There are certain figures in pop culture who loom larger than life. Their stories, their personas and their lasting influence are all so well-established (and, importantly, well-loved) that it makes putting together biopics about them an extremely daunting task. There’s enormous pressure to make it perfect, and there are millions of diehard fans waiting to find something to complain about.
Bruce Springsteen is one of these iconic artists. If you’re going to make a movie about The Boss, you’ve got to get it right. That’s why it was so important for producers Eric Robinson and Ellen Goldsmith-Vein to assemble the right team for Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere (in theaters Oct. 24). Based on Warren Zanes’s 2023 book Deliver Me From Nowhere and written and directed by Scott Cooper, the film chronicles the making of the 1982 album Nebraska, and it features a stacked cast that includes Jeremy Strong, Paul Walter Hauser, Stephen Graham, Gaby Hoffmann and, of course, none other than The Bear‘s Jeremy Allen White as Springsteen.
We caught up with Robinson and Goldsmith-Vein recently to hear more about how the movie came together, what it was like having Springsteen on set and why White was their first and only choice to play the legendary musician.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
InsideHook: Did you already know you wanted to do a Springsteen movie before the book had come out, or was it reading the book that kind of sparked this all for you?
Eric Robinson: Who doesn’t want to do a Springsteen movie? People have been trying for 50 years. [laughs]
Ellen Goldsmith-Vein: Yeah, everyone on the planet. Eric is a devotee of Marc Maron and was listening to the podcast and heard Warren Zanes talking about this book and did a little bit of research and sent me a note and he was like, “I’m going to read this book. I think there’s a movie here.” And of course Eric devoured it. He read it overnight and fell in love with it, and he was like, “This is definitely a movie.” And so he encouraged me to read it, and I did. And for anybody who’s a Springsteen fan, I encourage people to go out and buy and read the book. But anyway, so I read it and I said, “Gosh, I mean, this is actually a compelling story.” And then Eric had already started communicating with Warren’s agent and Warren directly.
ER: I emailed him through his website, and then we began an email relationship and then we started talking to his agent at Sloan Harris over at CAA and just trying to figure out the best way to go about this because Ellen and I knew full well, it’s all well and good to have this book, but unless you have Bruce Springsteen and Jon Landau on board, you’re not doing anything. And so we had to strategize how to do that, and we realized the best way to do so would be to get an undeniable filmmaker. And Scott Cooper was the only person that Ellen and I believed was the right person to tell this story, because it really is such a story about humanity and trauma and mental health and as well as being the portrait of an artist at an inflection point in his life and career. And Scott handles a lot of those themes very often in his films. And we were lucky enough to reach out to him kind of cold, and lucky enough that he, too, was a huge Bruce and specifically Nebraska fan. And then we were off to the races, and this whole time it’s just kind of felt like lightning in a bottle. We feel so lucky too.
EGV: It really was. Had Eric not been listening to that podcast, who knows what would have happened, but it was sort of the butterfly effect, wasn’t it, Eric?
ER: Yeah, very much because the book is great, but it wasn’t at the time a bestseller. A lot of people, when they listen to a podcast, if they don’t recognize the name of the person being interviewed, you just scroll past or skip a week. But I had read Warren’s Tom Petty biography, which is also pretty stupendous, and was interested to hear what he had to say.
And then he was talking about this story, and it just kind of caught our attention as being something very cinematic, and here we are.
What is it about the making of Nebraska specifically that you think makes the most sense for it to be the focal point of a Springsteen movie? Why that era?
ER: Well, it’s interesting. There’s such a genre at this point of these music biopics that are kind of cradle to present day, or in the case of Freddie Mercury or Ray Charles, cradle to grave stories. But there hasn’t been this concentrated story about one brief moment in an artist’s life. And it was what was really interesting to me [about Nebraska]; he hadn’t really become The Boss yet. That would come later with Born in the U.S.A. And this album, Bruce says, is the thing, the music, the record that he would love to be remembered for in 50 or 100 years as it’s the most honest thing he’s ever done. And on its surface, you could see the story as just a guy sitting in a bedroom by himself recording an album, but it’s everything around that — him exercising his trauma, exercising the demons from within to create this record — that was really powerful to us.
EGV: I mean, the other thing that was so magical about this process and our sheer sort of luck and lightning in a bottle when we were able to get Scott was, as Eric was saying, that this isn’t a traditional biopic, that it really is this very intimate personal story that takes place over this very short period of time from ’81 to ’82, where Bruce was really going through something that really haunted him, this sort of deep darkness. He struggled with depression his whole life, and so that makes this, as Eric said, a very humanizing film in a way that most of these spectacle sort of music biopics haven’t really been able to achieve. And that’s really why I think we feel that we were so lucky to be able to have the wonderfully talented writer-director Scott Cooper making this film, because I don’t think we would have had Bruce and Jon’s blessing to do it had we not brought Scott to the table, given his body of work and the kind of films that he has made and continues to make.
