The 2015 David Lean Lecture: David O Russell

THE 2015

DAVID LEAN LECTURE

DELIVERED BY

DAVID O RUSSELL

19 DECEMBER 2015

D EL I V ER ED BY DAV I D O R U S S EL L

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SUBJECTS THAT OTHER WRITERS AND DIRECTORS MIGHT DISTANCE WITH SOLEMNITY OR SENSATIONALISM, RUSSELL TACKLES WITH HUMANITY.

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OVERVIEW The two film screenplays for which David O Russell has won BAFTAs (Silver Linings Playbook and American Hustle) are dazzling examples of involving ensemble dramas. They’re also hilarious. One adapted, the other an original script, they demonstrate Russell’s ability to challenge, involve and surprise and his particular skill to compose group scenes of energising polyphony.

Russell’s early films, Spanking the Monkey and Flirting with Disaster, gave nuance to parental relationships that went some way beyond conventional. Subjects that other writers and directors might distance with solemnity or sensationalism, he tackled with humanity, trusting in his characters’ persuasive complexity. The action gathers speed, both ludicrous and totally believable. As critic Janet Maslin noted in The New York Times in 1996, “Russell could spin inspired zaniness out of a trip to the grocery store”.

He ended the 20th century with Three Kings, from a story by John Ridley about US troops in the desert at the end of the first Gulf War in 1991. Part action film, heist movie, satire and polemic, its radical shifts in tone and the energetic, journalistic feel of the camerawork make for juxtapositions that vary from wildly amusing to downright upsetting.

In 2004, I Heart Huckabees (co-written with Jeff Baena) made a virtue of absurdism as philosophy as well as a source of laughs, punctuated by the odd outbreak of nihilism.

The ‘big questions’ were investigated by existential detectives, with a stellar ensemble from Dustin Hoffman to Isabelle Huppert.

In short, it was an ambitious, risky comedy about the very meaning of life, no less.

The Fighter was the first of three films in which characters seek to reinvent themselves.

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by Francine Stock

Based on a real boxing comeback, the drama is anchored in the relationship of pugilist half-brothers, played by Mark Wahlberg and Christian Bale, and their formidable coterie of female relatives.

Silver Linings Playbook dealt with a man trying to get his life back after months in a state institution. Rarely can family dysfunction and disorder have been dealt with such compassion and wit, bipolarity and depression explored without being corralled as mental health issues. Russell took the BAFTA for Adapted Screenplay (from the book by Matthew Quick) and there was widespread award recognition for all four lead actors – Bradley Cooper, Robert De Niro, Jacki Weaver and Jennifer Lawrence, who received the Best Actress Oscar. For American Hustle (co-written with Eric Warren Singer), Cooper, Lawrence, Bale and Amy Adams all returned to dive into the 1970s and 80s of scams and mobsters, a joyous venture into Scorsese territory.

Joy, which opens here in the New Year, is based on the American success story of Joy Mangano, inventor of the Miracle Mop. Russell’s third film with Jennifer Lawrence (alongside Cooper and De Niro) has her play the lead up to age 45; the screenplay was co-written with Annie Mumolo (of Bridesmaids). Joy endures travails with parents, sibling, ex-husband, dodgy suppliers and slick mass marketers. A biopic that plays with the idea of soap in more ways than one, it brings Russell’s energy and detail to the world of the small business – from car workshop to QVC – and the making of a capitalist icon. ­ Francine Stock is a broadcaster and writer, and presenter of BBC Radio 4’s The Film Programme

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IN HIS OWN WORDS ON DAVID LEAN The very first ‘grown-up’ film I saw, by accident, was when I was barely seven years old. A friend’s mother took him and me to what seemed like a giant auditorium, which I later grew up to find was the town’s public high school. The film’s title made no sense to me, but the movie, particularly the first half hour, left a searing, emotional, visual, visceral, human, frightening, wondrous impression on me, which I have never, ever forgotten.

When I got home, my mother asked me what film we had been to see and I said it was a big word that I wasn’t sure of, something like ‘Astronomy’. Later, I found out it was Great Expectations, which certainly showed me what cinema and storytelling and life are in the galaxy of a boy’s mind, both the one in the movie and the one in me. There is more to learn about motion pictures, power and beauty in the first 20 minutes of David Lean’s film to last a lifetime. And it has. And still counting…

ON FILMM AKING The best thing you can have as a filmmaker is the authority in your heart of the story and the characters. If you’re not entirely rooted in the story you’re not going to be as good an authority.

