Bruce Springsteen & Jon Landau Q&A: After Half A Century Telling Hollywood No, Why They Let Scott Cooper Tap The Boss’ Pain In ‘Deliver Me From Nowhere’

EXCLUSIVE: Bruce Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere marks the second film in consecutive years that put a formative story about an iconic rock star into the awards race. The difference between the film and last year’s Bob Dylan movie A Complete Unknown has just taken a seat right next to me on a New York night, in between awards screenings at MOMA. Looking fit and spry at 76, Bruce Springsteen enters with his longtime manager Jon Landau and director Scott Cooper. They came to share with Deadline why, after turning down countless movie offers in the 50 years since Born to Run made him a household name, The Boss made an exception on a film that bares his most painful life crisis. Springsteen & Landau not only let it happen, they fully embraced the Searchlight drama.

Dylan was as conspicuously absent from last Oscar season as he was when he skipped the public ceremony awarding him the Nobel Prize for Literature. It’s still unclear if the filmmakers now know what he thought of their film.  

Springsteen & Landau — played with precision and intensity by Jeremy Allen White and Jeremy Strong — went all in for the production and promotion of a film that’s the diametric opposition of jukebox musicals like Bohemian Rhapsody and Rocketman. White plays a 30ish Springsteen in full existential crisis from scars and childhood trauma left by his cold father Doug (Stephen Graham). Their constant battles in their small New Jersey home fueled the edge in his early defiant songs, but left him paralyzed when it came to committing to lovers, much less facing the blinding fame that was just around the corner.  

DEADLINE: There are two main voices in the soundtrack of my adult life, you and Bono. I’ll start same as I did when he and I did a Cannes cover story for his autobiographical Apple TV film. Bruce, my sincere apology for 40 years of mangling your songs in the car.

BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN: That’s what they’re for, man. Turn it up and mangle away.

DEADLINE: While Bono wrote his memoir and made that movie, he was guided by not wanting people saying, “Oh here’s Bono, telling us once again how great he is.” As you did in Deliver Me From Nowhere, Bono shared scars endured as a youth after watching his mom collapse at her father’s funeral, and die, with her father not permitting household grieving, or even a mention of mom’s name. You allowed Scott Cooper to put on screen the most painful chapter of your life, when you were near a breakdown because of depression and shrapnel from your dad. Why now?

BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN: That really came as a result of Warren Zanes’ book. If a film was going to be made of Warren’s book, it had to encompass my life and times at that moment, that informed people of the context in which the record was made. It was just a strange and somewhat interesting part of my life where I happened to make this record that I wasn’t expecting, that nobody else was expecting. It just appeared relatively quickly, for better or for worse. And I went through this particular period of a lot of emotional disruption for really the first time in my life.

In your 20s, you can skate by because you’re young, you’re traveling, you’re on the road, you’re with your pals. There’s a lot of excitement, and there’s no reckoning with your past going on, yet. You’re exhilarated, being freed from your past. My parents left [New Jersey for California] when I was 19. So in my early and mid-20s, I was still exhilarated by just being free and alone in the world, and traveling, which agreed with me.

Music was my great love. That I was having the opportunity to perform around the world, which I fought to be able to do but it was a shock when it happened, you never quite expected it to pan out the way it did. And so your 20s … it’s not that it’s not affecting you. It does affect you, through your relationships with others and through your anxieties and your concerns. There’s things you don’t do, and that’s all there is to it. But you haven’t wondered about the reasons why you don’t do those things or do those things. That question hasn’t arisen. But once you reach your 30s, those self-medications start to drop away. And what you’re left with are questions you don’t have answers to. In my early 30s, I started to be curious about how I grew up, the history of my family, the dilemma of my mother and my father, what it meant to me, how it made me who I am. What were the forces that work on their lives, on a societal scale. And these things just … turned into songs. It wasn’t an intellectual exercise. I couldn’t have explained it to you then the way I’ve just explained it to you. When I was 31 or 32, all I knew was I was moved to do certain types of work.

And so I got involved in that. And shortly after that, I had this first sort of emotional confrontation with myself that led me, thanks to Mr. Landau here, into analysis and the beginning of deeply sorting out a lot of these issues. If the picture was going to be about the making of Nebraska, it had to be about these things also. And so that was that story.

