Kevin Thompson On Building Leonard Bernstein’s Homes Away From the Podium for ‘Maestro’

Any time Leonard Bernstein entered a room, he owned it. As a premiere godfather to American music, he held a respect wherever he went, and people were fascinated by his presence. As we barrel through Bradley Cooper’s tribute to this trailblazing artist, we are taken through several of Bernstein’s homes that he shared with his wife Felicia Montealegre Cohn (played by Carey Mulligan). We often think about how artists live in the public, but rarely do we think about the spaces they occupy between masterpieces. Production designer Kevin Thompson’s work on Maestro illustrates Bernstein’s successful climb as a person in the public eye so well that we can’t help but want to touch every keepsake and picture on the walls.

We meet a younger Bernstein on the fateful morning that he received the phone call that he was to conduct at Carnegie Hall that very night. He races out of his quarters, down a curved hall, and into the house—the stage almost smiling back at him and saying, “See you soon…” We only spend a few scenes in Bernstein’s Carnegie Hall space, but it never feels unimportant. The huge skylight on the slanted wall lets in endless light, and there are bookshelves built into the upper loft’s structure to make it feel like books, records, and art are all part of a foundation of Bernstein’s life. The space was more than just establishing the maestro’s humble beginnings.

“It was one of the first scenes that Bradley and I spoke about—he did conceive it as a one-shot opening with the drum beat of On the Waterfront,” Thompson says. “He described how he wanted Lenny to wake up and throw open the curtain and then run into the hallway to the box at Carnegie Hall. In fact, Lenny did live in the studios that were made available to artists for rehearsals as well as living in. That was based on an actual loft apartment that had a double-height ceiling with a loft area for sleeping with two big skylights. Those skylights were an exact size of what those were, and we interpellated the floor plan and the height of the loft to work for the energy of Lenny moving down the stairs and out into the hallway. It required a lot of design nuancing since we were designing for black-and-white and the aspect ratio, which was taller instead of wider. It went through many subtle incarnations and architectural changes.

We had to work with the DP to figure out how to move the camera through the space and what walls and sections of ceiling to take out. It ended up, for the most part, to be what Bradley envisioned it to be, and that was very satisfying to go full circle with it. I do think that it laid the groundwork for a lot of the living spaces, because we tried to bring authenticity and intimacy into that working space. There were a lot of visual references that alluded to how he lived and how he collected music. Or what kind of mentors he had. Since that was his first home with his first piano, it informed us to move things through his different living situations that were subliminally there for the characters. Maybe other people didn’t notice it, but we moved different pieces of set dressing into the Connecticut house and the Osborne apartment. And then, ultimately, into the Dakota.”

There are joyous nuggets of history all through Cooper’s film, and that extends into the production design. In every living space, I wanted to walk through alone to soak in all the exquisite details, and Thompson explained that creating that intimacy was paramount.

“In Fairfield, the piano in the living room is the piano that his piano teacher gave him when he was a student,” he says. “It still has a little plaque on it. Instead of moving it to Carnegie Hall, we got a model that was exactly the same, so it felt like the same one. Any time you do period, I think it’s important to layer history in that decade—whatever it is. It’s not all from one time. The mandate from Bradley in prep was all about that intimacy. Their lives are so well documented that there are endless videos that you can lose yourself in.”

When we see Lenny and Felicia being interviewed by Edward R. Murrow, we see an all-American style transported into the couple’s home in the Osborne Apartments. It reminded me so much of an elevated version of every successful married couple that I saw growing up on television. As you get closer, you realize so many more details. The curved couch indicates that maybe Felicia and Lenny entertain in their homes whenever they feel like it. The walls are filled with pictures and documents, and I adore the cushioned, wooden chairs that sit opposite the living space.

“Instead of going through each decade of their lives, Bradley wanted to progress lyrically from moment to moment of very specific points in their relationship,” Thompson says. “It was a matter of understanding the emotional core of each period and figuring out what we were trying to say. With the Osborne, we jump to when they are living together in a very grown-up apartment together. They have a daughter, and they are really in the public eye. They are being recorded, and it’s being broadcast on a Saturday night, and you are learning about how they communicate with one another. Lenny is very exposing about himself, and that says a lot about him as an artist.

What happens for me, as a designer, you go into all the tangible homework—like researching time period and studying the real Osborne—and then you just throw it all away. It’s in your head and in your body, and you can create what you want for the cinematic aspect of the scene. And how Bradley wanted to block it in the hallway and you feel like you are in their house. You go in and have them present themselves to the audience. The architecture was designed for that specific blocking, and the decorations on the walls and on his desk gave you a feel of the time period without telling you, ‘Hey, it’s 1961.’ You can see that in the curved couch and the texture of the fabric. A lot of that is telegraphed to us in the choices that we made in the furniture. You do end up intuiting a lot, and our set decorator, Rena DeAngelo, worked so closely with me about what Lenny had on his walls. We collected things as if we were moving into the apartment, and we arranged them in a way that felt right for them in this moment of their lives.”

The Dakota is a legendary building in New York City, and Cooper uses it for some of his film’s darker, tangled scenes. When the camera sits down for a blistering fight between the married couple, we notice that there is a substantial bar between two of the windows of their bedroom. Out in a more public space, the hypnotic blue walls complement the dark wood paneling, and it feels like you could do backflips in the space. It never feels empty, though. If you look at the bookshelves behind Lenny’s piano, you see mountains of books and knickknacks—everything feels like it carries weight and history.

“Along with the thread of understanding the emotional core in each scene, the Dakota is legendarily for the people who lived in that building,” he says. “The culture and the diverse artistry and the party scene. It’s very specific, and Lenny and Felicia were right in the center of that. The Dakota is architecturally very detailed with heavy wood molding, big scale in the ceilings, and the windows are large on the second floor. In essence, it’s heavy. The decision to go with darker shades, especially in the bedroom and the study, was thought of since their study was that darker color, and things like the grasscloth in the bedroom being dark blue lent itself to that sadness. There is weight there in that apartment.

The feeling of the size of the bedrooms and the entire space really indicates how they have made it. You even see glints from his awards in the decorating, but that doesn’t change the problems in their marriage. It was a heavy time for them, and even though they had a family life there, it was meant to convey a tragic period of their time together. We designed that hallway with the elevator and the entry vestibule for how Bradley wanted to shoot them. The length of that hallway showed how far away he was when he kissing Tommy Cochran, and she turns the corner. The starkness reflected the height of the ceilings of the hallways of the Dakota, and there is little decoration there in contrast to the space they share together. Even the draperies are heavy. It felt insulated.”

Maestro is streaming now on Netflix.