Speaking to Entertainment Weekly recently, the Oscar-winning actress disclosed her plans to get behind the lens. “I’d also like to direct a comedy,” she said. “I have wanted to direct as long as I’ve wanted to act. I just don’t talk about it because I’d rather just do it.”
Lawrence’s first directing project certainly doesn’t sound like a comedy, though. Called Project Delirium, the film is based on a New Yorker report about mental warfare during the Cold War. Lawrence has described the project as being “like an acid experiment gone terribly wrong.”
Raffi Khatchadourian wrote the 2012 New Yorker article in question, called Operation Delirium, which delves into Colonel James S. Ketchum’s chemical warfare experiments at the Edgewood military facility in Maryland between 1960 and 1969. In hopes of finding an incapacitating agent which sedated the enemy without killing them, Ketchum tested over 5,000 U.S. soldiers with substances like LSD, marijuana, and the deliriant compound called BZ. And, well, let’s just say that things didn’t quite go as planned.
Lawrence didn’t explain what drew her to the project but she did dig into her passion for the director’s chair. “It’s funny,” she told Entertainment Weekly, “I’ve wanted to direct since I was 16 and always thought I should start making steps towards that. If I had tried to do it earlier, I wouldn’t have been ready. Now I actually feel ready.”
J-Law fans will continue to see her on the silver screen, though. Her third film with director David O. Russell (American Hustle, Silver Linings Playbook), called Joy, premieres on Christmas. Next year, and she’ll also reprise her role as Mystique in X-Men: Apocalypse in May, 2016. She’s also cast in the upcoming Morten Tyldum-directed sci-fi film Passengers, alongside red-hot star Chris Pratt. And in August, she announced that she’s co-writing a new comedy with comedian Amy Schumer.
In other words, the actress, screenwriter, producer, and soon-to-be director has quite the busy schedule planned for the next few years.
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