Virginia Film Festival

Scott Cooper

Director, Screenwriter, Producer

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.