Scott Cooper's original plan was to write and direct a biopic of country legend Merle Haggard, but he couldn't obtain the rights.
Instead, Cooper, an actor making his first attempt at writing a screenplay, found and adapted an obscure novel about a boozing country singer still performing at dive bars across the Southwest.
"If I did this correctly," Cooper thought, "I would be able to create the fifth Highwayman."
What Cooper created is "Crazy Heart," a low-budget drama that nabbed three Academy Award nominations this week -- for Jeff Bridges' lead performance as the alcoholic musician "Bad" Blake, Maggie Gyllenhaal's supporting performance as a young journalist who becomes enamored of him, and the movie's signature song, "The Weary Kind." (The movie opens today in Salt Lake City.)
Cooper, in a phone interview before this week's Oscar nominations were announced, said he first showed his script to Robert Duvall, who befriended the younger actor when they appeared in the Civil War saga "Gods and Generals." Duvall ended up playing a supporting role in the film.
"Crazy Heart" shares some surface similarities with "Tender Mercies," the 1983 drama for which Duvall won an Oscar. Cooper is flattered that his writing could be compared to one of his favorite writers, Horton Foote.
"Nobody chronicles American life like [Foote] does," Cooper said. "His was two-thirds redemption. Ours is one-third redemption. And this one has a great deal more music than his does."
Cooper wrote the role of "Bad" Blake with Bridges in mind -- a risky move, he acknowledged, considering "Jeff is notorious for saying no. ... It took the Coens a year to get him to say yes to 'The Big Lebowski.'"
"It seemed like he was the perfect guy to realize this character," Cooper said. It helped that Bridges is also a singer and plays guitar, and has a slight physical resemblance to Kris Kristofferson (a member of the country supergroup The Highwaymen, along with Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson).
In choosing the actress to play Jean, the journalist who becomes Blake's love interest, Cooper said he and Bridges discussed finding "someone fearless, courageous, someone you wouldn't know a lot about in the columns of Us Weekly ." That led them to find Gyllenhaal, whom Cooper described as "versatile, with a lot of range and a unique beauty."
The other important element to making "Crazy Heart," Cooper said, was hiring T-Bone Burnett -- the legendary music producer and composer recently known for compiling the bluegrass all-stars for the "O Brother Where Art Thou?" soundtrack. "T-Bone has no peer as chronicler of roots music," he said.
Cooper had thought he might debut "Crazy Heart" last month at the Sundance Film Festival. His distributor, Fox Searchlight, had other ideas -- pushing the release date to qualify for this year's Oscars and mounting a campaign for Bridges' nomination.
"He has deserved this many years, for many performances," Cooper said, adding that he hoped "people don't overlook Maggie as well."
Looks like Cooper got his wish.
