Star Bradley Cooper and director Guillermo del Toro discussed how the pandemics affected the production of Nightmare Alley even before rules of social distancing forced studios to halt the shootings of movies and series. Talking at the Tribeca Festival (via Indiewire), the duo discussed how the tough times caused by the pandemic helped them give Cooper's character a second look.
Nightmare Alley was in the middle of production when news of the pandemic started to become alarming. On March 10, 2020, del Toro and Cooper conferred and decided together it would be best to stop shooting or risk someone falling sick.
As del Toro explains it:
“Stopping was not mandatory back then, but we both felt if we don’t stop now and someone gets sick — we said, ‘we gotta stop.’ Nobody was expecting it. Everybody went to lunch and came back six months later.”
The six months the crew took before restarting production was not wasted, however, as del Toro edited the part of the movie that was already shot and realized a lot of rewrites were needed. The six months the film had to rest gave both del Toro and Cooper a new clarity, and they both realized the project would demand a lot more energy than they first imagined, as they reimagined Cooper's character in the film.
As del Toro puts it, life sometimes has a weird way to show you the path you should follow. In the director’s words:
“We got to see these characters, when [Cooper’s Stanton Carlisle] was full of himself and arrogant and certain and seeking. We were able to go back six months in between all this and were able to analyze and see not only that character but what we needed to rewrite to be able to go back to a set. If your pores are open, the movie finds you. Each movie tells you what it needs.”
Nightmare Alley is being adapted by del Toro from William Lindsay Gresham’s novel of the same name about a manipulative carny (Cooper) who gets involved with a dangerous psychiatrist (Cate Blanchett). Del Toro has a unique voice in filmmaking, which means we are all impatient to see how the director will make the novel his own, especially because Nightmare Alley is del Toro’s first film after the brilliant The Shape of the Water.
After a lot of delays due to the pandemic, Nightmare Alley finally got a definitive release date on December 3.