“The only place for us to ever show this movie is here,” Bradley Cooper told the Alice Tully Hall New York Film Festival closing night crowd about his third directorial Is This Thing On?
The festival itself was over the moon to receive the film knowing that Cooper had finished shooting a mere few months ago. They saw an unfinished print, and natch, were smitten. The movie, in many ways his Cooper’s love letter to the city where he went to grad school in the late 90s and the stand-up comedy scene. Arnett plays a guy who is on the brink of a divorce after a long marriage. He finds a catharsis in being an amateur stand-up comedian.
For Cooper, there’s not other guy but Arnett to play the lead, the duo have a longtime bromance. The two wrote the script with Mark Chappell.
“I met him in New York City, and I thought ‘That guy’s tall, I don’t want to fight that guy.’ And then we lived together in Venice, CA and I just thought the was the coolest guy, and he was always the funniest guy in the room, that how I looked at him,” said Cooper.
“Sometimes you meet these people and they go out of your life, but we stayed in each others lives for decades and now he’s somebody who I can consider one of my closest friends in my life, that I will take on my death bed, and know for a fact that I’ll think back and this his friendship meant the world to me,” added Cooper.
“To be able to make art together with someone you trust, and to see them show themselves. There’s so many moments in this movie that you’ll see tonight is just him, baring his soul through the character of Alex.”
Cooper expressed in his opening remarks his love of New York: “I do love the Eagles! But I consider myself a New Yorker!”
“Growing up in Philly, I would think of New York and I would drive and we would get lost in the West Village. We’d tried to get home and my Dad would be cursing. And I always thought to be here in Grad School in the late 90s to go to the New School…and New York was so specific. It had that magic, and really still has that magic, for me at least and we hope for most of you. That’s what we wanted to capture,” the Hangover actor-turned-filmmaker added.
Laura Dern plays Arnett’s wife, Tess in the movie. Arnett and Cooper also produced. The movie reps Cooper’s third as a director.
Cooper gave a shoutout to the movie’s team at Searchlight: “The other people who had faith in us was Matthew Greenfield and his whole team. I’ve had the honor of working with great studios. I’ve never had such great communication with a head of the studio. Matthew came to set. He was like ‘Can we make New York Film Festival?’ I was like ‘I don’t know Bro, we just finished the movie.’ And we were all together, we all banded together and Searchlight was a major part of that.”
Is This Thing On? opens Dec. 19 in limited theaters.
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