SCOTT COOPER: It’s like Bono said, we didn’t want to do something that is like, well, here is Bruce, telling us again how great he is. I mean, this was …

SPRINGSTEEN: No, I’m glad to do that, but I didn’t want to do that here. That was my idea.

DEADLINE: Jon, my image of you, in the spirit of protecting Bruce, is that you say no probably as often as a movie studio chief, whose job is to say no, nine times out of 10…

JON LANDAU: We would say no so often that people just stopped asking us. That was the case in film work, and especially when Bruce first emerged after Born to Run as such a cinematic type of presence, and so many filmmakers recognized his potential if he went down that path. We would get all kinds of feelers, calls, proposals, and we would talk about it. But that wasn’t what we were up to, it wasn’t what Bruce was up to at the time. This was different. [Scott] compresses a great deal, but at the beginning we have the bar scene [young Bruce is sent by his mother to bring his father home] and the ominous overtones, and they finally lead to young Bruce sitting on his bed, in the form of this amazing young boy actor [Matthew Pellicano Jr], one of the best child performances I’ve seen.

And with this very intense look, then it cuts to the end of The River tour, which is very celebratory. And then what comes after is sort of slightly humorous scene between Bruce and me, and we’re talking about what comes next. And you begin to start to get this part of the story that Scott is telling. When it comes to Bruce’s work, what comes next? Because we reached a certain point where, okay, you’re out there, you’re struggling, you’re fighting for the recognition for people to see who you are, for everything that all your fantasies about it are, going back to the first time you saw Elvis. Bruce got bigger later, but we were plenty big right then. And so the question is, hey, there’s got to be more than this, what else is there? We see it start to take shape in the way that Scott compressed it, and the way he wrote it and his business of translating the experience into a two hour film and taking a year of life and doing that.

DEADLINE: After the New York Film Festival premiere, Bruce you gave a shout-out from the stage to Paul Schrader, for being a good sport about you lifting his movie title Born in the USA for a song you wrote during those Nebraska sessions. Paul told me he wrote the film for you, and his movie script sat on the coffee table in that rented house while you wrote songs for Nebraska. He turned the film into Light of Day, named for the song you wrote as a make-good for lifting the original title for your song. Fans will be left to ponder what might have happened had you starred in that movie. Paul said Jon told him that it was a pass, because he didn’t want to become Elvis Presley, who became the best paid movie star but stopped growing creatively. Baz Luhrmann made the narrative film Elvis and the documentary EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert. Baz told me that Elvis didn’t really even read the scripts, just showed up and read the lines and sang the songs, and that the Colonel cashed the checks and kept 50% or more. He stopped growing as an artist. How much of a concern was that for you guys?

SPRINGSTEEN: Well, no. If you see Elvis in King Creole, which was his first film, it’s quite excellent.

LANDAU: It’s fantastic.

SPRINGSTEEN: Michael Kurtiz directed it really well. It’s a really good picture, and I think he had it right [in assessing] Elvis’ direction for his film career. I think he was looking at Brando and James Dean, which are directions he could have gone in. Even Jailhouse Rock and Loving You are highly entertaining; they’re fun films that feel authentic to Elvis. But King Creole really is the one where you really see what could have been but failed to be because of the material they ended up working with.

In my case, around the time I was 25, I was offered a variety of different film roles. I was very hesitant because I didn’t want to dilute the work that I was doing musically. I said, there’s been very few successful musician/actors. You’d have to say Sinatra was the one who did it quite well. But I was so intent on working with my audience on constructing what I wanted my work and my persona to be about at that time. I knew that film was an incredibly collaborative medium, and I was not a collaborative guy in that sense.

DEADLINE: What do you mean?

SPRINGSTEEN: I just was not going to be able, at that moment, to put myself at the service of the director, the producer, the studio. That was something I never would’ve had the confidence for at 25 or 26 years old.

So I said, I love movies, but I’m just going to stay away from this. That pretty much has been my method of operation for most of my life, but particularly when you’re building your world, from my first record to certainly Born in the USA when I was 35. You are building your world, who you want to be for your fans and for yourself. And it looked like that would be a sidetrack in what I was deeply invested in. I didn’t want to dilute the work I was creating.

