by Gill Pringle
Fresh off mixed reviews from Francis Lawrence’s Russian espionage thriller Red Sparrow and Darren Aronofsky’s Mother!, Hollywood’s golden girl Jennifer Lawrence pressed pause on her dizzying career, emerging briefly last year in Adam McKay’s sci-fi satire, Don’t Look Up, as part of an A-list ensemble.
Heavily pregnant, the beloved actress gamely took part in press activities alongside co-stars Meryl Streep and Leonardo DiCaprio before returning to New York to give birth to her now nine-month-old son Cy, with art dealer husband Cooke Maroney.
One of the most talented actresses of her generation, her portrayal of Katniss Everdeen in The Hunger Games franchise cemented her as an enormous box office draw while her award-winning performances in Winter’s Bone, Silver Linings Playbook and American Hustle underscored her as a formidable talent.
Looking to return to her indie roots, Lawrence was immediately drawn to Elizabeth Sanders’ original script for Causeway which follows Lynsey (Lawrence), a soldier who suffers a traumatic brain injury while deployed in Afghanistan, now struggling to adjust to life back home.
“This movie came to us towards the end of Jen’s three year hiatus and she was being super thoughtful about what kind of material she’d be returning with,” explains Justine Ciarrocchi, who produces Causeway alongside Lawrence under the actress’s production banner, Excellent Cadaver.
“After a barrage of bigger studio films, I think she was craving something intimate.
“So much of what we’re submitted is traditionally structured, where everything is perfectly resolved and very redemptive. And this felt super refreshing and more abstract than that. I think so much of the story lived in the subtext and Jen connected with it pretty immediately,” says Ciarrocchi, explaining how the script was also submitted to director Lila Neugebauer at the same time.
“And then Jen and Lila sat down together over dinner. It was a five hour meal and they made the decision literally overnight.”
According to Ciarrocchi, Lawrence wasn’t even remotely perturbed to be working with a first-time film director – Neugebauer’s Emmy-nominated limited series, Maid, had not aired at the time they first met in 2019.
“Actually, Jen was thrilled to be working with a first time film director. Lila hadn’t made a movie yet. And so, the fact that they met, and within seconds of interacting with Lila, it is clear that she is a force… Her perspective on the material instantly captivated Jen and it felt like a really thrilling experiment,” she says.
Joining in the conversation with FilmInk, Neugebauer recalls her first meetings with Lawrence. “Not long after we had that dinner, we spent a couple of weeks in which I went to her apartment every morning, and we ate breakfast, and just read through the original script, very slowly one page at a time. At that point, we were not talking about performance. We were not talking about results, or what it would look like on screen. We were just talking, free associating, developing our relationship to Lynsey and to each other.
“I think the shared language that we were building together and envisioning, was enormously useful for our time on set. And I would also say that I think this is a very personal film for Jen,” she says.
“I don’t believe I am betraying her confidence to say that I think she’s drawing upon really personal, intimate, inner life stuff here. The work of the actor is always imaginative, and I also think that the discipline in her craft is apparent in her work in this film. I see it in all of her work. But because the cinematic register is louder, I think sometimes one can overlook that… although, actually, in all of her work, you can find these exquisite passages of stillness and tremendous viscosity of inner life. I think the quiet in this film, maybe also makes space to bear witness to that stillness in a more particular way,” says Neugebauer, also acclaimed for her direction of the Tony Award nominated Broadway revival of Kenneth Lonergan’s The Waverly Gallery in 2018.
In portraying a military engineer returning to the States from Afghanistan with a debilitating brain injury after an IED explosion, Lawrence’s Lynsey undergoes a painful and slow recovery as she re-learns to walk and re-trains her memory.
But when she returns home to New Orleans, she must face memories even more aching and formative than those she had in service: a reckoning with her childhood.
Staying with her mother (Linda Emond), with whom she shares a tense relationship, all Lynsey wants to do is return to the armed services. However, her doctor (Stephen McKinley Henderson) refuses to sign her off so, in the meantime, she gets a job cleaning pools. When her truck breaks down, she meets James (Brian Tyree Henry), who works at the auto repair shop. Slowly, they start to rely on each other for company and solace. James, it turns out, is also suppressing his past: a car accident that killed his beloved nephew. He was in the driver’s seat.
These two damaged souls’ budding friendship forms the centre and the heart of Neugebauer’s debut feature – a quietly devastating and ultimately uplifting story about coming to terms and moving forward.
Admittedly, the story was personal for Lawrence. “There were a lot of themes from my own childhood, from growing up in that town that I didn’t really feel like I belonged in or feeling lonely or misunderstood. And that urge to get out, and then getting out and still feeling lost was the big one,” she reveals.
“I think my life has, unfortunately, had a lot of betrayal in it. So, coming to a place of trust and wanting to stay in something and wanting to believe that I could trust what was happening right as I was getting married, and making that decision to do that with my husband, and having to rebuild what that feels like, and building a home and trusting the home…” she says.
Immediately drawn to Neugebauer’s vision for the project, she says, “Lila is so articulate and intelligent, I felt like we would be a good mix and bring out each other’s strengths. And I found her to be extremely authentic, somebody who emotionally and intellectually is only looking for something that’s real and something that’s true.”
Having made an instant connection with the director, Lawrence, now 32, was eager to dive in. “The urge to make it quickly definitely was exciting to me; it just reminded me of my indie roots.
“It felt like a real opportunity, especially with producing it, to use all of these lessons, tricks and the things that I’ve learned in the past that I love about filmmaking – that doesn’t really happen on a big budget. There’s not a lot of surprise. And with this, there was,” she says.
But the universe had other plans for the world’s highest-paid actress, whose films have grossed over US$6 billion worldwide.
Shot on location in New Orleans in 2019, the pandemic caused production to halt for almost two years, resuming in 2021.
Neugebauer says the break was a blessing in disguise.
“We shot the bulk of it in the summer of 2019, and the rest of it in the summer of 2021. While it was quite challenging to live in that limbo, it produced a set of opportunities to reevaluate,” says the director who had originally shot flashbacks of Lynsey’s experience in Afghanistan.
“The photography was visually arresting and was much more kinetic than the rest of the film but, ultimately, I came to a realisation that the stronger version of the movie had none of that. And so that clarity emerged by the time we were in that prolonged pause, and created space for what was organically happening based on the discoveries that inevitably happen while you’re making a movie, which is that we were realising that what was happening between Jen and Brian on screen, was the heartbeat of the film.
“It was already sort of nudging itself towards the centre of the film, and then I think when those flashbacks went away, it revealed and confirmed the centrality of that relationship as the transformative vehicle in the film,” says Neugebauer.
Causeway screens on November 3, 2022 as the opening night film of the Veterans Film Festival. It will stream on Apple TV+ from November 4, 2022