Let’s talk a little bit about Jeremy Allen White and the casting process and how he wound up being the one to play Springsteen.
ER: He was our, and Scott’s, first choice from the very start. We did not know if he could sing. We did not know if he could play guitar. As luck would have it, he didn’t know how to do either. [laughs] But the skills that he possesses as a performer, I think, allow him to. Like with The Bear, he has learned the skills of a Michelin chef. In this case, he worked really hard with an incredible team around him to learn how to sing, to learn how to specifically play Bruce Springsteen songs, but to learn how to play them, both on the guitar and with a harmonica. And even though he has incredibly deep blue eyes, and Bruce has brown eyes, we just felt like what he carried as a young man is the essence of Bruce. And when he put those brown contact lenses in on set, his whole body seemed to transform. He really would become Bruce Springsteen in 1981, 1982. And, you know, for us, aside from the obvious draw of having an award-winning actor at the center of this movie, he just, I think, is one of the most talented young actors working today, and we could not be more lucky that he was the first person we went to, and he immediately said yes. And so that is, you know, again, that lightning-in-a-bottle effect. He loved everything about this story. Badlands, the movie, which had a profound effect on Bruce when he was creating this album, also had a profound effect on Jeremy when he was a young actor. He would watch Martin Sheen’s performance in that film, and it really affected how he looked at his work. So there was just a lot of triangulation in that respect.
You mentioned, obviously, he’s doing his own singing in the movie, and it’s kind of insane how much he sounds like Springsteen. Was the idea always from the jump that whoever was playing Bruce was going to be doing their own singing, or was there ever any consideration of not having that actor do the singing?
EGV: We always say the process decides itself, and we’d hoped that we were going to find somebody who was going to be able to pull that off. I think that the film really is largely Jeremy’s vocals, with a couple of moments where we’ve woven in Bruce’s vocals as well. But, you know, it’s hard to imagine that anyone could nail the Bruce sound completely. But Jeremy really did the work, and he did an incredible job. And Eric, how did Bruce describe specifically, you know, when he heard Jeremy singing?
ER: Well, there were times where he couldn’t tell the difference. And he said, “You don’t sound like me, but you sound like me.” You know, he’s not doing a mimicry here. When you look at what Jamie Foxx brilliantly did as Ray Charles, you know, he really was doing this masterful impression of Ray Charles. That was never Jeremy’s intention. It was never Scott’s intention. The intention was to really carry these songs through in the essence of Bruce. You know, they have a different tenor to their voice. Bruce does have a little bit deeper of a growl when he sings. But there were times on set when Bruce himself could not tell the difference between himself and what he was hearing from Jeremy. There was one day that we were on set at the Stone Pony, and Bruce’s son was there with us watching. And Jeremy was playing over the sound system, over the PA system, and his son asked me whether or not that was his dad or Bruce. This is a human being who has literally been hearing his father’s voice since he was in the womb. He could not tell the difference between the two of them.
EGV: What Bruce said was, “You sound like me, but you’re making these songs your own.” And I think Jeremy did that. I think what you see and what resonates with you as you’re watching the film and that you think you’re hearing Bruce is that Jeremy’s performance is so incredible, and he so embodies Bruce and who he was at that moment in time that you think you’re hearing Bruce Springsteen because you’ve been transported into that story. And that is the magic of Jeremy Allen White and why he was the perfect guy to play Bruce in this film.
You mentioned Bruce being on set, and I’m curious: what was the level of his involvement in this project? I know, obviously, you had to get his blessing to make it, and he was making a lot of set visits.
ER: After we first introduced Scott Cooper to Bruce and Jon Landau in October of 2023, when we traveled him to New Jersey to go meet with Bruce, he was on board from that very first meeting, giving his blessing. He was very intimately involved in the process throughout the script phase, specifically going through the script line by line with Scott in the room — not to give him notes, but to give him authenticity, to make sure that things were told as they actually happened. There’s a couple of beautiful interactions and traumatic interactions with his father that happened exactly as they are shown in the movie that came directly from Bruce, stories that he’s never told anybody else. So, you know, he would come to set, not to sit there and give his approval, but because he so enjoyed it. He loved it. He loved being there and experiencing the idea that people were making a film about this brief moment in his life that happened 40-something years ago. He just was reliving this moment in his life, and there were times that he was so overcome with emotion that he did have to leave.
