“It’s a cliché,” says Bruce Springsteen, “but he is a rock star – and you can’t fake that.”

The Boss is talking about Jeremy Allen White, star of The Bear, who is now playing him in the upcoming film Deliver Me From Nowhere.

It comes after a flurry of biopics on musical greats in recent years, from Bohemian Rhapsody and Elvis to A Complete Unknown and Back To Black, but rather than an all-encompassing look at his epic career, this one focuses on a very specific period of its subject’s life; a raw portrayal of the young Springsteen, on the cusp of even greater success following the release of The River album, but struggling with inner demons and childhood trauma while writing the stark follow-up Nebraska, released in 1982.

Speaking at a Q&A held at Spotify’s London headquarters ahead of the film’s release, Springsteen, 76, said he had watched The Bear and “knew that was the kind of actor” needed – someone who could convey his inner turmoil, as well as play a convincing rock star.

“You either got that or you don’t have it, and he just had the swagger.”

Directed and co-written by Scott Cooper, the film is based on the book of the same name by Warren Zanes, and is the first time Springsteen’s life has been depicted on the big screen.

The star was on board straight away. “I figured, I’m 76 years old, I don’t really care what the f*** I do anymore. As you get older, certainly at my age, you take more risks in your work and in life in general.”

He and White first met at one of his gigs at Wembley Stadium, where Springsteen prepared himself for lots of questions. “I figured this guy is going to be tremendously interested in me.” But White had done his homework, arriving “so prepared that he really asked me very few questions”.

Springsteen was on set regularly, “which I always apologise to [White] for because… it’s gotta be really weird playing the guy with the guy’s stupid ass sitting there.”

Learning five Bruce songs

And White also had to take on the music. When told he would need to sing and play guitar, his jokey response was: “I don’t do those things. Are you sure?” He had about six months and learned on a 1955 Gibson J-200, sent to him by Springsteen, as the closest model to his Nebraska guitar.

“I was getting together with [teacher JD Simo] on Zoom, four or five, six times a week to prepare. And the first time we hopped on, I said, ‘hey, I’m so excited to learn how to play guitar with you’. And he said, ‘we don’t have time to learn how to play the guitar, we have time to learn these five Bruce songs’. So I learned the guitar in a very strange way.”

Springsteen says it “took me a moment” to get used to seeing his story being dramatised, to White playing him. But he was happy.

“I always go, damn, when did I get that good looking?” he jokes. But he says White’s performance was impressive, that he was able to sing songs “that are hard for me to sing, some of them”.

Keeping the sweat going

Mastering the big hits, Born To Run, Born In The USA, was tough, says White. Thinking he would need to keep his heart rate high for his performance scenes, White says he took a weighted rope on set, to skip and “keep my sweat going”. Turns out, it wasn’t necessary. “When you perform Born To Run or Born In The USA, that sweat comes naturally… I did not need to use that rope.”

Part of the film goes back to Springsteen’s childhood, to the house he grew up in. “They did a very, very good job of putting that house back together,” he says. It is the home he visits “in my dreams to this day, at least a couple of times year… so being able to physically walk into what felt like that living space, my grandmother’s house, my grandfather’s house with my parents, we all lived there together. It was quite a miracle and quite wonderful”.

British actor and recent Emmy winner Stephen Graham plays Springsteen’s late father, and the drama delves into their difficult relationship.

Remembering the family struggles

Reliving those experiences was “powerful”, the star says. He watched an early screening with his younger sister, who held his hand throughout. “And at the end she says, isn’t it wonderful that we have this… it honours our family, it honours the memory of the struggles that we went through… To have it on film in the way that it was portrayed, meant a great deal to my sister and myself.”

Springsteen says he hopes people will connect with the film, with this part of his story, the same as the crowds in front of him do every time he walks on stage.

“The E Street Band will be good every night because that’s what we do,” he says. “But how great we’re going to be is up to you… Hopefully there’s an element of transcendence… and hopefully it stays with [the audience] for as long as they need.”

At West London Film Studios – where major productions from Bridget Jones’s Baby to Killing Eve have all filmed – while Apple TV+’s Ted Lasso is currently being shot in one of their 10 sound stages (across two sites), it pains owner Frank Khalid that one of his biggest stages is empty.

But he has a theory as to why – Donald Trump’s social media posts threatening tariffs on films made outside the US.

“Prior to [Trump] posting that we had quite some big major features come to us looking for space,” he says, “and it’s just gone very quiet since he posted… maybe it’s a coincidence, I don’t know, but I believe it has affected us.”

In September, on his social media platform Truth Social, Trump wrote that America’s “movie making business has been stolen….by other countries…like…’candy from a baby’.”

Repeating a threat he’d first made last May, he claimed he’d authorised his government departments to put a “100% tariff on any and all movies that are made outside of the United States”.

For bigger studios, like Pinewood and Elstree, block-booked years in advance by the major movie producers, his words haven’t had any immediate effect.

But, at smaller studios, like Khalid’s, he certainly feels like there’s been a ripple effect.

“We had a letter from one major big American production saying [the tariff] is not possible, [Trump] legally can’t do it… but at the end of the day, he doesn’t have to do it, the damage is done, isn’t it? By him just posting that… the confidence in the market goes down.”

As Jon Wardle, director of the National Film and Television School, explains, the industry has “always been a bit feast or famine, and we’re in a slight lull… it’s not quite the boom of what it was in 2022 after COVID, but probably at that point we were making a few too many projects.”

Wardle says, Trump’s threatened tariffs are certainly likely to make film companies “slightly more nervous” and “dither a bit more” when it comes to signing off on projects a few years down the line.

