Bruce Springsteen Tells Telluride Crowd About ‘Deliver Us From Nowhere’

Of all the panels and Q&As happening during this year’s Telluride Film Festival, probably the most anticipated one featured a visit from rock royalty in the form of an unbilled (but not terribly secret) appearance by Bruce Springsteen in a group discussion following the second-ever screening of the dramatic feature “Springsteen: Deliver Us From Nowhere.”

Asked why he said yes to this project after presumably being approached so many other times to have his life turned into a film, Springsteen took issue with the premise of the question. “Um, I don’t know that he have,” he chuckled. Manager Jon Landau, seated beside him, did not jump in to mention how many movie queries he kept from ever making it to his client’s desk.

But “what brought this one along,” Springsteen continued, “was that I think we had a very specific idea — (or) Scott (Cooper, the writer-director) had a very specific idea, particularly, of what we were gonna attempt to do. And, for lack of a better word, it was an anti-biopic. You know, it’s really not a biopic — it just takes a couple years out of my life when I was 31 and 32 and looks at them really at a time when I made this particular record (“Nebraska”), and when I went through some just difficult places in my life, you know. And, I’m old and I don’t give a fuck what I do now.”

Springsteen shared the stage at Telluride’s 600-seat Palm Theater with Landau, Cooper and leading men Jeremy Allen White (who plays Springsteen circa the early ’80s) and Jeremy Strong (who portrays Landau).

White, whose vocal performances in the movie are virtually indistinguishable from the handful of vintage Springsteen recordings also included in spots, was asked about the challenge of reproducing that tone.

“When Scott and I were talking about the possibility of me doing this, I remember telling you (Cooper), ‘I don’t how to sing and I don’t know how to play the guitar’’… (But) he was sure. I had five, six months to get ready, and I had a great team of people to help me get there,” he said, citing among others Dave Cobb, who produced the soundtrack tunes. “We found it over time, and when I recorded the majority of the album ‘Nebraska’ in Nashville at RCA (before filming), that was a breakthrough for me. I think I found a lot of confidence in those sessions, which was about a weekend.”

Cooper said White had “an intensity of vulnerability and authenticity that I saw in Bruce’s work and in archival interviews with Bruce… Jeremy has two things that really, for me, make up Bruce Springsteen, and one is humility. And the other is swagger.”

“That’s half-right,” Springsteen quipped in response, to laughter and applause.

White talked about the larynx-challenging duty of replicating Springsteen’s loudest if not necessarily loveliest vocal, on “Born in the USA.” (That song was not ultimately part of the “Nebraska” album, but nonetheless was included in the film because it was being demo-ed for the bare-bones project before the decision was made to hold it for a fully rocking-out rendition on the subsequent blockbuster album that was eventually named after it.)

“I saw you guys later that night,” White told Springsteen and Landau, “Do you remember this? You guys had ‘Road Diary’ [a recent Springsteen documentary] coming out? I had spent an afternoon singing ‘Born in the USA,’ and I got a migraine and I lost my voice. I didn’t know how Bruce was still performing this song, or ever performed this song, never mind with two and a half, three hours more of music. And I saw Bruce that evening after I recorded the song, and he said, ‘What’d you do today?’ I said” — and here White went into the raspiest possible speaking voice — “‘I recorded “Born in the USA.”‘ He said, ‘Sounds about right. You sound exactly like me.’”

Springsteen was asked about a scene that occurs near the end of the movie [mild emotional spoiler ahead] in which the artist’s father asks him to sit on his lap, backstage at a gig.

“That happened,” the musician said. “My pop came to the show. We were exactly where the film says it was, in Los Angeles. And I went backstage and he was sitting in that chair and he said, ‘Come sit on my lap.’ I said exactly the words that I said (in the movie): ‘Dad, I’m 32 years old.’ ‘Come on, come on.’ So that came directly” out of real life.

Another pivotal scene didn’t happen in real life, exactly the way it does in the movie — yet it sprang out of Springsteen’s imagination, or at least the literal needle-drop did. It’s a scene between the Springsteen and Landau characters that ends with the playing of a Sam Cooke classic, and it was not written that way.

Said Springsteen: “The scene that goes over Sam Cooke’s ‘Last Mile of the Way,’ which is one of my favorite set pieces in the film, really came from Jeremy Strong phoning me up the night before the scene was going to be shot in the bedroom and asking me, ‘What are the songs you play for one another? And what song would you play for somebody if you were trying to save their life?’” After some thought upon hanging up, Springsteen recalled, “I went right to ‘The Last Mile of the Way.” And the next day they shot the scene, and it was just a testament to Jeremy’s strong insightfulness and his relentless… I think we talked all night on the phone that night, but what happened the next day was, that beautiful piece of music got into the film, and the scene was one of my great favorites.”

Strong elaborated: “In the early days, Jon would go out to New Jersey, and they would listen to music together. And it’s of course a language and it’s of course where words can’t go any further. And in that scene I felt that there was something I wanted to be able to express to him that words were not sufficient (for). And so, yes, I reached out to these guys and thought, what if I put in a song? And it was after a number of different ideas that Bruce had that idea. And it’s obviously such an emotionally huge song. But what I love about it is, it’s a testament to a director who (first) shot the scene as scripted. I asked sound to prepare the tape. They didn’t tell anybody. ‘Hey, Scott, do you mind if I just try something?’ ‘Sure.’” Then, “Jeremy (Allen White), do you want to know what it’s gonna be?” The other actor said no, he’d be happy to be surprised in the moment.

Cooper talked about the origins of the film. “When I read Warren Zanes’ wonderful book, ‘Deliver Me From Nowhere: The Making of Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska’ — if you haven’t read that, or his Tom Petty biography, I recommended them… The way he explained it to me was, in reading Bruce’s great memoir, the shortest chapter in the book was about the making of ‘Nebraska,’ and I think that’s what intrigued Warren. And then when Warren and I discussed my adapting it, I said, ‘Listen, this record was a part of my life long before your book.’ My father, who passed away the day before I started shooting this film. introduced me to (the album). And in a movie that is about a lot of things, including fathers and son, his spirit carried me through it. And it took me back to understanding what a deeply personal and very specific time this was in Bruce’s life.

“Bruce could speak to this much better than I, but it was at one of his lowest times… I was interested in a man who’s sitting alone in a bedroom with a four-track reporter facing this unresolved trauma and mental health illness asking the questions that we all often ask when we’re lost and we’re facing the sort of issues that really no one else can understand.

“And I knew at that point this was a film I had to make, and I said to myself, well, much like that scene where Jon Landau was in his office, speaking to the record executive, I knew that this is gonna be a real commercial risk. So thank you, 20th Century.”

Springsteen talked about having watched the very first screening of the film the night before with his sister, Pamela, who is seen as a youngster in the many black-and-white flashback scenes portraying their upbringing in Freehold, NJ.

“I got to watch the film with my one-year-younger sister who is just a little blonde girl on the film, but it was actually a little brown, short-haired girl. But she sat there with me and we watched the film and she held onto my hand, and at the end of it, she turns to me and says, ‘Isn’t it wonderful we have this?’”