Shooting “Joy” has not been joyous for Jennifer Lawrence.
“The Hunger Games” star had “a meltdown” Tuesday night while filming her third movie with mercurial director David O. Russell, a source on the Boston set told me.
“He was screaming at her. She was screaming at him. It was loud,” said the witness. But a publicist for the Fox movie told me, “There was no fight. David is very passionate. He yells lines back at actors. He gets right in the scene with them. This scene was a big argument. Jennifer had a crying baby in her arms. There was a lot of screaming and yelling.”
Lawrence plays Joy Mangano, a Long Island single mom who invented the Miracle Mop and became one of the country’s most successful entrepreneurs. Robert De Niro plays her father. The cast also features Bradley Cooper, Virginia Madsen and Diane Ladd.
My source said Lawrence has also had trouble memorizing her lines because Russell has multiple versions of the screenplay circulating.
“He’ll say read pages 15 to 20, but the pages are different in different scripts, and she’ll memorize the wrong scene,” said the insider.
