“This is too smart for me”: the director Jennifer Lawrence called a genius
Having found more success by the end of her 20s than most actors experience in a lifetime, Jennifer Lawrence established herself not only as one of the industry’s best and most popular stars but also as somebody who figured out how to play the game at a very early age.
Even though it’s an established rule of Hollywood that any performer who lands a breakthrough relatively early on in their career will more often than not sign up for a blockbuster franchise in short order, even that well-worn route was one Lawrence masterfully navigated by balancing her box office smash hits with acclaimed dramatic fare.
She was only 19 years old when co-writer and director Debra Granik’s searing coming-of-age drama Winter’s Bone was released, with the ‘Best Picture’ nominee earning Lawrence her first nomination for ‘Best Actress’. The next step was proving she wasn’t a flash in the plan, and she made it look easy.
Her leading roles in the X-Men and Hunger Games sagas rang up billions of dollars in ticket sales before she won an Oscar at the second attempt at the age of 22 for Silver Linings Playbook. The three-time Golden Globe winner is now a permanent resident of the A-list, and her rapid rise to the mountaintop can be traced directly back to Winter’s Bone.
It was only the fourth film of her career and her first-ever leading role. Even though she’s gone on to work with filmmakers including Matthew Vaughn, David O Russell, Jodie Foster, Susanne Bier, and Darren Aronofsky, Granik was an auteur so single-minded that Lawrence could barely comprehend the plane of artistry she was operating on.
“Debra has a brain that’s not like ours,” she told Pop Entertainment. “She has a mind that is on a whole other playing field. It took me a while to get in sync with that because, for a while, it was like reading instructions like this is just too smart for me. If I could only understand what the instructions meant, I could get this radio going, but I just don’t get it.”
Things fell into place eventually for the newcomer, and once that happened, Lawrence realised she was in the presence of “a genius beyond genius.” Not only that, but Granik was celebrated as being “not like anyone else” the actor had ever worked with, as well as being “smarter than anyone that I know that I’ve ever come into contact with.”
Lawrence would evidently jump at the chance to collaborate with Granik again now she’s fully cognisant of how her unique mind views the art of filmmaking, but 2018’s Leave No Trace is the only feature she’s directed in the decade and a half since Winter’s Bone. When she picks up the megaphone again, though, there’s one actor who’ll be waiting eagerly by the phone.
