Those silver bells are ringing, and this holiday season brings with it the third film director David O. Russell and star Jennifer Lawrence have made together, "Joy" (our review). “David and I will never, ever, ever, ever not do movies together,” Lawrence said earlier this year. “I love him so much that sometimes I can’t talk about him without tearing up." Such is the power of their creative spark, and in a recent roundtable talk with THR, Russell revealed that prior to penning "Joy," he was working on epic story that he still hopes to make with the actress.
"There was another thing I was writing to do. Two summers ago, I wrote about 600 pages, two parts of a big family opus I wish to do — and then I wrote ‘Joy,’ " Russell said.
The director adds that his scripts are always lengthy, allowing him to indulge in other stories away from the main narrative, but that the key is breaking them down when it comes time to turn them into a feature. "I always write scripts; they come in around 175 pages now. They are more novelistic. They have many worlds in them. I think many good movies have many movies within them," he explained.
Part of Russell’s penchant for the pen is familial, as his parents met at Simon & Schuster. And the filmmaker reveals that while he’s never quite become the writer of fiction he first dreamed of, he’s working on a project that will allow him to dig into the world.
"I was a writer before I was a filmmaker," he said. "I wanted to write fiction. My father and mother met in the mailroom at Simon & Schuster — my mother was an Italian girl from Brooklyn and my father a Russian immigrant’s son from Manhattan, and they met at Simon & Schuster. My dad was a salesman with a sales case. He would call on all the bookstores, and he knew every great bookstore in America, and he’d go walk into those bookstores. So books were terribly enchanting to me. They supported our household. And I wanted to write one. And I’m actually making a documentary about the fascinating world of [publishing]. You go all the way back to Charles Dickens: When Dickens came to the United States, he was on a train, and he thought it was snowing — but it was people spitting out the window. Spitting was so popular, you would step on a carpet and it would be saturated with tobacco spit. Anyway, so I’m doing that documentary, which is very fascinating to me."
Fascinating to us, too. No word yet on when it might arrive, and it’s the first we’re hearing of it, but hopefully there’s more word on it soon.
"Joy" opens on Christmas Day.