But he says it’s important to remember that US studios have “invested hugely” in the UK.

“Disney has a 10-year lease at Pinewood, Amazon has a 10-year lease at Shepperton, the investment for those companies is massive. And the other part of this is that it’s not going to be cheaper to make those films in America. In fact, it’ll be more expensive.”

While the UK industry appears to be finding its feet after the knock-on effects of COVID shutdowns and the US writer’s strike, some smaller studios say Trump’s tariff threats are certainly on their radar.

Farnborough International Studios told us that while it has “recently hosted major TV series for companies such as Paramount and Amazon”, it has “seen film bookings and enquiries slowing down since the first sign of imposed tariffs”.

While West Yorkshire’s Production Park said they’d “not seen any slowdown”, a spokesperson for their studios said they are “tracking wider policy changes that could affect us”.

Mr Wardle says: “I think is it’s a good warning to the UK industry. I think the UK needs to take more seriously the commitment to its own homegrown talent. How do you make projects that aren’t funded and paid for by Americans or another nation?”

With little detail for now, few working within the industry can fathom how a tariff would deliver the happy ending of shoots returning to Hollywood that Donald Trump might desire without driving up costs and stifling investment.

“There’s a huge number of questions about how you actually make tariffs work,” Mr Wardle explains. “It seems like a silly example, but production accountants: we train production accountants and nowhere else in the world does… we planted those seeds 20 years ago and we’re now reaping the rewards.

“It’s not going to be cheaper to make those films in America… so they’ll just make less.”

While Number 10 awaits full details of the latest US tariffs and their potential impact on the UK, a government spokesperson said: “Our film industry employs millions of people, generates billions for our economy and showcases British culture globally. We are absolutely committed to ensuring it continues to thrive and create good jobs right across the country.”

Listen below to Trump100 from May where we discuss Trump’s tariff threat:

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The madness of trying to second-guess what the president might mean becomes all too apparent at an event like this year’s London Film Festival.

Mr Wardle explains: “There are films in this festival that were made in Britain and in the US, made physically in terms of the shoot in London, post-produced in Canada, with VFX done in India…. how do you apply tariffs? At what point do you do that?”

Read more:
Hollywood is dying – but insiders fear Trump’s tariff threat may hasten demise
Trump plan for tariff on non-US movies could deal knock-out blow, union says

On the red carpet, actor Charles Dance – who stars in Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein – questioned Trump’s knowledge of filmmaking.

“I don’t think he is generally known for his own understanding of culture,” he said, “this is a man who wants to concrete over the Rose Garden.”

Rian Johnson, director of the Knives Out franchise, said it was “dark times right now in the States, for a lot of reasons”.

“All we can do is keep making movies we believe in, that matter, that say things to audiences… I think we need more of that so we’ll keep forging ahead as long as we’re able,” he said.

A BBC Gaza documentary breached the broadcasting code, an Ofcom investigation has found.

The regulator said the failure to disclose that the 13-year-old boy narrating the programme was the son of a deputy minister in the Hamas-run government broke the rules and that it was “materially misleading” not to mention it.

In July, the BBC said it breached its own editorial guidelines by failing to disclose the full identity of the child narrator’s father in the Gaza: How To Survive A Warzone documentary.

The documentary was made by independent production company Hoyo Films, and features 13-year-old Abdullah Alyazouri, who speaks about life in Gaza during the war between Israel and Hamas.

It was pulled from BBC iPlayer in February after it emerged that the boy was the son of Ayman Alyazouri, who has worked as Hamas’s deputy minister of agriculture.

A report into the controversial programme said three members of the independent production company knew about the role of the boy’s father – but no one within the BBC was aware.

Ofcom’s investigation into the documentary, which followed 20 complaints, found that the audience was deprived of “critical information” which could have been “highly relevant” to their assessment of the narrator and the information he provided.

The report said the failed to disclose a narrator’s links to Hamas “had the potential to erode the significantly high levels of trust that audiences would have placed in a BBC factual programme about the Israel-Gaza war”.

Following an internal review into the programme, followed by a full fact-finding review the BBC’s director of Editorial Complaints and Reviews, Peter Johnston, the corporation’s director general, Tim Davie, and Hoyo Films apologised.

Hoyo films said it was “working closely with the BBC” to see if it could find a way to bring back parts of the documentary to iPlayer, adding: “Our team in Gaza risked their lives to document the devastating impact of war on children.

“Gaza: How To Survive A Warzone remains a vital account, and our contributors – who have no say in the conflict – deserve to have their voices heard.”

Israel does not allow international news organisations into Gaza to report independently.

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Describing it as “a serious breach of our rules,” Ofcom said they were directing the BBC to broadcast a statement of their findings against it on BBC2 at 9pm, with a date yet to be confirmed.

Responding to the findings of Ofcom’s investigation, a BBC spokesperson said: “The Ofcom ruling is in line with the findings of Peter Johnston’s review, that there was a significant failing in the documentary in relation to the BBC’s editorial guidelines on accuracy, which reflects Rule 2.2 of Ofcom’s Broadcasting Code.

“We have apologised for this and we accept Ofcom’s decision in full.

“We will comply with the sanction as soon as the date and wording are finalised.”

The BBC has faced numerous controversies in recent months, and just last week, former MasterChef presenter Gregg Wallace filed a High Court claim, suing the broadcaster and its subsidiary BBC Studios Distribution Limited for “distress and harassment” after he was sacked from the cooking show in July.

The 61-year-old ex-greengrocer was dismissed after an investigation into historical allegations of misconduct upheld multiple accusations against him.

The BBC has said Wallace is not “entitled to any damages,” and denies he “suffered any distress or harassment as a result of the responses of the BBC”.