We were thrilled to have screenwriter Josh Singer, producer Kristie Macosko Krieger, Leonard Bernstein’s daughter Jamie Bernstein, makeup designer Kazu Hiro, costume designer Mark Bridges, production designer Kevin Thompson, production sound mixer Steve Morrow, and Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the conducting consultant and conductor for new recordings and Music Director of The Metropolitan Opera, discuss their work on Bradley Cooper's Maestro, the Spotlight Gala selection of NYFF61, with NYFF Main Slate committee member Justin Chang.

In his directorial follow-up to A Star Is Born, Bradley Cooper dramatizes the public and private lives of legendary musician Leonard Bernstein with sensitivity, visual ingenuity, and symphonic splendor. Coasting on the boundless energy of its subject’s runaway genius, Maestro transports the viewer back to a vividly re-created postwar New York, when Bernstein (Cooper) began his stratospheric rise to international fame as both a conductor and composer, and also when he first met Felicia (Carey Mulligan), the actress whom he would marry and spend his life with. Maestro is a tender, often intensely emotional film about the different faces one wears when living in the public eye, depicting the complicated yet devoted decades-spanning relationship between Leonard and Felicia. Fueled by Cooper and Mulligan’s perfectly matched duet of towering performances, Matthew Libatique’s balletic cinematography, and, of course, Bernstein’s thrilling music, Maestro is a tour de force for its director. A Netflix release.

Don’t forget to mark your calendars: Maestro opens in theaters on November 22 and on Netflix December 20.

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