Vanity Fair: How do you know when you’ve landed on a story that you have to tell? When do you know that story will work for you? Bradley Cooper: I don’t even honestly know if I could put it into words, because it is a feeling state and it’s sort of instinctual. You just sort of know it. And you know it because one realizes that the amount of work it will take to realize this story has to be fueled by an immense furnace of energy inside of oneself. And that energy is motivated by love of it.
He went to Harvard, and then he went to in Philadelphia, and then he was living at Aaron Copland’s, and then he got a job as an assistant to Artur Rodzinski at the New York Philharmonic and moved into the top of Carnegie Hall. And it felt like New York breathed life into him, and he found a group of people and he was able to explore musical theater, and he was just, as a 24-year-old, on fire there.