Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Dustin Rowles | Celebrity | November 4, 2025
David O. Russell has a reputation for being one of the, uh, yelliest and most confrontational directors in Hollywood. He famously berated Lily Tomlin on the set of I Heart Huckabees. He made Amy Adams cry on the set of American Hustle, and memorably, George Clooney got into a fistfight with the director on the set of Three Kings. Years later, Clooney would note that life was too short to work with someone like Russell again.
“I’m [not] going to have a miserable **** like David O. Russell making my life hell. Making every person in the crew’s life hell. It’s not worth it. Not at this point in my life.”
That was decidedly not the perspective of Jennifer Lawrence, who worked with Russell three times during her early to mid-20s, and those efforts bore fruit in terms of awards. Lawrence won an Oscar for Silver Linings Playbook and landed nominations for her roles in American Hustle and Joy.
In an interview with the New York Times, Lawrence doesn’t deny that Russell is yell-y and aggressive, but she says she just didn’t take it personally. “I really felt like with David that was his way of communicating in a non-bull**** way. I never felt like he was degrading or yelling at me. If he didn’t like something, he was just like: ‘That was terrible. Looked like s***. Do it better.’ And that was a very helpful conversation. How so? I don’t know. ‘Slower! Not so loud!’ I’m not sensitive. I don’t know how you can be in this industry.”
After saying she’s not sensitive, however, Lawrence walked back part of that statement. “Maybe he was harder on [Amy Adams] than he was on me. I don’t know. I mean, yes, of course I’m sensitive. I’m really sensitive. I don’t know.”
Adams and Lawrence both worked with Russell on American Hustle, the movie set where Russell made Adams cry. In an interview back in 2016, Adams suggested that Lawrence was “Teflon” and somehow “didn’t take any of it on.”
For what it’s worth, after Lawrence’s Joy, David O. Russell seemingly fell out of favor, though he did return in 2022 with Margot Robbie’s box-office flop Amsterdam. He’s currently in post-production on Madden, a John Madden biopic starring Nic Cage and Christian Bale — the latter of whom once stepped in to mediate an argument between Amy Adams and David O. Russell on the set of American Hustle. Madden, for the record, hasn’t been without its issues either. An unnamed actor walked off the set only two weeks into production, and there have been reports of chaos during filming.
via Variety
