Bradley Cooper didn’t like revised script of ‘Place Beyond the Pines’, says director

Bradley Cooper almost pulled out of the 2013 movie The Place Beyond the Pines, according to director Derek Cianfrance, after he received a revised script.

Before shooting started, the director—who also co-wrote the criminal drama starring Ryan Gosling and Eva Mendes—brought in screenwriter Darius Marder to rewrite “every word” of the film, he recently revealed to IndieWire at the New Directors/New Films festival.

However, Cianfrance claimed that after reading the revised screenplay, the Star Is Born actor was unhappy with the alterations made to his character, Avery, a police officer who, halfway through the film, shoots a sympathetic thief (Gosling).

“I had given [Marder] the script and he had a lot of notes for it, and I kind of agreed with a lot of what he was saying. And so we rewrote every word from 10 weeks to six weeks,” he recalled. “I remember giving Bradley Cooper the copy of The Place Beyond the Pines, the new script, and getting a voice message from him saying, ‘Bro, I just want to let you know I read the new draft and I’m out.’”

Cooper was apparently irritated by the fact that it was “not the movie that we had signed up to do,” according to Cianfrance. Since Cooper’s presence in the picture contributed to some of its funding, the director claimed to have visited the Maestro actor in an attempt to persuade him to reconsider.

“I was moving my family up to Schenectady the next day, and the whole crew was coming up there. I had all the money anyway,” the Blue Valentine director added. “I was like, ‘Can I come talk to you?’ So I went up to Montreal, and I had a long conversation with him from midnight to 3:30 in the morning where I got him back on. It was only in the last five minutes [he was convinced]. I think he just got tired. He wanted to go to bed.”