Beforehand, in an earlier interview with the New Yorker, Subject identified that Lydia’s claims of working below Leonard Bernstein as an adolescent could possibly be simply refuted anyway. Given Lydia’s age and the time of Bernstein’s demise, the 2 couldn’t have crossed paths, even when she was not fictional. Nonetheless, Subject feels that the Bernstein Property would fortunately again up Lydia’s lies anyway, given the constructive publicity it will accrue. His actual phrases have been: 

“It could be good for the Bernstein property to let her lie about her affiliation with Leonard Bernstein, even when she possibly by no means even studied with him, as a result of the optics of that affiliation can be very, superb, provided that she’s a girl, given how Lenny’s life ended. […] However I do not assume she ever studied with Leonard Bernstein. For those who take a look at the maths — Lenny dies in what, 1990? When is she finding out with Lenny Bernstein? I do not assume it occurred.” 

Jamie, Alexander, and Nina Bernstein, the composer’s three kids, wrote to the New Yorker, “incensed” that Todd Subject can be so flip to dismiss Lydia Tár’s claims, saying: 

“In Michael Schulman’s interview with the director Todd Subject, Subject speculated that the fictional protagonist of his new film, the conductor Lydia Tár, might need lied about finding out with our father, Leonard Bernstein. As representatives of Bernstein’s property, and within the spirit of the continuing hubbub over the movie, we are able to guarantee Subject that his heroine was a teen-age prodigy whose skills have been so formidable that she was granted particular permission to be one in all Bernstein’s conducting college students at Tanglewood in the summertime of 1990, in the course of the remaining 12 months of Bernstein’s life.”