ON WORKING WITH A REGUL AR CAST It’s a process. I feel that I have to create characters and a story that is worthy of these actors and the great trust they give me and the great leap they’ll take with me together.

So, in a way, I feel like I am auditioning for them and I always want to create a role that is worthy of them. The privilege I have is that I can pick up the phone and go to their home

and speak to them about the role, which can help us both decide what the character can be at its best, and if or how we would want to do it…

I can’t imagine these films without the confidence and trust of these actors as my partners; we create the world together. It’s very exciting for all of us. It was exciting in The Fighter, it was exciting in Silver Linings and on the set of American Hustle there was a lot of excitement to have everyone there together.

To have Christian Bale with Jennifer Lawrence, and Amy Adams with Bradley Cooper, to have Robert De Niro back, to have Jeremy Renner join us. The combinations were all very exciting, for everybody. I think everybody elevated [themselves] and were excited to watch the others work and to see what was created together between all of them. There was something very chemical about that.

When Amy and Jennifer were going to have an electric scene together, everybody on the set that day could feel it. Likewise with Christian and Bradley or Christian and Jennifer.

ON DIALOGUE One thing I learned making [my] first two movies was how much dialogue in cinema is about rhythm. The rhythm has to be like in music. And not just the language – the visuals, too, every shot is rhythmic.

ON CHARACTERS Ultimately, I hope the audience just enjoys spending time with the characters. More than anything, I want you to fall in love with them. The nicest compliment anybody can give me is when they leave a movie and they say, ‘I really loved these people – I didn’t want to leave them.’

SOURCES: Quotations from The BAFTA Guru podcast, film production notes and an interview by Terrence Rafferty for the Directors Guild of America (www.dga.org)

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SEX, SCANDAL & SATIRE THE FILMS OF DAVID O RUSSELL

How Spanking the Monkey leads to Joy: David O Russell’s films in review. By Neil Smith

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f I don’t feel something is fresh and raw and amazing, I don’t think there’s much reason to do a picture,” David O Russell said five years ago, while promoting the release of his film The Fighter. It is a credo that has served the New York-born filmmaker exceedingly well over a career that has revealed him to be one of the most creative, singular and unpredictable voices on the contemporary cinema scene.

It was a voice that audiences heard loud and clear in Spanking the Monkey (1994), a provocatively irreverent debut feature whose treatment of the taboo subject of incest was made all the more unnerving by its measured matter-of-factness. Written by the director while on jury duty, his “black, angry fantasy” about a want-away son ( Jeremy Davies) obliged to spend the summer tending for his bedridden mother (Alberta Watson in a role that Faye Dunaway turned down) tapped into

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a queasy hinterland of suppressed impulses, as it negotiated the subtle power plays between parent and child. Critics inevitably focused on the film’s scandalous aspects, missing perhaps its nuanced critique on the banality of suburban existence. “I always called it a ‘feel-bad’ movie,” Russell explained in 2014. “But there’s always comedy inside the darkness, you know? It’s in my DNA.” DNA, as it happens, was pivotal to Flirting with Disaster (1996), Russell’s follow-up feature about a new father (Ben Stiller) who embarks on a cross-country quest to find his biological parents with his neglected wife (Patricia Arquette) and incompetent case worker (Tea Leoni) in tow. Alan Alda, Lily Tomlin and Josh Brolin lent further anarchic textures to a film whose wacky confusions prompted one critic to compare its director to the great Preston Sturges. Arquette, for her part, likened her experience on the set to “working with a live electric wire. He’s wild and mercurial but has really great instincts and incredible ideas.”

Were he of a mind to, Russell could probably have stuck to directing subversive independent comedies with contentious adult themes.

Yet, he opted instead to “make a movie that nobody would expect me to make”: a sophisticated satire full of bruising mayhem, gruelling violence and a pointed political subtext. The result, Three Kings (1999), followed three US soldiers (George Clooney, Ice Cube and Mark T H E 2015 D A V I D L E A N L E C T U R E

Wahlberg) as they set out to relieve Saddam Hussein of a stash of stolen Kuwaiti gold in the dying days of the first Gulf War. The intention – partly realised by using Ektachrome, a film stock usually used in still cameras, to achieve an unnaturally bright, colour-saturated image – was to create a bold, kinetic and muscular film thats audacity was epitomised by a scene illustrating a bullet’s trajectory through Wahlberg’s innards.

