Believe it or not, Jeff Bridges owes part of his Golden Globe Best Actor win for Crazy Heart to Michael Cimino and Heaven’s Gate. Widely considered one of the biggest commercial failures in Hollywood history (though it’s since garnered more favorable acclaim), the 1980 western still serves as industry shorthand for creative overindulgence. But it also brought three men into Bridges’s life who would help musically steer him.
“I love country music,” revealed Bridges during a 2009 interview with the Hollywood Foreign Press Association for the release of Crazy Heart. “One of my models for the character was Kris Kristofferson, and we worked together 30 years ago in a movie called Heaven’s Gate. That is where I also met T Bone Burnett and Stephen Bruton, who the film is dedicated to, and we sure played a lot of country music on that show.”

When Bridges was initially sent the script for Crazy Heart, about an alcoholic, once famous singer-songwriter attempting to turn his life around, it didn’t have any music attached to it. Knowing full well that finding the right musical score was essential, as the songs would prove to be such an integral element of the film, Bridges turned the part down. About a year later, he ran into Burnett, who mentioned that he was now attached to the movie. Excited by the prospect of working together again, and confident that the man who helped guide the music of O Brother, Where Art Thou?, Cold Mountain and Walk the Line was supervising the score, Bridges felt he would be in secure hands.
“That kind of was the thing that got me to the party,” he noted.
The son of actor Lloyd Bridges and actress and writer Dorothy Simpson Bridges, Jeff has been at the party a long time, as he made his first screen appearance as a baby in the 1951 film The Company She Keeps. He and his brother Beau would pop up occasionally in their father’s hit TV series Sea Hunt, and Jeff would score his first major screen role in The Last Picture Show, which garnered him the first of seven Oscar nominations.

But acting wasn’t Bridges’s only creative passion. In addition to photography, painting and writing poetry, he’s an accomplished musician, performing occasionally with his band, the Abiders. So, strapping on a guitar in Crazy Heart wasn’t that much of a stretch.
“I don’t see too much difference,” he noted about his various artistic endeavors. “I don’t approach them in a different way. They’re all kind of outlets for expression, (and) in the expression I try to be as truthful as I can.”

That honesty is evident in Crazy Heart.
Music, said Bridges, “brings us all together. It gives us a feeling that we’re all in this together, you know — we’re not alone in our suffering. And that’s something that I kind of aspire to. I try to be honest in my work and in my life as much as I can.”