LANDAU: Yeah. Little footnote to the King Creole story. Did you know it was written by a man named Michael V. Gazzo, who would later play Frankie Pentangeli in The Godfather Part II…

DEADLINE: Who betrayed Michael Corleone, rescinded his congressional testimony after seeing his Italian brother, and then opened his veins in the bathtub? I had no idea. For a couple guys who spurned a movie career, you clearly have seen a lot of them in the downtime between concerts…

LANDAU: But the film thing, my funniest recollection is after we did the famous shows at The Bottom Line in 1975, kicking off Born to Run, we went to L.A. and played a similar run at the Roxy. And at that time, Jerry Bruckheimer and his late partner Don Simpson, were catching fire. This was at the beginning of their mega success. Don Simpson called me at 5 a.m., after the first night of the Roxy engagement. I wasn’t that savvy about recognizing when people were really altered. But he was a wild man on the phone and he was selling, well, you can’t believe what he was selling. It was the next Elvis. I just said, “Okay, sounds great. I got to get back to sleep.” That was the end of it.

SPRINGSTEEN: I also met Dino De Laurentiis, and he was making a film called King of the Gypsies, which was actually ended up being quite a good film. Eric Roberts’ debut. He’s very good in it along with, but so there was some interest in me starring in that. I met Milos Forman, who was making a film of Hair and was interested in me. There was another, about the day James Dean died.

So these things were all floating around me at the time. I must have had a window of some sort open, and I met the folks. But when it came down to committing to anything, I always came back to the same thing. This was a world I don’t know, and I’ve worked really hard. I do know my world and I know what my ambitions are, and I’m going to stick to what I know. Until Scott Cooper came along.

DEADLINE: You went through hell to finish your breakthrough record Born to Run, and wanted to toss it in the garbage the week before you turned it in. You are a hands-on, totally in control artist, and the closest thing to that in movies is the director. How to explain why you gave up control here?

SPRINGSTEEN: Well, part of it is the difference between 25 and 75. A lot goes on in those intervening years. And of course, your curiosity about a lot of things always opens up. Scott came down and I’d seen several of his films and I liked them very much. You could see he had a feel for blue-collar life. I liked the grittiness, and the realness. Then it was just timing. Warren writes the book. Warren comes to visit me with Scott. We spend a couple hours in the afternoon and it sounded like a fascinating idea for me, at this point in my life.

LANDAU: I think that while Scott’s films were highly relevant, I honestly think it was that meeting we had. What we went for was, Scott. We both felt this was somebody we had an instinct we could trust. What does that mean? Bruce and myself were interested in being helpful. It’s not that we wanted the film to be exactly this way or that way. We’re not filmmakers in that sense, right? We wanted to trust that somebody, the man in charge, was going to do his goddamn-dest to make an honest and truthful film. That’s what I got out of that meeting with Scott, that this is a guy, that’s what he’s going to do. I wished he had.

[Bruce and Cooper break into laughter]. No, take that out. I’m kidding.

DEADLINE: A lot of us had issues with our fathers, who probably got it worse from their fathers. I would listen to bootlegs of your concerts when you talked about things like your father bringing a guy in to cut your hair when your leg was busted up in a motorcycle accident. You told him you would never forgive him. There were so many stories, each a light for me and so many others. Was there an element here that ceding control might encourage others to not invest so much in their darkest moments, as you were tempted to do?

SPRINGSTEEN: No. I think if there was anything I was concerned with, it was that Scott would make a good film and that we would tell a good story and an accurate and authentic representation of that particular period in my life. I wasn’t thinking like, oh, maybe if people aren’t doing well mentally, or they’re having [trouble] … after I saw the film, I had people come up to me and say, gee, this might help some folks that are struggling and come from a place where they don’t know how to get help. In the ’50s and ’60s if you grew up in my town or neighborhood, I don’t think I had ever heard the word psychiatrist or analysis. Where I grew up, there were five houses [occupied by his family] that we all were in surrounding this church, and there was somebody really sick in every house. It really was in my family’s blood.

I got used to that being a part of life. These people were my cousins and aunts, and I got used to being around people who were not well and who had no recourse as to what to do about it. And I didn’t realize that my father was one of those until later in life, when it really, really manifested itself.