“The story could have been told as strictly an actionadventure film,” said producer Charles Roven. “But David turned it into a dramatic story with action and a tremendous amount of comedy: a distinctive, David Russell kind of comedy.”

Having successfully pulled off one abrupt left turn, Russell promptly performed another with I Heart Huckabees (2004), a comedy of ideas about an environmental activist (Jason Schwartzman) who enlists two existential detectives (Dustin Hoffman and Lily Tomlin) to TO P : I H E A R T H U C K A B E E S ( 2 0 0 4 ) A B O V E : T H E F I G H T E R ( 2 010 ) help him get to the bottom of his spiritual funk. Complex, zany and flamboyantly The Fighter (2010), in contrast, came together idiosyncratic, it left critics and audiences alike beautifully; its look at a luckless slugger’s a little bemused. Some, however, were more redemptive comeback chiming perfectly with charitable towards the filmmaker’s attempts to Russell’s own belated return to the Hollywood find an artistic correlative for his philosophical limelight. As much a portrait of a fractured contemplations, among them his future family as a boxing movie in the Rocky mould, collaborator Jennifer Lawrence. “I think that this account of Micky Ward’s battles in the ring might be my favourite comedy,” she said in and his drug addict brother’s struggles outside 2012. “I was obsessed with it when I first saw of it boasted a lean, gritty veracity, bolstered it; I watched it four times in one week.”

by Russell’s insistence that he reprise their Financing problems saw Russell’s next story on the same mean streets that raised them. project, a satire on US healthcare called Nailed, The performances, meanwhile – especially fall apart mid-production. (It would later Christian Bale’s as Micky’s addled, raddled resurface, without his name attached, in the sibling – were testament to the director's ability bastardised form of Accidental Love [2015].) to draw the very best out of his cast.

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WHAT I WANT TO DO IS GRAB YOU AT THE BEGINNING OF THE PICTURE, TO GRAB YOUR ATTENTION IN A WAY THAT SURPRISES YOU, AND TO HOLD IT THROUGHOUT.

That same rapport was spectacularly in evidence in Silver Linings Playbook (2012), which won Russell his first BAFTA for Adapted Screenplay.

The film is a prickly love story-cum-family drama that not only had Bradley Cooper, Jennifer Lawrence and Robert De Niro add their talents to its director’s personal repertory company, but also saw Russell cement his fruitful collaborations with production designer Judy Becker, editors Jay Cassidy and Crispin Struthers and composer Danny Elfman.

All of the above were back for American Hustle (2013), an energetic con caper and fact-based 1970s’ scam yarn which offered Russell a rich opportunity to try his hand at a period piece (it also won him his second BAFTA for Original Screenplay, with Eric Warren Singer, and another nomination in the Director category). Comparisons to Martin Scorsese were duly made, mostly by those so dazzled by the film’s style they missed its forensic attention to character detail. The result was a rarity indeed: a genre film that reinvigorated its genre.

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It’s surely a sign of the esteem Russell now commands within the industry that he can incite feverish anticipation with a film about the woman who invented the Miracle Mop. Knowing its director, however, Joy (released in UK cinemas on 1 January 2016) will be about so much more, its chronicle of Joy Mangano’s self-propelled elevation to QVC queen allowing him ample room to dissect the American Dream with the help of another all-star ensemble cast, including his third collaboration with Lawrence, Cooper and De Niro.

“What I always want to do is to try to grab you at the beginning of the picture, to grab your attention in a way that surprises you, and to hold it that way throughout,” Russell noted a few years ago. “I want people to walk out and feel, ‘My God, that ride never slowed down.’”

The ride, one suspects, is only getting started.

Neil Smith is a contributing editor at Total Film and also writes for Heat, SFX and the BBC News website.

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CO PRODUCTION Five collaborators talk about working with David O Russell…

“David’s movies have tremendous heart.

In all of his films, the characters face a reckoning in their lives and they are searching for something better.”

Richard Suckle, producer American Hustle

“I love working with David. If you can give him your trust, he will lead you to an emotional place that is truthful. The characters and performances become so much more rich and meaningful. It’s intense, because you’re so vulnerable as an actor, but it’s when you’re most vulnerable that the truth comes out.

