David O.Russell sta vivendo una sorta di seconda giovinezza.
Dopo il successo di Amori e disastri e Three Kings alla fine del secolo scorso, il suo ambizioso I heart Huckabees è stato travolto dalle critiche, dai pessimi incassi e dal resoconto delle sua sfuriata sul set con Dustin Hoffman e Lily Tomlin.
Solo nel 2010 è tornato al cinema con The Fighter, poi con Il lato positivo e quindi con il prossimo American Hustle.
L’attore Alessandro Nivola ha svelato a Vanity Fair il curioso metodo che Russell adotta durante le riprese:
Well, it was like no other experience I’ve ever had. It was definitely one of the most rewarding. I had done the Elephant Man, the play, with Bradley Cooper just the summer before, so he had been telling me about what shooting Silver Linings Playbook had been like. I couldn’t believe it, the way he was describing it. He was telling me that David O. Russell would have the camera rolling and just be sort of shouting out lines for you to say while the camera was rolling, and then you would just repeat them. I got in there, and sure enough, that’s exactly how we shot it. He lights a whole room, so there’s no traditional coverage—normally the way you shoot a movie is you do one side of the room, you’d light, and you’d shoot the character who’s on that one side. He doesn’t do it. He just lights the whole room, gets everybody in there, and has these incredible cameramen. Everything is shot on steadycam. He just stands right behind the camera operator and tells them what to film at any given moment. He talks while you’re filming the scene. He’ll say, ‘Go to Alessandro, go to Bradley, go over here, go to the picture of the cat that’s on the wall!’
He’d written a totally brilliant script, some of which is making it into the movie, but a lot of the dialogue that’s spoken in the movie is dialogue that he’s invented on the spur of the moment. It’s got such a kind of energized, free form that it’s just incredibly spontaneous, and also terrifying because there’s no way to prepare for it. It’s just like bungee jumping. He became a sort of extension of all the different characters and would be feeding you, and you would give it back to him, and then he would give it to you again, and you’d give it back. It just had this kind of wild, reckless, and inspired feeling about it. And obviously, I haven’t seen the film, I don’t know how this one will turn out, but I know that from his other movies, they all have a feeling of being very alive. And that’s clearly to do with the way that he shoots, because it’s so distinctive.
Sarà forse per questo motivo che i litigi sul set di Russell sono rimasti famosi?
Stanze di Cinema 