Why Bradley Cooper almost quit ‘The Place Beyond the Pines’: ‘I’m out’

nypost.com:

“The Place Beyond the Pines,” revealed that Bradley Cooper nearly bowed out of the production after disagreeing on a script rewrite.

According to Cianfrance, 50, the “Maestro” star hated the fact that in the updated script — this time co-written by Darius Marder — his character Avery Cross killed an empathetic thief (Ryan Gosling) halfway through the film. “I had given [Marder] the script and he had a lot of notes for it, and I kind of agreed with a lot of what he was saying.

And so we rewrote every word from 10 weeks to six weeks,” the director told IndieWire. “I remember giving Bradley Cooper the copy of ‘The Place Beyond the Pines,’ the new script, and getting a voice message from him saying, ‘Bro, I just want to let you know I read the new draft and I’m out.’”According to the director, Cooper, 49, claimed that the new script was “not the movie that we had signed up to do.” Unfortunately for Cianfrance, he had very little negotiating power as the film was partly funded by Cooper’s involvement. “I was moving my family up to Schenectady the next day [to be on location] and the whole crew was coming up there.

I had all the money anyway,” he recalled, adding that he asked Cooper to join him for a face-to-face meeting. “So I went up to Montreal, and I had a long conversation with him from midnight to 3:30 in the morning where I got him back on,” Cianfrance said. “It was only in the last five minutes [when I convinced him].