Interview: David O. Russell Talks ‘Joy,’ Defying Expectations With Jennifer Lawrence, Writing A 2-Film Saga & Much More

There’s a before-and-after divide between two key creative periods in the career of filmmaker David O. Russell. The first half of his filmography found him genre-hopping between a Woody Allen-eseque comedy (“Flirting with Disaster”), a Gulf War thriller (“Three Kings”), and a existential-crisis comedy (“I Heart Huckabees”); while the second half, starting with “The Fighter,” is consumed with the capital F-ness mania of family.

In this latter era, Russell has been lacquering his pictures with the veneer of genre — a boxing movie, a con-man flick, a romantic comedy — but they are ultimately operatic melodramas about who we are, where we come from, trying to survive those origins, and the exasperating messiness or our real or ad-hoc families. With Russell’s latest film, “Joy,” his third straight collaboration with Jennifer Lawrence, the writer/director makes a raw and vulnerable movie about success, struggle, and the burden of the tribes we come from. In “Joy,” Jennifer Lawrence plays...