He always manifested depression, but nobody called it that. I never heard anybody use the word depression. He was just moody, always in a bad mood. There was no psychological awareness whatsoever, or psychological talk of any kind as far as it went when someone’s not well. So my main concern was that we make as good a film as we can. And I knew that was in Scott’s hands, he understood my story. And obviously it’s good if it can help folks somewhere or another, but it wasn’t what I was thinking about.

DEADLINE: Scott, you had a healthy relationship with your dad. Why did this grab you so strongly that you came to Bruce and Jon and said, I know you’ve never said yes before, but you should say it now?

SCOTT COOPER: Nebraska, first and foremost. I was 18 or 19 when my introduction to Bruce Springsteen came through that album. My father, to whom I dedicated the film, had really been my early musical educator, and that was classical country music, jazz, classical, the blues. And then at 18 years old, when you are most needy in your life, when you’re disaffected or unsure of your place in the world or where or how you’re going to fit in, an album like Nebraska comes to you and it hits you like a bolt of lightning. That album has stayed with me ever since that day. It’s an album that I would return to often when writing other films like Out of the Furnace, Black Mass and Hostiles. That, and [The Ghost of] Tom Joad in particular, really spoke to me on a deep personal level. I try to personalize all my films in some way. So even though I had a very healthy relationship with my father, we had seen our fair amount of tragedy as a family, as most families do.

So art speaks to me in some ways that inform my life and my work. Then I read Warren Zane’s book, and Warren and I discussed that in reading Bruce’s wonderful autobiography, all the other chapters in Bruce’s memoir Born to Run were quite lengthy, except for the chapter about Nebraska. That led to our fateful meeting in New Jersey. I knew that I could tell that story. I knew that I could personalize that story. I knew that I could tell Bruce’s journey in a way that would speak to people from all walks of life. I tend to make films about people who live in the quiet corners of America, who are often overlooked, who aren’t often the subjects of films. I would approach this that same way. It’s just that the central figure happened to be a man named Bruce Springsteen.

DEADLINE: A quick yes?

COOPER: It was. Well, it was a quick yes on their part. Before I came down, I found it daunting to make a film about Bruce Springsteen, a radio hero of mine, someone whom I had greatly admired for the way he spoke up for people who don’t have a voice. I knew that making a film about Bruce Springsteen could be divisive because Bruce is beloved. There are a lot of people who feel a certain ownership over Bruce. There are also the potholes of making a film in the musical biography genre because they adhere to a certain formula. I knew that this film would not adhere to that. This would be more a psychological art of creation. A man who defies expectations of his own, and his record company Columbia, to make his most personal album, which is essentially a reckoning. That’s not something that people who are casual movie fans might expect, because when you make a film in this genre, it’s typically something of spectacle.

DEADLINE: This was not going to be a jukebox musical?

COOPER: I knew that I was going to make this film the way Bruce made Nebraska, which is to say, simple and spare minimalist, no spectacle. The camera doesn’t move away.

SPRINGSTEEN: It really has very little to do with the so-called biopic.

COOPER: We were all real clear on you didn’t want that. We didn’t even have to talk about it, because the material itself was not biopic material. The film was about a little more than a year, as opposed to the big canvas, from beginning to end. The whole epic saga.

LANDAU: My recollection is we had this get together, which was just really quite electric in its own way. I said to Scott afterwards, we haven’t done this before. What comes next? He says, well, I can write a treatment. We said, that sounds like a good idea. The treatment arrived very quickly, and Bruce said to me, okay, what comes next, again? The first draft, which I read and said, wow. It would get a whole lot better, but that first draft would’ve been a good movie, but not the great movie that Scott made.

SPRINGSTEEN: It was just natural, recognizable process in the sense that, very similar to the way we make records. You have an idea, something gets written, try to improve upon it, hopefully you do. Scott was really an incredible collaborator. If we had an idea, he would listen to it and measure it and see how it affected the story, and if it was going to move the story forward or add certain colors that were going to be advantageous to the film. He was an incredibly open, un-defensive and generous collaborator that really made us feel included in the process.

