producer Eric Robinson puts it, considering Springsteen has turned down many offers for a biopic. “People have come to [Springsteen] with the idea of doing the big cradle-to-present-day stories,” says Robinson. “This was always intended and planned to be the anti-rock biopic. … Zeroing in and focusing upon the creation of this seminal album at this moment in his life, we haven’t seen that before.”
With Springsteen on board, producers Robinson and Ellen Goldsmith-Vein then went after their “white whale,” Cooper, to direct. “We felt like it was divine in a lot of ways … we had often referred to [Scott] as the white whale because we would send things and he would pass on them,” Goldsmith-Vein said. “But when Eric originally gave me the book, I thought this just feels so much like Scott.”
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Scott Cooper onstage at Deadline’s Contenders Film: Los Angeles
Jesse Grant/Deadline
“It’s all of these amazing cinematic visual elements that Bruce was drawing inspiration from to create Nebraska at the same time he was exorcising the demons of his generational trauma with his father,” said Robinson. “All of which are themes Scott has touched on in his movies.”
Luckily, they came to Cooper with the perfect album to pitch the story – Nebraska. “Eric and Ellen approached me about this particular time in Bruce’s life, which I was well aware of, this very specific and intimate, quite painful chapter in his life,” Cooper said. “To see Bruce Springsteen, one of the biggest stars in the world, suffer the way he did and get through it, I thought it would give people a lot of hope.”
Along the way, Cooper said Springsteen being available to him on the set was an amazing source of information. “What a real gift to have Bruce be with all of us throughout the process,” Cooper said of his filmmaking team that included Jeremy Allen White who played the rock star. “Bruce was in this very, very fragile time in his life, you really have to go to the source, and he was completely unadulterated and gave me access to literally every part of his life.”
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Check back Monday for the panel video.
