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 The problem: He didn't have a story.
Now, the distillation of the time spent among Braddock's
working-class single-family homes and rusted-out iron furnaces along
the Monongahela River has delivered the elements Cooper needed for
"Out of the Furnace" — a tale of brothers and revenge. Starring
Christian Bale and Casey Affleck, it will be in wide release in U.S.
movie theaters on Friday.
"I was struck by how cinematic (it was) and how it dripped with
atmosphere," said Cooper of Braddock. The borough reached its
economic peak in the 1950s and '60s but went into a steep decline in
the early '80s, when the area's major blast furnaces closed.
Braddock's population today stands at around 2,100, and it has lost
more than 80 percent of its residents since 1960.
"I knew that I wanted to shoot a film here and I wrote it
specifically for Braddock," Cooper added. "I wasn't going to make
the movie if I didn't shoot it there."
"Out of the Furnace," distributed by independent studio Relativity
Media, tells the story of steel mill worker Russell Baze (Bale) and
his younger brother, Rodney (Affleck), an Iraq War veteran haunted
by his tours of duty, who would do anything to avoid working in the
mills like his brother and father.
What struck Bale about the Russell character, a good man to whom bad
things happen, was the change in Braddock's fortune and how Russell
was determined to stay despite the odds.
"It was someone who feels so connected to their own land," said the
Welsh-born Bale, a self-described rootless person who grew up in
Europe and the United States. "Even if something disastrous was to
happen, they would rather stay there."
The film — which features several past Oscar nominees and winners,
including Willem Dafoe, Woody Harrelson, Forest Whitaker and Sam
Shepard — adds a working-class quality to the recent spate of
Hollywood fare that touches on the social anxieties and financial
insecurity wrought by the recession.
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 "I wanted to shine a light on what we as Americans
were experiencing in these past five turbulent years: economic
distress, fighting wars on two fronts and having those soldiers
return, suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder and having a
very difficult time assimilating back into life," said Cooper, whose
2009 debut film "Crazy Heart" earned critical acclaim and a best
actor Oscar for Jeff Bridges.
REVENGE AS LOVE
The methodical thriller is set in motion when the emotionally
volatile and heavily in debt Rodney becomes enmeshed in an
underground boxing scene run by local bookmaker John Petty (Dafoe).
But when Rodney and Petty disappear after a fight
run by diabolical New Jersey drug dealer Harlan DeGroat (Harrelson),
Russell takes matters into his own hands to find DeGroat as police
drag their heels in pursuit of the hillbilly kingpin.
The film, which shows revenge as an act taken in equal measures of
rage and love, sets its most violent moments in the abandoned Carrie
Furnace near Braddock that once roared, producing iron for United
States Steel Corporation.
"I couldn't find that myself if I built it," Cooper
said he told himself when he found the site. "I wanted that to be
the place where Casey Affleck, where we first meet him fighting, and
where Woody Harrelson's character meets his maker."
Bale, who won a best supporting actor Oscar for the 2010 boxing
drama "The Fighter," said he was unable to shake the story of
Russell avenging the loss of his brother from his mind after he read
the script.
"He's a man of incredible stoicism and patience ... who, when
everything is lost, allows these impulses to come through that he
had always had," the actor said.
But it was also Braddock, its boarded-up houses and vacant lots,
seeking its own retribution to lost jobs and lost hope that
resonated with Bale.
"Something about the extreme change of fortune in the town," he
said. "The notion of globalization and outsourcing of the American
heartland and manufacturing, and this character who stayed."
(Editing by Mary Milliken and Gunna Dickson)
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