The Untold Truth Of A Star Is Born

Bradley Cooper and Lady Gaga first met at a Saturday Night Live taping a few years ago, but it was their second interaction that really made an impact. In 2016, after signing on to make A Star Is Born, Cooper was searching for an actress to play Ally. He went to a cancer benefit in Sean Parker's backyard in Los Angeles where Gaga was performing, and the rest is history. Cooper told Vogue, "She had her hair slicked back and she sang 'La Vie en Rose,' and I was just... levitating. It shot like a diamond through my brain. I loved the way she moved, the sound of her voice." 

He knew then that he wanted her in the movie, and that performance helped to inspire one of the first scenes in A Star Is Born, when their characters meet — Ally is singing "La Vie en Rose" when Jackson Maine falls for her. Gaga told Vogue that when they met the next day to discuss the film, "it was an instant connection, instant understanding of one another." Cooper basically offered her the part that day, and then they had spaghetti and meatballs together. 

Throughout the film, Cooper has a lot of scenes where he's playing guitar and singing — something we've never seen him do before, but that's really him. According to Vogue, Cooper trained for the film by learning how to play guitar and working with a vocal coach and a piano teacher for over a year. He ended up writing three of the songs for the movie. In an interview with the magazine, Cooper attributed his singing to Gaga, saying, "All because of Gaga. She really gave me the confidence." 

When the two first met to discuss the movie, they sat down at Gaga's piano to play one of the songs together to see how they sounded. Gaga had Cooper sing, which he described as "awkward" to W magazine. But Gaga could see he had talent, and that seemed to boost his confidence. An interview with Gaga for The Los Angeles Times reveals that she helped him through a lot of the music stuff on set, writing some of the songs and answering all of Cooper's questions about what it's like backstage at a concert. 

Even if you've only seen clips from A Star Is Born, it's clear that Gaga looks completely different than she normally does. There are no elaborate costumes or makeup — instead, she has brown hair, and she's wearing almost no makeup at all. Gaga told The Los Angeles Times that one of the first times they met for the film, Cooper handed Gaga a makeup wipe and told her to leave her face bare. He wanted her to be, "Completely open. No artifice." She realized she had to trust Cooper, and said, "It put me right in the place I needed to be, because when my character talks about how ugly she feels — that was real."

Adjusting to not wearing makeup was difficult for Gaga. On The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, she said that she changed her hair and removed her makeup months before filming to get into character, saying, "It was actually kind of liberating." 

Although Cooper and Gaga both wrote a few of the songs for the film, they didn't do it all on their own. Lukas Nelson, Willie Nelson's son, helped them with a lot of the music. Cooper noticed him when they were shooting at Coachella and Lukas was playing guitar for Neil Young. Nelson told Rolling Stone, "He looked at me and said to himself, 'I want this guy to teach me how to present myself as a musician in this movie.'" Although Nelson was originally just going to be a music consultant, he eventually started writing with Gaga, and Cooper had him and his band, the Promise of the Real, become his onscreen backing band for the film. 

The relationship between all of them was so great that Nelson even asked Gaga to sing background vocals on his song "Carolina," which is on their 2017 self-titled LP. Nelson said working with Gaga is "fantastic," adding, "I really feel like our brains work similarly in music."

Without giving away any huge spoilers, let's just say that the end of A Star Is Born is pretty devastating. The final scene is Gaga singing the song "Never Love Again" on stage, and the day she shot that scene happened to be very difficult for her in real life, too. In an interview with Apple Music, Gaga revealed that the day she had to film that scene was also the day she found out her friend Sonja, who had been battling cancer for years, had died. 

Gaga said she left the set to see her friend, but she didn't make it in time before she passed. After spending some time with Sonja's family, she went back to set and shot the final scene, singing the song in her friend's memory. She said, "Bradley was so beautiful with me that day. He was so loving." He told her she didn't have to do it, but Gaga said all she wanted to do was sing. 

If you haven't seen A Star Is Born and you don't want the ending spoiled, you've been warned: don't read on! If you have, here goes: the ending of the movie, in the version we all watched, was Jackson committing suicide by hanging himself in his garage. The final scene of the movie was Ally singing a song on stage that Jackson wrote for her. Apparently, though, this almost didn't happen. 

Toby Emmerich, the chairman of Warner Bros. Pictures Group, told Variety that the original script had a very different finale. In the first ending, Jackson "actually swims out into the ocean, where he commits suicide." Then the ending changed again. Emmerich said, "The script that we had when he started shooting, he rides his motorcycle." He describes it as more similar to the ending of the 1976 version. Eventually, though, Cooper changed his mind. Emmerich says he thinks the end result was the best, saying, "When I watch the movie now, I can't imagine it ending any other way."