LANDAU: The only thing there that I’d add is that it’s still somewhat mystifying to me, given what Bruce just said, that there aren’t more scenes about me in the movie. I had good ideas…

DEADLINE: It occurred to me while watching, does Jon mainly just sit around and wait to hear from The Boss and help him sort his problems? Go and talk to the Columbia Records guys and say, here it is, Nebraska. Sony guys and say, alright, this is what we got.

SPRINGSTEEN: That’s the job.

LANDAU: Somebody’s got to do it. It landed on me.

DEADLINE: You can see the sweat equity investment by the two Jeremys who played you guys. Jeremy Allen White? I started by apologizing for mangling your songs in the car. In 40 years, I never got any better. It is hard to sing like Bruce Springsteen. This guy learns to play guitar and sing like you in what, six months?

LANDAU: He blew our minds.

DEADLINE: How did you help him get there, and when did you feel confident you weren’t going to have to dub the singing?

SPRINGSTEEN: I didn’t help him at all, really. He went on his own and connected with the fellas in Nashville, Dave Cobb, and worked with them on the singing and playing. I didn’t even know the level at which he was doing it. And when he came on set, he was prepared, musically, to do what the film needed and demanded. I was just as surprised as everybody else.

When I listened and there were certain things in the songs in Nebraska, where I’m going, okay, wait a minute, is that me or is that him? He caught the timbre, the tone, but also the internal understanding of the songs in a way that simply just sounded like someone singing those songs and understanding what they were about. That was the essential element of his musical performance that struck the deepest. Not whether he could sound more like me, less like me. He simply understood the essential nature of the music and performed it as such, and that simply made it believable. He did an incredible job there.

LANDAU: Scott in my observation is a true actor’s director, and what I can see is how much affection the actors had for him. And if you look at the film and you look at the cast from top to bottom and the performances down to the bit players who walk on the screen. Jeremy Allen White, and the others acting in the film, every one of them, they’re artists, not movie stars.

SPRINGSTEEN: Down to the smallest role, the casting was fantastic. I was surprised to see the fellow who owns Frank’s Deli is actually in the film and is quite affecting for the moment that he’s there. That bartender in the Chinese restaurant; the woman who plays Faye’s manager [played by Odessa Young, Faye is a young single mother waitress who serves as a composite of the women Springsteen could not commit to as depression and demons raged in his brain]. You just loved that manager the moment you saw her. She’s so natural.

DEADLINE: Both Jeremy Strong and Jeremy Allen White are known for digging deep to get their characters right. Which one was the biggest barnacle where you were like, this guy’s calling me again?  

[Both laugh hard].

LANDAU: Oh, that’s easy. You want to guess?

DEADLINE: My guess would be Jeremy Strong, who played you, Jon?

LANDAU: You guessed right. It was so much fun to see someone else that committed. Jeremy Allen White was … softer.

SPRINGSTEEN: [My] Jeremy, he knew what he was doing, and he was very self-contained. He simply had an approach that was really independent of me. We hung out just a very little bit and we talked some. With the exception where he asked me to read some small piece of the script, and the occasional question or two, he was for the most part very independent in his preparation. Jeremy Strong was always very wide open in that he was constantly coming up with ideas. And I’m sure he was on the phone to Jon, but he was on the phone to me on at different occasions and came up with some wonderfully creative things that made Scott say, “Hey, let’s take a swing at this. Let’s try this.”

I can’t imagine a better creative environment than we had. It was really a joy. Yeah, that’s all the whole thing was. It was a joy. It was fun the entire time. Loved everyone I met, admired and respected everyone I saw on that set in whatever job they were doing. We had a golden experience, for people who had never been involved in film and then were involved in this one. That of course starts at the head [points at Cooper]. So that’s Scott’s organization. The way that he runs his set is just, it was just wonderful.

LANDAU: My favorite Jeremy Strong story, and I could write a book … he calls me up week before we’re going to start shooting. He says, Look, I had all these books made … he had a researcher, he knew more about me than I knew by the end, certainly as much as my mother knew. So he says, in every picture of you from this period, you’re wearing these same glasses. And I heard the word dorky, the same dorky glasses.

