Gaga Media
Eric Roth, screenplay writer of A Star is Born, was recently interviewed by The Wrap, where he discussed writing sessions with Bradley Cooper and table reads with Lady Gaga! Read below…
On when he gold involved:
“I got involved around Christmas time last year, I thought long and hard because I had never done a remake and the movies were obviously famous, and I didn’t want to be the person who would wreck it. It was a great challenge, but I thought, if we could accomplish this, it could be something unique — and it was well worth the challenge.”
On staying true to the story:
“Generally, I stayed as true as I could to the previous versions — the storytelling is basically the same,” he said. “I tried to tell it more in a modern and contemporary way, how the film was affected by our world. Bradley had such a unique point of view which made it easier to follow the way we might do this, and he wanted to make this personal and truthful and it feels like that when you’re watching it. It’s a mixture of trying to keep the old of what ‘A Star Is Born’ is and what makes it vital to the world we live in today.”
On how the original story included cover songs only:
“At one point, we were doing probably some covers and then Bradley said, ‘Let’s do no covers at all, let’s do all originals,’ except for ‘La Vie En Rose’ and ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow,’” he said. “I didn’t know what to make of that. But I knew when [Lady Gaga] opens her mouth, God steps in.”
On the table read with Lady Gaga:
“She’d sing a song, and we were all like, ‘Are you kidding me?’ I think I might be decent at what I do, but she’s in another realm.”
“She did a pretty wonderful thing with me, early on in the process, we had a meeting at her house in Malibu, and she asked me to stay when Bradley had to leave,” Roth added. “She asked if she could play a song for me and she sang ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow.’ It was magnificent. I don’t know if she was doing it for a purpose or not — but it definitely served its purpose.”
This article originally appeared in The Wrap.