His mother, Adele, had passed away the year before. And there’s a beautiful scene where Matthew Pelicano Jr., who plays little young Bruce, is dancing with his mother, played by Gaby Hoffmann. And it was within this house that was almost an exact replica, you know, down to the most minute detail, which included some personal items that Bruce gave to the production to put in the house, like a picture and a painting. And he was watching himself dance with his mother, which was something that those two used to do all the time throughout their lives, and I think he was very overcome, overwhelmed with emotion and needed to leave. But there were days that he would be performing a show.
There was one day where he was still on tour, and so he was performing one night in Montreal, and he got on the plane after the show and flew back so that he could be on set. We had like a 9 a.m. call time, and he showed up at 10 o’clock and apologized for being late.
EGV: He was so great, too, because he and Jon Landau, they in many ways have become like family to us because we’ve spent so much time with them. And they were so enormously helpful. I mean, the other thing, Eric, when you were talking about how Bruce spent so much time with Scott going through the script and Scott read the script to Bruce and he would sort of ponder these things, he was enormously helpful during that process, I think, particularly around the scenes involving his family. And then the fact that he loaned us so much of his own personal items just speaks volumes about how much he trusted the process and this team to tell this really important story, I think.
What ultimately do you hope that people get out of this movie? Like if someone were to come up to you after watching it and say, “This is what this meant to me” or “This is what this did for me,” what would that be that would make you say, “Mission accomplished”?
ER: It’s a great question. And I think it has a couple of answers. On its face, I would say the first would be this is a story about a man I thought I knew and about an album that I didn’t really know. And, you know, there’s something to the idea that Born in the U.S.A. was this monster of an album and still is, but it couldn’t exist without Nebraska. So to get the full creative spectrum of Bruce’s body of work, I think it’s important you hear The River, then you go to Nebraska and then you hear Born in the U.S.A. So I think to understand Bruce Springsteen as an artist in the scope and context of his career, this album and what he went through to make this album is a really important note.
But also on a more personal level, this is a movie about mental health. There is this kind of epidemic of male loneliness. And you look back at this time in 1982, where the population, specifically men, didn’t have the language or the self-realization or self-actualization to be able to say, “I’m depressed, I need to seek professional help.” Bruce was so lucky to have Jon Landau by his side, who was present enough, supportive enough and loving enough to say, “You need professional help, and I’m going to help you get that.” And that was just purely about the love these two men had for each other. And so in a world that is filled with toxicity, I think that the core relationship between Bruce Springsteen and Jon Landau echoes across time, and I think is very resonant today, where people very much struggle with mental health. And I hope it shows that if a man like Bruce Springsteen in 1982 can find a way through this and not only succeed and survive, but thrive, I think that it could hopefully save lives, change lives.
This is, at the end of the day, a movie, but I do think that there’s a beautiful message in it about male friendship, about self-preservation, about art, and the fact that we all have people in our lives that we can rely on, and don’t be afraid to ask for help. I lost my big brother to suicide a couple of years ago, about a year before this whole process started, and he’s the one that introduced me to Bruce right around the time that the movie takes place, frankly. And I only wish that he were here to see this movie. I think it could have helped him.
Wow, yeah. Well, you touched on the male friendship and the relationship between Bruce and Jon Landau. What was that casting process like? What were you looking for in your Jon Landau for this film?
EGV: Well, I mean, I don’t even think we thought of anybody besides Jeremy Strong. Scott really wanted him from the beginning, and we went and watched him in his Tony-winning performance in New York, and I mean, he has so much range, and he takes things so seriously. I have in my office, he hired a researcher, and I have literally nine inches in three separate books on everything ever written about Jon Landau, which Jeremy Strong read and reviewed. And I’m sure that you will see him do the same thing in his role as Mark Zuckerberg, in another movie that we’re actually involved in also, the new Facebook movie. In fact, both of our guys are in that film as well — both Jeremys. But we didn’t even ever consider anyone else for the role.
ER: We really didn’t. And it’s funny, Scott made a brilliant movie called Black Mass, the Whitey Bulger story. And I think Jeremy Strong was in that film, but ended up on the cutting room floor for some reason. And so he loves Jeremy; they’ve had a relationship for a long time and have been wanting to work on something together again. So he was always Scott’s first and our first choice for this. The other person was Stephen Graham, who is so brilliant as Doug Springsteen, as Bruce’s dad. He was supposed to be in Black Mass as well, but then couldn’t be in the movie because of scheduling issues, so Scott was also always looking for something else to do with Stephen. And strangely, he is almost the spitting image of Doug Springsteen. And so we were lucky enough, even before we knew that Adolescence existed, to have Stephen, who I think is not only a national treasure of the United Kingdom, but is just one of the most brilliant actors working today.
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