He said, did you happen to save them? It was 43 years later. I said, of course, I’ve been saving all of my glasses since I started wearing them in the fifth grade. I said, let me go down to the Landau archives in the basement. Check. I hold the phone for 10 seconds and go, oh, they’re missing. Luckily for us, these sort of big oversized lenses were popular at the time. So I was glad. I figured they would find something else, something a little cooler.

First time I show up in the set, there he is. He’s wearing the exact glasses. He got some prop master to make the f*cking glasses. I said you couldn’t lose those? But that’s him. That’s him.

COOPER: Luckily for us though, Bruce did save almost everything. And we raided his archives. Jeremy’s wearing some of his clothes, some of his props are in the movie.

DEADLINE: Paul Schrader told me he was surprised to see his Born in the USA script. How did they know I put the title over a map of Ohio?

COOPER: Bruce had it.

DEADLINE: Along with the Nebraska cassette tape, the letter that Paul Walter Hauser gives Jon from Bruce, describing his creative intentions? Was that the actual letter?

COOPER: Yeah, we made a copy of that. Bruce would doodle in the margins, and that’s there.

DEADLINE: Bruce, you keep everything in your archives? No wonder Jon couldn’t give Jeremy Strong his glasses. Did you have them?

SPRINGSTEEN: We’re hoarders.

LANDAU: We built this building in Monmouth, to hold it all.

SPRINGSTEEN: We don’t throw out anything.

COOPER: Thank God.

DEADLINE: I watched the film today, which makes three times for me…

LANDAU: That’s all? We’ve seen it 13 times.

DEADLINE: In this last viewing, I fixated on how you gravitated to this guy Charles Starkweather, who was the subject of Terrence Malick’s film Badlands, who killed 11 people in Nebraska in a murder spree. What was the significance when we see you change the lyrics of that song “Nebraska” from third person to first person? We also see you practically gun the engine of your muscle car on a lonely road and nearly flip it over, and you’re listening to this shocking band called Suicide. How desperate of a situation did you find yourself in because of your own internal angst? Were you at a point where you might actually do yourself harm?

SPRINGSTEEN: I don’t think so. I mean, not at the time. I think I was a little reckless in some of my behavior when I was in my early 30s. I simply didn’t understand myself. I drove very, very frustrated with myself and at myself, which leads you to be more volatile. I was more volatile at that time in my life, and I was somebody who’d take it more out on myself than others. I didn’t have a language to explain what I was going through, or what that was about. It wasn’t until I began to understand how deeply your past imprints itself on your present, that I began to be able to sort of control the different aspects of my personality.

As far as changing the tense of the song … I said, well, when you’re using he and she, you are putting yourself at a distance from your characters. So I said, it’s more powerful if I just say I, because really you’re always, in the end, you’re writing about yourself. You’re using those characters, you’re using those circumstances, you’re using that story, but ultimately you’re writing about your own inner life. And that’s what I was doing.

DEADLINE: I recently interviewed Billy Bob Thornton and Sam Elliott who are doing Landman. They both had tough dads. Billy Bob said his father knocked the snot out of him routinely. He said one of the things that made him proudest was breaking that cycle with his kids, who grow embarrassed at the level of affection he shows them in public. I’ve seen your interactions with your kids, when one became a firefighter, another a champion equestrian rider. How about you breaking the cycle from the coldness of your father in childhood? Your image is more readily associated with fast cars, not jumping horses.

SPRINGSTEEN: Well, it was a thing for her, so it became a thing for me [laughs]. I look back on my own upbringing and in many ways I received a lot of good things from my parents. But you don’t want to pass on their troubles or their sins. I always say, your children’s sins should be their own, not yours. And so I was very concerned with, I always said, well, gee, if I fail my children, I will have failed in life. If I fail my sons, if I fail my daughter, I will have failed in life. Because I know better. I’m not somebody who doesn’t know. I know better, and I know who I need to be, who I should be and what I should be doing. So that became very, very important to me. And you do break a lot of the chains of the toxicity that gets handed down from generation to generation.

LANDAU: Bravo.

DEADLINE: I had issues with my own dad. He was an alcoholic for a long time, and then he stopped. But I was watching the scene where your character goes to L.A., to find his father. When he finds him at the bar in this Chinese restaurant, I was saying to myself, geez, why couldn’t these two have sat down at the bar, shared their pain and discussed the commonality of what they struggled with? Then I realized, I never did that with my father. I guess it just doesn’t work that way.

