Scott Cooper

Author

Scott Cooper made his feature film directorial debut, in 2009, with  Fox Searchlight’s award-winning, CRAZY HEART, which he also  wrote and produced. The film, which starred Jeff Bridges, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Colin Farrell, and Robert Duvall, earned three  Academy Award nominations, winning for Best Actor (Bridges)  and Best Song (T Bone Burnett/Ryan Bingham). Cooper won an  Independent Spirit Award for Best First Feature, a USC Scripter  Award, and earned nominations from the Writers Guild of America  and the Independent Spirit Awards, for his screenplay. 

Cooper’s follow-up was the Leonardo DiCaprio/Ridley Scott  produced, OUT OF THE FURNACE, starring Christian Bale,  Woody Harrelson, Casey Affleck, Zoë Saldana, Forest Whitaker  and Sam Shepard. For his work as writer, director and producer,  Cooper won the Best Debut and Second Film Award at the 2013  Rome Film Festival, where he was also nominated for a Golden  Marc’Aurelio Award. 

Next, was Cooper’s 2015 Warner Bros. gangster film, BLACK  MASS, which Cooper both directed and produced, and which  made its worldwide debut at the Venice International Film  Festival. The box-office hit garnered wins from critics’  associations across the country, and earned lead actor Johnny  Depp the Desert Palm Achievement Award at the Palm Springs  International Film Festival, as well as a Best Actor nomination  from the Screen Actors Guild. 

In 2017, Cooper’s Western epic, HOSTILES, debuted at both the  Telluride Film Festival and Toronto International Film Festivals,  earning widespread critical acclaim. The film reunited Cooper with  his OUT OF THE FURNACE star, Christian Bale, and featured 

performances from Rosamund Pike, Wes Studi, Jesse Plemons,  Rory Cochrane, and Ben Foster. 

Cooper followed this up with ANTLERS, an exploration of yet  another genre, in the Guillermo Del Toro-produced horror film.  Searchlight released the film to acclaim in October 2021. 

Most recently, Cooper re-teamed, for the third time, with his  closest collaborator, Christian Bale, in THE PALE BLUE EYE, an  adaptation of Louis Bayard’s novel of the same name. The film  tells the story of a series of murders at The United States Military  Academy, at West Point, in 1830, and surround a cadet the world  would later come to know as Edgar Allan Poe. Robert Duvall,  Gillian Anderson, Timothy Spall, Toby Jones, and Harry Melling  round out the cast. The Netflix film debuted to widespread critical  acclaim, and was seen in over 100 million households upon its  first month of release. 

Born in Virginia, Cooper now resides in Los Angeles.