Soon after Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Cooper finished shooting David O. Russell's buzzy dramedy Silver Linings Playbook, they dived into a new project portraying a Depression-era married couple in Serena.
So it was easy to believe the Oscar-nominated Lawrence and her dashing co-star when they trumpeted each other's praises during the Toronto International Film Festival this past September.
"Bradley and I are both very no [B.S.]," Lawrence told reporters during the festival, seated next to Cooper and Russell. "I don't like getting to the end of a really long take and then the director coming up and tiptoeing around my feelings and telling me in a really polite way that he didn't like it.
"It's like, cut the [crap], tell me what you didn't like before we waste time. Let's just do this."
Early signs suggest the no-nonsense approach worked beautifully.
A crowd-rouser with a precisely measured mix of comedy, drama and romance, Silver Linings Playbook - which opened Wednesday - casts Cooper as Pat, a mentally brittle man trying to reassemble his life after a possibly premature release from a psychiatric institution.
With little help from his unstable family - including a masterful performance by Robert De Niro as Pat's gambling-addicted, Philadelphia Eagles-obsessed father - Pat is rudderless and volatile until he slowly forms a friendship with Lawrence's Tiffany, a sad-eyed young widow who shares Pat's propensity for blurting out her thoughts in tact-free bursts of honesty.
Buoyed by a talented supporting cast that also includes Academy Award nominee Jacki Weaver and motor-mouthed comic actor Chris Tucker (in a dramatic departure), Silver Linings Playbook won the all-important People's Choice Award at the Toronto film festival while racking up raves from critics, many of whom are hailing the heartfelt flick as an Oscar front-runner.
While the subject matter is heavy, the film is actually quite light - thanks primarily to the movie's disarmingly witty script. And for Cooper, finding the comedy in ostensibly unfunny situations wasn't all that difficult.
"The most dramatic moments in my life that I've witnessed or been part of have been utterly hilarious in moments," said the 37-year-old star of The Hangover franchise.
"David has this thing: 'Make it gangster, make it real.'... When that starts to happen, it gets funny, actually. That's when the rhythm happens. It gets tragic and it gets real. It becomes like life. And that's when people can relate to it."
Though adapted from Matthew Quick's novel of the same name, Silver Linings Playbook veers from its source material. Russell, who wrote the screenplay, says the book was "much more extreme" in its depiction of the damaged central characters.
But he said he didn't necessarily feel his job was to reproduce specific mental illnesses in painstaking detail, but rather to draw from personal experience in trying to portray these characters as fully as possible.
"Jennifer's character was always that sort of volatile, direct, charismatic girl that is very potent and you don't know what's going to happen," said the Oscar-nominated director of The Fighter and Three Kings.
"I had to base that on people that I knew, or Bradley had to base it on people he knew, and Jennifer as well. People who had tangled with these matters with or without medications."
Well, Russell's process seemed to work fine by his cast.
He and Cooper are reportedly planning their next movie together, about the 1970s Abscam scandal. And Lawrence sure speaks as though her experience on Silver was golden.
"Because [Russell] is so sweet - he's the nicest person in the entire world - he's probably the only person in the entire planet who can get away with everything that he's saying," said the 22-year-old star of The Hunger Games and Winter's Bone.
"He'll say what everybody else is thinking but nobody can get mad.... So we were constantly on our toes, constantly on our feet. We could be so honest with each other, more honest than any movie ... I've ever been on.
"I don't even want to work another way."