SPRINGSTEEN: Yeah. My father would have had no language to have that conversation. I have sat with my father at a variety of different bars from different times back when we were out in California. And that was not a conversation he desired, or was prepared to have. The best thing you could do was be with him, and talk about whatever the events of the day were or whatever was on his mind. That was your best shot at intimacy. So that’s pretty much what I did.

LANDAU: Just looking at it from the film and the filmmaking point of view, to have that shot at the beginning of the young Bruce in the bar [telling him his wife waited outside in the car], and then two-thirds of the way through the film, you have the return to the bar. But it’s a very different scene. It’s beautiful, the way Scott shows how much is changing from the childhood moment to the present. I love that contrast between the two scenes in the bar.

SPRINGSTEEN: One of the things I did talk with Scott about was, I don’t want to paint just a one-dimensional picture of my dad. When I was very young, he was very rough. He was young and much more volatile than he was towards the end of his life. Fundamentally, he was a pretty soft and gentle soul most of the time. When he was young, he was an alcoholic and he was not a happy drunk. For one reason or another, it brought out the worst in him. And later in life, he’d gotten on correct medication, which assisted him psychologically. And he got to know my children. He was a good grandpop. We became as close as it was possible to be with my dad, which was loving, but not knowing. I had to accept that he was fundamentally unknowable and that was the cards that we were all dealt.

The later scenes in the film, at the bar and at the [concert] where I sit on his lap, which is something that actually happened, were very important in showing that part of my father’s sensitivity.

DEADLINE: You treasure that memory now?

SPRINGSTEEN: Yeah.

DEADLINE: Jon, there’s this part in the movie where you are speaking to your Columbia Records exec Al Teller. Bruce is poised to take off like a rocket after Born to Run, Darkness on the Edge of Town and The River. And you are selling him Nebraska, and that there would be no tour, no picture of Bruce on the album, no publicity campaign, no nothing. It’s your version of the moment John Candy had in Planes, Trains & Automobiles. He’s trying to get Steve Martin home for Christmas, in a husk of a car that went through hell. A cop pulls him over and asks if he had any idea how fast he was going. No, sir, because the whole dashboard melted in the fire. After acknowledging there was no roof, or mirrors, he throws in that the radio plays as clear as day. Of course, the car was impounded, but your salesmanship succeeded. What was going through your head when laying a strategy that had to be the nightmare for any top record company exec with Bruce on the roster?

LANDAU: Well, I think that what Jeremy shows there is that I had no doubt. I had no doubt Al Teller was talking to a wall of steel. I’m being a little Buddha-like, that was the way Jeremy interpreted it. But I’m a man who knows how the conversation’s going to end. And here’s why. Because in the film, I had just gone through the scene in the diner and we’ve now succeeded in getting the album to exactly where we want it. Where Bruce was satisfied. Bruce had laid out to me what the plan was, which was … no plan.

In the diner, Bruce says to me all those things I say to Al. So first of all, I’m doing my job. I have a job, and I to answer to him [points to Bruce[.

Okay. Well, so how’s that meeting going to end? You think I’m going to come out of the meeting and say, you know what? Now that I’ve talked to Al, I think we’re going to do a big tour? [Bruce laughs hard.]. So it’s just how do we get there? What I love about the scene, and Scott and I talked about it a little, I said it’s very important to me … Al, who I haven’t seen in years, but was a friend during these years when we worked together … Al was the classic Top 40 singles guy. And he was there representing the record company. He wasn’t bad. We weren’t mad at the record company. He represented their interest. I represented our interest, and that was the discussion. And at the end of the day, he says, if it was anybody else, I’d hand the thing back and tell you to come back when you got three hits on it. That’s not going to work with you guys. Now, why does he say that? He says that because by then there was a whole established history that nobody was going to tell us what to do.

So he was just, he’s verbalizing that. He had to say, I’m dying to tell you this. Give me some f*cking hits. It’s not going to work. So he knew.

SPRINGSTEEN: And we’d had the success, enough success at that point to where we showed we knew what we were doing. As unorthodox as these requests were at the time at Columbia, we held a certain amount of power and we decided that was the moment to exercise it. And so we did.

