‘Maestro’ DP Matthew Libatique on Telling Leonard Bernstein’s Story Onscreen With and Without Color

To tell the love story of Leonard Bernstein and his wife, Felicia Montealegre, director Bradley Cooper reteamed with his Oscar nominated cinematographer, Matthew Libatique, and used various film looks, starting with black and white before moving to color and a widescreen aspect ratio. Cooper, who also stars as the renowned composer and conductor in the Netflix drama, gravitated toward film and championed the use of celluloid after running a series of tests, the DP says.

Cooper also used actual locations to great effect, including Carnegie Hall, Ely Cathedral, Tanglewood, Broadway’s St. James Theatre and the Bernsteins’ Fairfield house in Connecticut. For the early part of the movie, Libatique explains, he used Kodak’s one available black and white stock. “That’s in the film with varied filtration to maximize the black and white,” he says.

Inspirations included the photography of John Gruen, Elliott Erwitt and Roy DeCarava. The movie opens in grand style and begins in black and white with a scene in Bernstein’s apartment (a set), which at the time was above Carnegie Hall. “Bradley had this very early idea that we start the film in the dark and all we see is sort of a shape of light,” Libatique says.

“Lenny gets a phone call, which happens in the dark. He [opens the curtains] and reveals the light into the space. It brings everybody into the movie. It mimics this sort of stage feel, this proscenium.” The camera follows the energetic Lenny as he gets out of bed, grabs his robe and races out of his apartment.

“The camera was naturally in a high, sort of God POV,” he continues. “The camera pulls Bradley through the space, through a corridor that we built, and then through a dissolve like blend that takes us into Carnegie Hall, which was basically a Cablecam shot that took us all the way through from back of house to the upstage,” revealing the iconic five story concert venue.

The switch to color occurs at the part of the drama when Lenny and Felicia (played by Carey Mulligan) are married and living in New York during the ’70s. “It smashes to a cut of Felicia’s back up against the wall,” says Libatique. “And now they live in the Dakota building.” Here, Libatique says he wanted to get “as close to Kodachrome without trying so hard for a Kodachrome feel.

The black and white naturally transported you to the 1940s. I wanted color to be able to transport you to the ’70s. “I wanted to make sure that I would render all those colors honestly — but, at the same time, adding texture and grain,” he continues, noting that this involved some influence from the color photography of Saul Leiter, Fred Herzog and William Eggleston.

“So much of it, when you look at those photographs, is the color that’s inside the shot. It’s less about the photography, really. It’s more about what the color was at that time.” For the 1980s — which bookends the decades spanning film — the movie expands to a 1.85:1 widescreen aspect ra tio.

This includes the shot when Felicia dies — a powerful close up of her face, in light, with Lenny, in shadow, holding her. Says Libatique of Cooper’s direction of that shot, “He wanted to see her in the light in the last moments and have his character fade away into the background, because in the film so much of Lenny’s life overshadows hers.” .

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