Gaga Media
Lady Gaga has landed in Toronto, and press interviews have officially begun before the North American premiere of A Star is Born on September 9th! In this interview with NOW Toronto, Lady Gaga explains how she prepared herself for her role as “Ally”.
We worked together doing some workshops with [acting coaches] Elizabeth Kemp and Susan Batson and I dyed my hair and took my makeup off a few months before we started filming, to get into the character. It was a challenge, but Bradley says it to me in the film, and he said it to me every day: ‘All you’ve got to do is trust me.’
Bradley only wanted all the cast-mates to trust him, whether the movie would be a success or not.
The one thing that I begged of everybody in the room here was to trust me. That even if the movie sucked, like, there’s not going to be any bullshit from them. They’re gonna be authentic no matter what. And I learned that from working with people like Clint Eastwood and David O. Russell. You know, David O. Russell would always do a no-bullshit take, which I loved and took. So I felt excited about what we were getting, because I felt like every day we were living it.
Lady Gaga recalls, the first day of shooting, which was a bit difficult for her, however, she learned a lot that day.
I had memorized my lines, and we sat down, and he said something off-script to me, and I just said the line that I had memorized. And then he said something else to me and I kept repeating [my] same line over and over again because I didn’t know what to do. And he said to me, ‘Are you okay? Do you feel like you need to cry?’ And then I cried for a second, and then I just threw the lines out the window. I still had them with me, but I was able to be in a more present conversation with him.
It really taught me something about being an actor: you have to know the story that you’re going to tell, and you have to know the lines. But at the end of the day, you have to be as honest as possible in the moment.
