Hi, I'm Scott Cooper. I'm the writer and director of “Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere.” This is one of my favorite sequences in the movie. “There's just one more clue I have to leave.” Because it's not about performance. It is a confession where we see Jeremy Allen White, who plays Bruce Springsteen, is about to record his most personal and enduring song. This sequence is meant to show that songwriting is not about invention, but, as Bruce told me, about excavation: that he dug where it hurt the most. And I didn't want to capture the spectacle of Bruce Springsteen, but the intimacy. In this particular sequence, “Father's House,” obviously Jeremy is singing in the bedroom, but there is a moment where I cut to the image of young Bruce standing by the tree. ♫…through the trees… ♫ where I weave in Bruce's voice from the original recording of “Nebraska,” talking about how he wanted the film to feel like he was haunted by Bruce Springsteen and tormented by his pain. The reason I chose to photograph the flashbacks in black and white is because Bruce told me that he only thinks of this time in his life as black and white. In terms of Jeremy Allen White's performance as Bruce, both in his incarnation and his singing, it wasn't about mimicry or imitation, it was about finding the truth about who Bruce is. ♫ My father's house shone brightly. ♫ You see, father and son in 1958, watching “The Night of the Hunter”. And this is a film that is not just a cinematic reference. It is a psychological mirror for Bruce. It is a metaphor for Bruce's childhood anxieties, where he tries to escape the darkness that shaped him. And by showing young Bruce with his father, although we have had flashbacks elsewhere in the film, this is not a flashback, but rather a confrontation. And we see his father's silence, his stoicism, his refusal to comfort young Bruce, and that becomes the older Bruce's greatest wound. Decades later, seeing the older Bruce in the theater, watching his younger self with his father, to me, means that Bruce is still searching for meaning in that silence.
