Laura Dern on Is This Thing On by Bradley Cooper?

This year, when Laura Dern started filming Is this thing on?she noticed her dynamic with director Bradley Cooper echoing her work with David Lynch, who had cast Dern in his film. Blue velvet role almost 40 years earlier. “People might think, rightly so, that this would be the first time I’d have director experience as a cameraman,” Dern says, noting that Cooper took on the job just as Lynch had in the past. “But I had the chance to live this experience personally [repeatedly]in a very raw way, where your director becomes your partner.

Over the past decades, Lynch has remained one of Dern’s closest artistic collaborators, as she has starred in everything from Wild at heart has Inner Empire has Twin Peaks: The Return. He died just before filming began Is this thing on. “It was a very tender and heartbreaking time,” Dern admits. “I feel like I’m still at the beginning.”

Dern was hit closely by 12 months of profound loss and grief for Los Angeles, the city in which she was born, raised and still works and lives. At this point, it’s almost ingrained in his heart, from his work at the Academy as a governor and museum board member to his singular filmography across iconic films and television series. January saw Lynch’s death and devastating wildfires in the Pacific Palisades and Altadena. Last month, his mother, Oscar-nominated actress Diane Ladd, died alongside Dern at the age of 89. And on this December afternoon, we’re speaking just days after the brutal murders of Rob and Michele Reiner, whose son Nick was charged with their murders.

“Literally, my kids are in this house like it’s the countdown to Christmas, but it’s just getting to the end of this year,” Dern says with a weary laugh. “This is the most common discussion.”

How is she doing these days? “I just haven’t gotten there yet — I haven’t let myself get there yet,” Dern says of her mother’s death. “It’s the same in a weird way with David and other losses that have happened this year – it’s so compounded. But I will say, while I’m in the thick of it all, looking at photos and looking at things and trying to figure out how to honor him and pay homage to him and all of this to come, I feel really blessed by their legacy – holding on to the things that they gave us in art and in friendship and in memories and in stories and in activism, in everything this.”

Dern adds, “And I’m especially grateful – sincerely – that this is the movie I’m talking about. I’m talking about intimacy and grace and desire and heartbreak and being true to yourself. Honestly, I told my publicist, if it were any other themes, I don’t think I could do this at all.”

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“It was my first opportunity and my first blessing to be a part of a movie that Rob Reiner gave us,” Dern, 58, tells me up front. What does she mean by that? “Knowing how to balance truth and complication and flawed characters and joy and hope – it seems an impossible task, but one he always seemed capable of entrusting to us.” Is this thing on? was made intensely in this tradition.

Dern met Cooper about ten years ago and quickly became a close friend and colleague as he moved into directing. “Whatever movie he was in, he’d say, ‘Do you want to watch this? What do you think?'” Dern says. “Then once he started directing, I was with him watching screen tests and camera tests, or reading early drafts.” On both A star is born And Maestro“We played through scenes together while watching edits in the editing room.” She didn’t know Arnett either, but he too was close to Cooper. As they embarked on Is this thing on?In their emotional duet, the actors made a promise to each other: “To be as vulnerable, honest and open as we have ever been.”

The magic of Dern’s moving and complex performance crystallizes in a scene where she doesn’t say a word. The film traces the lives of estranged spouses Alex (Arnett) and Tess (Dern), with the former secretly dealing with the breakup through an amateur comedy act. While on a date, Tess inadvertently stumbles upon one of Alex’s sets – causing her to wonder why their romance fell apart. Tess listens, in shock. With Cooper close to the camera, Dern reacts with spectacular nuances. You can feel the actor discovering, then exploring the emotions that hit her – newly heartbroken, dryly amused, strangely excited.

“It takes a filmmaker who wants to not only hang on to an actor’s face, but also let him catch up in real time,” Dern says. “What surprised me, but what I am so grateful for, was that I was able to find Will so funny even in the hurt and pain.”

The sequence shows what Is this thing on? The goal is: a warm, honest examination of imperfect people reflecting on their mistakes while trying to figure out what they want. Although it is the most modest film of Cooper’s directing career, it fits neatly into Dern’s oeuvre, which is full of films by great American humanists like Alexander Payne, Noah Baumbach, Greta Gerwig, Paul Thomas Anderson, Mike White, and Kelly Reichardt. Its arrival at the end of a year marked by sluggish box office figures for films of this type – sophisticated, relatively sedate character studies aimed at adults – is a priority for Dern. “Maybe we’ve all become desensitized to fireworks,” she says.

