When David O Russell makes movies, he gets down and dirty. Behind-the-scenes stills show him crouched alongside his actors, just out of shot, full suit and tie, akimbo on the lino or crammed in a footwell. This is not a man afraid of the floor.
Same deal when he mops. “I tend to be more a hands-and-knees guy,” he says. “I was typically a sponge-mopper. But I am very familiar with mops and have mopped many a floor and had the satisfaction of that.”
He mopped a lot in his 20s, as a waiter and a cleaner; today it’s more for meditation than necessity. “In a zendo, where I practise regularly, part of the thing is to clean the floor; that’s as important as winning the lottery.” A chuckle with a bit of husk. “Seriously, in the poetry of zen. They’re like: ‘Yeah, they’re a little different but … they’re also the same.’ There’s this detachment and commitment to work and meticulousness and perseverance.” He smiles serenely. “I was also a vacuumer.”
This Russell shares with Jennifer Lawrence, who, he says, dodged mopping growing up: “Her mother was so OCD that she knew if she waited long enough she’d do it.” Russell chucks his head back, squints and grins. “That’s a great hustle if you can work it as a kid.”
Russell and Lawrence are one of the great, symbiotic, cinematic collaborations of our time – each other’s spirit animals, no-filter friends. In conversation, and giving a lecture the next day, he speaks about her frequently, fiercely fond, endlessly defensive – witness the “douche face” (his words) he pulled at the 2013 Baftas, when she lost out on an award for Silver Linings Playbook.
That was the first of three films together; a fourth will see her play the mother of Robert De Niro – another regular in Russell’s rolling rep company. She says it’s a death-till-they-part partnership; he that he intends to keep working even if he has to stagger on set in an oxygen mask. (Actually, he’s only 57, looks younger.)
It is easy to mistake Joy as their most mundane movie, maybe because Lawrence dials it down from the nutty heights of Playbook and American Hustle. Actually, it’s their most intricate and exhilarating. A loose biopic of Miracle Mop inventor Joy Mangano, this is a female empowerment fable that starts as whacked-out fairytale, then swerves into a ball-busting western. Its heroine evolves from doormat to godmother – the mobster type, not the Cinderella version (think Marlon Brando in marigolds).
Joy is really a collage, bits filched from the biography of its lead as much as its subject. “It’s an echo of what I’ve watched Jennifer live in the last five years,” he says. The sum of these parts is a manifesto on how to survive success as well as failure. About keeping sweet as you skip through the brickbats.
Yes, Joy began a gunslinger as well as becoming one, he says. But whether an assassin or entrepreneur or actor, you’re only as good as your last hit. “In karate you may have a black belt, but if you don’t use it they don’t consider you to have it any more. I think Joy was born the unanxious presence in the room. But that’s the tricky mystery of life; you still gotta live the journey, go through the trolls and the giants and the beasts and the goblins. For some reason that’s how somebody designed the software of this place.”
Two years ago, Russell helped Lawrence unpack when she bought her first house. She opened a box of trinkets she hadn’t seen since she was six; the scene was airlifted direct into Joy. The whole film, too, is highlyalive with the furnishing and definition of one’s own territory. Joy lives with her mother, grandmother, two children, ex-husband and estranged father. She tries to impose order by divvying it up and keeping it clean, but it’s still a prison. Not only are family the people least likely to instil self-belief, says the film, but also most likely to erode your sense of yourself.
Russell quotes Sartre: “We only become what we are by the radical refusal of that which others have made of us.” He continues: “You can wake up and find yourself defined by their space or the world’s space. And then the question is, if you’re going to try against the odds to change that. There’s a beautiful loneliness and sadness in people who dare to do things, which I find cinematic and cool.”
Joy, then, is a three-parent product. Do a little digging and it’s obvious Russell’s DNA is the most dominant. “I relate to her deeply,” he says – more, even, than to his go-to alter-ego, the QVC wrangler played by Bradley Cooper. “She manages a lot of bare-knuckled commerce that’s unforgiving and nasty,” says Russell, with relish. “You will lose it in the blink of an eye. It will be taken from you. You gotta be able to roll off it and move on. I just dig that in her.”
So the whole film is really about making a film? It is – it always is. “It’s always gonna get fucked up 10 ways till Sunday. Ten people will try to take it away from you, 10 will try to take credit, 10 will try to sue you for it. There will be someone in another city you have to confront. You have to bleed for it.”
Russell has haemorrhaged more generously than most. After a hard-scrabble career start, he was in his mid-30s before scoring a couple of indie hits at Sundance: Spanking the Monkey (1994) and Flirting with Disaster (1996). He upscaled in 1999 to Three Kings, an Iraq war drama with man of the moment George Clooney. The rumbles of dark days began aroundthen, building to thunderclaps during Marmite comedy I Heart Huckabees (2004); both movies earned more press for their on-set spats than their sporadic brilliance. came a divorce, the realisation his young son suffered multiple disorders and, says Russell, his own diagnosis with “a syndrome which can happen to anybody, especially writers and directors – it’s called head-up-your-ass”.
He didn’t make a movie for six years. The drought was finally ended after Mark Wahlberg pushed for Russell to head up family boxing saga The Fighter in 2010. The director came back fleet of foot and on form; he followed that film with the one-two sucker punch of Playbook and Hustle. Russell had finally struck gold with salty movies about damaged scrappers – and he wasn’t keen to jump back into limbo.
In Joy, Lawrence reads her daughter a children’s book about cicadas, many of which hibernate for 17 years, before discarding it because it’s too disturbing. The book is not a real book, just a resonating metaphor the director banked long back. “I grew up with cicadas. We never saw them or their shells. I considered them almost aliens or monsters, so when it was explained they would go underground for 17 years, it only made it scarier.That made even less sense to me.”
Joy is crushed the needs of her family for 17 years; Russell’s burial was only a little briefer. “It did seem to beperfect to me that she would go underground. I wanted her to be haunted by dreams. I’ve woken up many times from a nightmare where you’re in church: it’s beautiful, there’s a choir singing, it’s a funeral – it’s my funeral. These are wake-up telegrams from the great beyond.”
The film shows us what it is to choose life in a coffin. Joy’s mother, defeated by divorce, entombs herself in her bedroom, a man-fearing Miss Havisham addicted to soap operas. “That is a way of living I endorse,” says Russell. “I say: ‘I understand the world is too much for you. You’re in your room and you’re taking solace from narrative. You’re not hurting anybody. You might be helping, in calling forth great forbearance and patience from Joy to treat her mother as a third child.’ My mother in heaven is saying to me: ‘I made you be as strong as you need to be by the ways I challenged you, and the ways you had to try to take care of me.’”
So this is the zen era of David O Russell. He has chosen, like the woman whose story he nominally tells, to forgive those with whom he went into combat, and to mop for succour as well as sanitation. A man happy in his second act, who even looks a little reborn: clear eyes, teen sneakers, goes cross-legged without creaking. The reinvention of the one-time bad boy to proto-buddha might be a narrative curveball, but it is a sincere one.
“The sublime can happen very unexpectedly, as Yeats said. You can be sitting in a teashop and all of a sudden you can feel blessed and blessing. Why at that moment? It can be a very banal moment. These are things to look for in our cinema of the ordinary, which aspires to be extraordinary.”
