There are two questions on the table during a recent interview regarding “The Words.” The first, to Bradley Cooper, is: What role did you play in helping the small independent movie with the big stars and bigger ideas get made?

The second, to the writing-directing team, is: What’s the real scoop?

“Why would you think I wouldn’t tell you the real answer?” asks a playful Cooper, who, at 37, is at a career point where just dropping his name could make or break a project. Then he laughs at the explanation that some actors are modest about such things.

“Well, you’re not going to get that here,” he quips, dissolving his colleagues Brian Klugman and Lee Sternthal into laughter.

“The Words,” which opens Friday, is the story of an aspiring novelist, Rory Jansen (played by Cooper), who finds an old, anonymous manuscript that’s astoundingly good and claims it as his own.

What happens next is both an intricate meditation on love, success and morality and a psychological drama featuring top-notch actors. Besides Cooper, the cast includes Zoe Saldana as Rory’s love, Dora; Jeremy Irons as the old man who wrote the words Rory appropriated, and Dennis Quaid and Olivia Wilde as a writer and grad student whose narrative is interwoven with Rory’s in an unexpected way.

“The Words” is also the tale of three friends from the Philly region who came to Los Angeles and wound up working together on a film that had some lag time before getting made.

“I guess lag time would be one thing to call 12 years,” says Sternthal. “Purgatory would be another.”

During a phone interview, the three men take turns telling the story of the long, ultimately rewarding trip of bringing the movie to the screen ― with several interruptions from Cooper, who seems determined to crack up the other two as often as possible.

It started when Klugman and Sternthal, who shared writing and directing duties on “The Words” and have been friends since they were 11, met at summer camp. Klugman and Cooper met in school that same year. A few years later, Sternthal and Cooper were introduced at Klugman’s bar mitzvah.

Klugman, who’s also an actor, and Cooper bonded at the private school they attended in Philadelphia.

“We both grew up with fathers that showed us movies a lot and we sort of got lost in them,” Cooper remembers. “We could talk incessantly about them, so we felt a common language there.”

“Bradley and I used to do skits in high school together, even in Latin class we would do these performances,” says Klugman, at which point Cooper jumps in to describe the Latin teacher who occasionally let them pretend they were him and run the class.

Cut to several years later, by which time all three men were pursuing careers in Los Angeles. Cooper, who’d arrived there after majoring in English at Georgetown University and earning a graduate degree in acting at New York’s the New School, attended a table reading of a script by Klugman and Sternthal, an early version of what would come to be called “The Words.”

Cooper was captivated by the drama, as read by a group of actors that included Klugman’s uncle, Jack Klugman, in the old man role that eventually went to Irons. “Never in my wildest dreams did I think they would ask me to play Rory back then,” Cooper says.

What happened next was more than a decade of working and waiting. The script was work shopped at the Sundance screenwriting lab, an offshoot of the influential film festival. For most of the 2000s, it wasn’t clear when the movie would get made. It eventually premiered on the closing night of the Sundance festival this year.

“I remember a lot of actors that came in and out of this movie and a lot of directors. It’s hard to get a movie made,” says Cooper. “It almost got made a couple of times or was in the nascent stages of that.”

In the interim, Cooper’s clout kept rising as he landed roles in smart television shows like the short-lived “Jack & Bobby” and the critical darling “Alias” and movies like “Wedding Crashers.” By the time he agreed to make “The Words,” he was on the cusp of major stardom and not that far away from the seismic change that the monster hit “The Hangover” would have on his career. It was an easy choice, he says, when his friends, who had decided to direct their script together, approached him.

“It’s not even that they approached me,” Cooper says. “I think they were talking one day and it just sort of came up, ‘What about you playing Rory?,’ and let’s try to get the movie made. And I said, of course.”

The shoot was completed in a quick 25 days in Montreal for about $6 million, according to Sternthal, who credits Cooper with being key to making it all happen. “We couldn’t have possibly made the movie without Bradley,” he stresses.

Klugman elaborates: “Just as a testament to Bradley, he agreed to do this movie before ‘The Hangover’ came out. You can imagine the reality, the change that happened when ‘The Hangover’ came out.”

Here, Cooper chimes in, “As well as how happy my agents were.”

When the laughter dies down, Klugman continues. “To his credit, he stayed with it and he fought for it always. We were really blessed with that.”

But Cooper says that he was equally blessed, if not more. “I was the one in the end who wound up benefiting the most from it, though. What could have started out as a favor, I got to work with great actors and got to be in the first outing of a great directorial team and I got to work in a very interesting character.”

Both Klugman and Sternthal describe the directing process as a pleasure, even with the daunting challenge of being in charge of veterans like Irons and Quaid.

Says Klugman: “The actors that came, these weren’t personalities. These were real actors. And they came as actors with thoughts about their characters. It was a great dialogue the whole time.”

For Cooper, “The Words” represents another step for an actor who’s using the fame capital he’s accumulated to make projects that mean something to him. Choosing roles is a simple process, he insists. “It’s character, director, the people involved, the script.”

He stretched his comedy muscles this year by playing a flashy, hot-tempered criminal in the offbeat indie “Hit & Run,” written and co-directed by his pal Dax Shepard. Next up is “Silver Linings Playbook,” a film from “The Fighter” director David O. Russell that will debut at the Toronto International Film Festival and is expected to hit theaters in November.

As the clock ticks down toward Cooper’s next interview, he and his friends intervene to allow another question. With the energetic charm that pops off the screen, Cooper offers his description of the essence of “The Words.”

“It’s a romantic drama more than anything else, with thriller aspects,” he says, wasting no time. “How do you like that? Bam!”

By Julie Hinds

(Detroit Free Press)