So is she worried about the future of cinema without fireworks? “The industry gets into the habit of clicking, ‘Oh yeah, this movie isn’t doing well, this movie isn’t doing well, people didn’t like this movie as much as the other movie,'” Dern says. “But it’s like, ‘Well, you’ve said that in like 15 movies this season, so maybe people aren’t going to the movies.’

“What worries me is the noise like, ‘I guess people are just watching it at home.’ When people talk about small, independent films – films about people – as if they are films you can watch at home because they are intimate, they miss the point,” she continues. “Being next to your neighbor who you don’t know, you give yourself the opportunity, number one, to have a shared experience; and number two, you then go down to your car with the person you went with and you talk about it – and then you go to dinner and maybe start a relationship conversation that you wouldn’t have had otherwise. That’s the church of cinema that I grew up in, and I never want us to lose that.”

This is Dern’s biggest on-screen year since before the pandemic, when she won the Oscar for 2019. Marriage story while appearing in Gerwig’s Little women and the second season of Big little lies that same year. Its other major credit for 2025, Jay Kellyis another Netflix-Baumbach joint in which she effortlessly steals all of her scenes — this time, as the exhausted publicist for a Hollywood megastar, played by George Clooney, heading toward a personal score-settling.

On the Oscar stage in 2020, Dern called Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarnados a friend; she also headlines the streamer’s romance film lonely planet last year. In all this, we are talking about theater with films like Is this thing on?I wonder what Dern thinks about the possible impending Warner Bros. acquisition. by Netflix, which has the city on edge even as Sarandos promises to maintain the former studio’s theatrical strategy. “I’m hopeful that with the news that’s coming out that what can come from this is a confidence in cinema, that films deserve a theatrical experience and audiences need that and filmmakers need that,” Dern said. “If we lose that, we lose the filmmakers. They’ll still be there – David Lynch will go make a movie with the Sony camcorder and shoot it for $300,000 – but you can’t make the same movies you want to make if you don’t have the financial backing to make them. These movies should be seen in theaters.”

And trust: Dern is going to the movies. “It’s a great year for cinema,” she enthuses. “I was particularly moved by how intimate relationships are at the heart of a lot of these films… The filmmakers are leaning on empathy as a theme. I just saw a great film last night, which made me proud of this moment for the films.” I expect she will name a Best Picture heavyweight in the conversation with her films, like Sinners Or Sentimental value. “It is Zootopia 2! » she applauds. ” Oh my God. I mean, incredible. Everyone finds their own way of doing it, and to be honest, you don’t want to miss seeing Zootopia 2.”

Dern brings to work every day a life spent on film sets. Filmmaking is her life and she speaks about the process with respect, passion and expertise. She spent some time with Cooper Is this thing on? that says a lot about how she approaches work these days. They were waiting for some sort of noise pollution, maybe a helicopter, to wander over the set. He was standing right in front of her, holding the camera.

“He’s looking at me through the lens, and I’m looking at him, and we’re waiting for this moment, and I’m like, ‘Oh my God, it’s you and me and we’re doing this,'” Dern says. “There was no adjustment period like, ‘Whoa, Bradley is in front of me with a camera.’ No, that’s what we do.

For his noted taste in Hollywood and his work in the trenches with filmmakers like Cooper, Dern has only amassed a handful of significant credits behind the camera so far. The big change happened a little over ten years ago with Enlightenedthe masterful but underrated HBO series that Dern starred in (winning a Golden Globe and receiving an Emmy nomination), but also co-created and executive produced by Mike White. More recently, she contributed to the development of series such as Apple TV+. Royal Palm and that of Hulu Little beautiful things. But looking at an actor-turned-director like Cooper, could Dern also see this in her future?

“No one has asked me about it recently because for years I said it was something that fascinated me, but I’ll never do it until my baby goes to college,” Dern says. “And now my baby is at NYU – so I better get my act together.” She has thought about directing, she reveals, but as with every choice in her career, she approaches it with caution – and with her heart first. “God knows I know how much there is to learn as a filmmaker, so I would never do it unless I believed I was the person telling the story,” she says. “So: maybe. I hope so. I know the story will come to light.”