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After Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere director Scott Cooper suffered tremendous personal loss while making his new Bruce Springsteen biopic, the Boss himself stepped in to help his family out.
Immediately before production started on the Jeremy Allen White-led film, Cooper’s dad James died. During the final days of production on the movie, which centers on the making of Springsteen’s 1982 album Nebraska, the director, 55, and his family lost their home to the devastating wildfires in Los Angeles.
“He moved my family into his home when our house burned. My daughter Stella, who was learning guitar when her guitar burned — Bruce promptly sent her one of his,” Cooper says. “That’s who Bruce Springsteen is.”
Adds the filmmaker, “To move my family and me into his house while we got on our feet, it brings a special resonance to this movie, which is why it’s so hard to put it out into the world.”
Cooper shares daughters Ava and Stella with wife Jocelyne. “It was an incredibly painful movie; I guess, even though I wrote it and directed it and produced it, it doesn’t really feel like my movie,” he says.
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Cooper dedicated the biopic to his late father, whom he says is the person who first introduced him to Springsteen’s music. As a longtime fan, Cooper admits he was “a bit intimidated to meet” Springsteen, 76, for the first time, but he found the real-life man was “everything that I could have hoped [for]” in making the movie and in responding to real life tragedy.
Cooper directed one of the film’s loudest scenes — White, as Springsteen, playing the iconic hit “Born to Run” while on tour — and a tender moment between the rock star and his father Douglas (Stephen Graham), on the same day he received a “devastating call” about his home burning down. The director says he spent “five minutes in the corner crying, understanding our lives would never be the same” in the middle of the shoot. He calls those moments “without question, the hardest day I’ve ever had shooting a movie.”
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More than 10 months after the Los Angeles wildfires, Cooper tells PEOPLE that recovery and rebuilding efforts in Pacific Palisades and Altadena, Calif., will “take quite a while.”
“My daughters Ava and Stella are incredibly resilient. They’ve been better with this than I could have ever hoped, because we, like many others, lost everything,” he says. “And then a week after our house burns, we had to euthanize our dog. It was like a bad country song. It was awful. It’s been the worst year of my life, but also the best.”
Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere is in theaters Oct. 24.