LANDAU: But the point is that Bruce didn’t have a choice, which the film shows. Because the record was just the record that it had to be, I didn’t have a choice. So it was … I don’t know. It seems very unusual and not the scene you expect. You expect a big bad record company and the poor downtrodden artist. We weren’t downtrodden artists at that point.

SPRINGSTEEN: They weren’t the bad record company. We were just trying to sort out, what do we have here?

DEADLINE: They knew they had a rocket that was about to take off, and suddenly it was like, wait. It’s not going to take off right now. We’re going to put Born in the USA on the shelf. We got to do this first.

LANDAU: But I didn’t tell him about Born in the USA.

SPRINGSTEEN: They didn’t know that was coming.

LANDAU: No. Because if I had distracted them with that … and the other thing about it is by the way, is you say, well, I’m telling ’em how great it is. I don’t tell ’em how great it is. I don’t say one word about how great it is. I refuse to sell him on the album. I just said, this is what the album is. We don’t need your permission. We don’t need your approval. This is what we’re doing.

COOPER: Just listening to this conversation has reminded me over the last couple of years, what a gift this is. You asked the question, who was the biggest barnacle? I’m the biggest barnacle. These two have been such a gift to the screenwriting process, to the shooting process, to the cutting process. You can’t make this film.

DEADLINE: I’d like to have Jon’s number so I can ask him to call my wife from time to time and explain why she should let me out of the doghouse…

LANDAU: I’m not that good with wives. [They all laugh].

DEADLINE: Two more from me. This film shows what was going on in Bruce’s turbulent life and mind, and we see the futility of his attempt to have a relationship with Faye, played by Odessa Young, the single mother he keeps disappointing. She was a composite of numerous women you dated back then. Is this film a kind of blanket explanation/apology to all those women who saw a future with you?

SPRINGSTEEN: Well, I don’t know. It was … you’re young. I really didn’t know what I was doing. In a lot of these relationships, I had some great times with quite wonderful women who were very good to me and with whom I just simply did not have the ability to reciprocate at that moment. It was just something about myself. I just simply didn’t understand it. I didn’t even know why. All I knew is, I’d get to a certain point and I’d hit a wall. I’d hit a wall. So the Faye character was very important to me to have in the film because I felt that that was a big part of my personal life and did need to be explained. And you can kind of call it whatever you like, but it was a big part of my life at that time because I was at the beginning of trying to sort out how to have a life.

As I’ve said about the film, the film is about a guy who knows exactly who he is and what he’s doing. For three hours. The other 21, he’s clueless and lost. That’s the essence of what the picture is about. He’s trying to figure out who am I and what do I do with those other 21? Where is my everything?

DEADLINE: Last one. You were very gracious, inviting Scott and his family into your home when he lost his house in the L.A. wildfires. Have you evicted him yet?

LANDAU: No, but I’ve collected the rent.

SPRINGSTEEN: No, we were glad to do it. And he was very gracious about it. He moved along rather quickly.

COOPER: Mike, I would say that Bruce Springsteen and Jon Landau have come into my life at exactly the right time.

LANDAU: I know we’re wrapping up and I just, in this article, if you could work into it my appreciation that the scene that we shot where I steal all the money, like the normal manager in the Hollywood film, got left on the cutting room floor. Thank you, Scott.

DEADLINE: Did that include the line of dialogue where you say, wait a minute, the Colonel put Elvis in all those movies, and got 50% or more of everything he earned?

LANDAU: Exactly. Peter Guralnick, the great biographer and an old friend, he came across this cache of letters that he believes casts the Colonel in a completely different light.

SPRINGSTEEN: Have you read that book?

LANDAU: He sent it to me. We were talking about it and I said, you can’t rehabilitate the Colonel as a manager. Here’s why. Number one, here’s the greatest international artist of all time, and never did a show outside the United States. Because of the Colonel. The second thing is, during the greatest moment of creativity, his greatest years, he signed him to two films a year, and the only music he would put out was the soundtrack from these … after the very first ones, these horrible films with these mostly horrible songs. I said, I don’t care about the business part. I just said that’s, I mean, what can you say? That’s horrible.

SPRINGSTEEN: You’re not protecting your client’s talents.