The more you know David’s process and are familiar with it, the easier it is to dive right in – and you’re diving in to a family.”

Bradley Cooper, actor Silver Linings Playbook, American Hustle, Joy

“David doesn’t sit by the monitors. He stays right with his actors, where the movie is. He grabs shots in the moment. He thinks like an editor – he knows all the angles he has. And

the result is that when you sit down to watch the movie, you can tell within five minutes that it’s a David O Russell movie – it has that style, the specific language, the camera movement, the feeling of the world.”

Jonathan Gordon, producer Silver Linings Playbook, American Hustle, Joy

“David is a complex and original thinker.

He juxtaposes the horror of war with a uniquely dark humour and sense of adventure.

He made an extraordinarily exciting film which actually portrays the reality of modern warfare, in which civilians die in greater numbers than soldiers.”

Paul Junger Witt, producer Three Kings

“The great thing about David is that he’s so passionate about everything he does and he’s not afraid to fall in love with ideas and things and people. I think it’s what makes him such a terrific director.”

David Hoberman, producer The Fighter

Quotes taken from production notes for American Hustle, The Fighter and Three Kings

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DAVID O RUSSELL FILMOGRAPHY (A S D I R EC TO R) F i l m 2015 Joy * 2013 American Hustle * 2012 Silver Linings Playbook * 2010 The Fighter 2004 I Heart Huckabees *

AWARDS AND NOMINATIONS

1999 Three Kings * 1996 Flirting with Disaster * 1994 Spanking the Monkey * * Also writer or screenplay

(SEL EC T )

BAFTA WINS

BAFTA NOMINATIONS

2014 Original Screenplay (American Hustle, shared with Eric Warren Singer) 2013 Adapted Screenplay (Silver Linings Playbook)

2014 Director – (American Hustle)

OTHER

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academy awards nominations 2014 Best Achievement in Directing (American Hustle) 2014 Best Writing, Original Screenplay (American Hustle, with Eric Warren Singer) 2013 Best Achievement in Directing (Silver Linings Playbook) 2013 Best Writing, Adapted Screenplay (Silver Linings Playbook) 2011 Best Achievement in Directing (The Fighter)

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Golden Globes Nominations 2014 Best Director – Motion Picture (American Hustle) 2014 Best Screenplay – Motion Picture (American Hustle, with Eric Warren Singer) 2013 Best Screenplay – Motion Picture (Silver Linings Playbook) 2011 Best Director – Motion Picture (The Fighter)

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THE DAVID LEAN LECTURE

WITH THANKS

The Academy’s annual David Lean Lecture is generously funded by The David Lean Foundation. The lecture series serves to continue the legacy of the great director David Lean, one of the founders of the British Film Academy (as BAFTA was then known) in 1947 and a continuing inspiration to many through his exceptional body of work.

David O Russell Susan Ciccone Bethan Dixon Liz Miller Anthony Reeves Katherine Willing

Previous David Lean Lectures have been given by: 2014 2014 2012 2011 2010 2009 2008

Lone Scherfig Paul Greengrass Pedro Almodóvar Errol Morris Peter Weir Atom Egoyan Lean Centenary Celebration

2007 2006 2005 2004 2003 2002 2001

David Lynch Oliver Stone Woody Allen John Boorman Ken Loach Robert Altman Sydney Pollack

Tonight’s lecture will be available on www.bafta.org Follow us on Twitter: @BAFTAGuru #FilmLecture EVENT PRODUCTION Event Host Francine Stock Film Programme Manager Mariayah Kaderbhai Event Producer Pelumi Akindude PR and Learning Campaigns Manager Niyi Akeju Director of Learning and New Talent Tim Hunter Learning and New Talent Officer Julia Carruthers Learning and New Talent Assistant Ciara Teggart Learning and New Talent Intern Evan Parker Production Manager Ryan Doherty Photography Director Janette Dalley Brochure Editor Toby Weidmann Brochure Design Joe Lawrence

Imagery courtesy of BFI Stills (Three Kings, p.6 and I Heart Huckabees, p.7) and Twentieth Century Fox (Joy, p.8). All other imagery courtesy of REX Features.

The Academy chooses Amadeus Primo Silk, supporting excellence in print. Publication printed on Amadeus Primo Silk 200g/m² supplied by Denmaur Independent Papers. www.denmaur.com