Jennifer Lawrence for NYT: Causeway, Her Break, and Reentering Her Winters Bone Era
Jennifer Lawrence says Adele warned her not to do ‘Passengers.’
“She was like, ‘I feel like space movies are the new vampire movies.’ I should have listened to her.”
(https://t.co/RdE3BoTU11) pic.twitter.com/UJSxMoNx0b
- Film Updates (@FilmUpdates) November 2, 2022
Jennifer Lawrence spoke with the New York Times about her new movie “Causeway,” out on Apple TV+ this weekend, an intimate, understated drama in which she plays an injured military engineer who returns home to New Orleans for an uneasy convalescence. She reassures everyone she's back in her 'Winters Bone' era.
Highlights:
- Her reps tried to steer her away from 'Causeway': In that her audience wouldn’t understand. “I found out that a lot of filmmakers that I really loved and admired had scripts that weren’t even reaching me,” she said.
- After wrapping 'Dark Phoenix' in 2018 she left CAA: “I had let myself be hijacked,” she said.
- On her flop era: In her mid-20s, as she finished up the “Hunger Games” franchise and moved on to films that were less warmly received, she could sense her fans’ dismay: “I was like, ‘Oh no, you guys are here because I’m here, and I’m here because you’re here. Wait, who decided that this was a good movie?’”
Was there a certain title that made her feel that way? “‘Passengers,’ I guess,” Lawrence said, singling out the lambasted 2016 sci-fi romance she starred in with Chris Pratt. “Adele told me not to do it! She was like, ‘I feel like space movies are the new vampire movies.’ I should have listened to her.”
- On deciding to take a break: But none of it was really clicking, and Lawrence could feel a backlash brewing: She had gotten way too big, and people were eager to bring her down a peg. Deep down, maybe she wanted to downsize, too. “I felt like more of a celebrity than an actor,” she said, “cut off from my creativity, my imagination.”
Writer noted that some movie stars grow so isolated by their celebrity that you can no longer detect anything real in their screen performances.
“That can happen,” Lawrence said, finishing her first beer. “And that was going to happen to me.”
- 'Causeway' had to break from filming due to Jlaws wedding and COVID, during which the direction of the film changed: "But there was an upside to the long, enforced hiatus: As Neugebauer edited the film, she became fascinated by the scenes that Lawrence’s Lynsey shared with James, a car mechanic played by Brian Tyree Henry who is wrestling with his own trauma. The chemistry between the two actors was so potent and compelling that it began to nudge its way more firmly toward the center of the film."
“Whenever I kept cutting away from their performances in the present tense, something was being lost,” said Neugebauer, who ultimately scrapped a series of Afghanistan-set flashbacks to devote more time to the present-day scenes with Lawrence and Henry.
- On commitment issues: Lawrence realized she was having commitment anxiety, “and it was coming out of my performance in all these different creative ways, but I wasn’t conscious of it. Then I went back, and when I’m home with my husband making this family, I’m so happy I stayed. I’m so happy I didn’t freak out and cancel the wedding and run away and go, ‘I’ll never be taken down!’”
- On taking her husband's name and The Hunger Games:
“I was born with the name Jennifer Lawrence, but that got taken from me when I was 21 and I never got it back,” she said. “So it didn’t feel like I was giving up anything. That name already belongs to them.”
"Who does she picture now if asked to visualize Jennifer Lawrence? She thought about the question for a moment."
“Jennifer Lawrence is Katniss Everdeen, I guess,” she said. “Is that weird?”
She doesn’t regret signing on to “The Hunger Games,” which encompassed four films that were released every year from 2012 to 2015. “Those movies were fantastic,” she said. “The only thing that gave me pause was just how famous it would make me.”
-Upcoming projects include: “Die, My Love,” an adaptation of the Ariana Harwicz novel that will be directed by Lynne Ramsay, and a biopic of the powerhouse Hollywood agent Sue Mengers, both of which she’ll star in.
Update:
Want to check out my new profile of Jennifer Lawrence? Here's a gift link, so you can read it even without an NYT subscription. https://t.co/4jmYU6M9f1
- Kyle Buchanan (@kylebuchanan) November 2, 2022
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