Jennifer Lawrence Talks Award Season and 'American Hustle' with Deadline

Jennifer Lawrence's Best Supporting Actress Oscar odds are definitely looking more favorable after her Golden Globe win and her surprising (for some) BAFTA win. She recently spoke with Deadline about being nominated for multiple awards this season for her turn in American Hustle, her collaboration with David O. Russell, and her BAFTA win:

“Oh, it was a big surprise,” she told me when she took a few minutes away from shooting. “I didn’t remember that the BAFTAs were happening that day. I certainly did not think I was going to win one so I put it out of my mind,” she said. “So there I was, in the middle of being painted blue, and someone said, ‘You just won the BAFTA!’ And I said, ‘Oh, go fuck yourself!’ And then it turned out they were serious.”

“It has been a bit of a blessing to be away, and not really aware of what has been going on,” she told me. “It actually has been really nice.” She has just begun thinking about all that pageantry, the dress fittings, coming up with interesting things to say on the red carpet. It has begun making her nervous. She wonders if she will ever get good at it though it’s hard to imagine she’ll get off to as rocky a start as last year, when she fell on the stairs to accept her award, and then spent her backstage interview explaining her fall and whether she worried about peaking at age 22.

“Exciting? I’m trying to go back to that place where dress fittings seemed exciting,” she jokes. “I’ve had one fitting here in Atlanta and I think I have the final fitting on the day of the awards. So I just hope it fits.” I suggest that running for her life as Katniss, coupled with the pressure of filming scenes as the nearly naked blue-skinned Mystique in X-Men, is probably better for dress fittings than months of banquet foods. “I hope you’re right,” she said.

As for whether she has gotten the Oscar thing down, Lawrence said: “Ha! Have you not seen my last Oscar moment? I handled myself so well. I think it’s really unfair to make a person speak in front of the entire world at a moment like that because it is just so overwhelming. It was terrifying and what I regret now is not doing what you’re supposed to, which is even having a few words, something, that you can say, or even some idea if they do call your name. Every time my mind when there, I would feel so much anxiety that I couldn’t think about it. Then when they called me, I got up on stage and said happy birthday to Emmanuelle Riva from Amour, and then I walked off without even thanking David, or Harvey Weinstein.”

She dismisses my suggestion that her speech, complete with the staircase stumble, was somehow charming. “It looked like I was drunk,” she said. “I did learn, though, not to let the dress gather in the front when you walk up the stairs.”

Lawrence said the thing she was most excited about this year was the chance to celebrate this unusual character she played in Rosalyn Rosenfeld, the needy wife of two-timing conman Irving Rosenfeld that she and Russell brought to life together. This was not even supposed to be Lawrence’s role. After completing Silver Linings Playbook and all that press, Lawrence mostly just wanted a short vacation before turning up for another Hunger Games installment.

“I had been working a lot and a vacation seemed important until I met Rosalyn,” Lawrence told me, “and then there was nothing in the world I wanted to do more and I realized this would be more refreshing than an actual vacation. David sent me the script, and then we just started creating her piece by piece. He has this amazing contagious energy that makes me feel like, whatever he asks, you go for it. Even the kissing scene with Amy. I said, David, no. He says, trust me, it will work. No, David. Even after we did it I thought, no way. And then I see it, and it absolutely does work. I can’t explain [the dynamic between us], but his incredible fire just pushes you to do things you didn’t know you were capable of.”

Read how David O. Russell describes their special relationship and collaboration after the jump!

And David O. Russell clearly loves his collaboration with Jennifer:

Said Russell: “It is one of those privileged relationships that happen sometimes if you are lucky. We have an intuitive instinct for what we want to do and how we want to get there. We listen to each other. She’ll ask questions. She is very smart. The character has to make sense to her, and once it does, fasten your seat belt. She is just going to become the soul of that person and things are going to happen, things she doesn’t even know are going to happen. I find it wonderful that she is so beautifully inarticulate in talking about her work and I think it’s better it stays that way and that maybe it’s why her work can be so magical. I don’t think she needs to be the one talking about it. She just knows how to feel it, and do it. She’s the least neurotic self-conscious person I’ve ever met. She comes from a very pure desire to do the work and she’s not tortured by it. She has to find the vector, and once she does, she will give herself over to it in the way only she can, much like a fingerprint. There’s something special about how that happens.”

Russell said the key is the preparation they do together, a process that started with Silver Linings Playbook and continued with American Hustle.

“She would ask the smartest questions about this character Rosalyn,” he said. “Why is she in this marriage? Why wouldn’t she get divorced? And then we put it together. She’s someone who doesn’t believe in divorce but the truth underneath that is she is terrified of change. I personally related to that, and I’ve known people in life who’d rather stay somewhere than make a change. I also found that because of that collaboration with Jennifer that things just come to me, like her confrontation with Amy, or her confrontation with Christian Bale, or her singing “Live And Let Die.” It just makes it so exciting to be writing and directing her.

“We have this shorthand when we are shooting,” Russell said. “In the restaurant scene with Jack Huston, she had done the scene a few times, and I just looked at her and said, ‘Jennifer, this time…’ She knows what I mean, which is, go there in a way you haven’t yet. And she completely did, and something happened that I never saw her do and which makes her such a daring actress and so…riveting to audiences. Her hand goes to the back of her neck, in this weird way I’d never seen her do, but it fits the emotion of the moment. ‘It’s very hard for me,’ she says, and her voice changes. ‘I think I’ll die before I change.’ And every grain of what she does reeks of some authentic character that maybe you’ve never met but you are suddenly sitting with. Those discoveries are so exciting for me.”

Read the whole article at Deadline.com