David O. Russell

David Owen Russell (born August 20, 1958) is an American film director, screenwriter and producer.

He wrote his senior thesis on the United States intervention in Chile from 1963 to 1973.

After graduating from Amherst, Russell traveled to Nicaragua and taught in a Sandinista literacy program.

He worked in waitering, bartending, and catering.

Some of his bartending colleagues included members of the Blue Man Group.

He worked for a booksellers' association and later became a community organizer in Maine.

He used video equipment to document slums and bad housing conditions, which later became a documentary of Lewiston, Maine.

Russell was a political activist and canvassed and raised money in neighborhoods; he also did community work in Boston's South End.

In addition to working in several day jobs, he began to write short films.

Russell directed a documentary about Panamanian immigrants in Boston, which led to a job as a production assistant on a PBS series called Smithsonian World.

In 1981, Russell received his A.B. degree from Amherst College, where he majored in English and political science.

In 1987, Russell wrote, produced, and directed Bingo Inferno: A Parody on American Obsessions, a short film about an obsessive bingo-playing mother.

Two years later, he made another short titled Hairway to the Stars, which featured Bette Davis and William Hickey.

Both shorts were shown at the Sundance Film Festival.

After Russell made an award-winning short film for a Boston television station, he received grants from the New York State Council on the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Instead of the money going towards a feature about a fortune cookie writer, he decided to make Spanking the Monkey, a film about an incestuous mother-son relationship.

As a result, Russell had to return the funds to the NEA.

His early directing career includes the dark comedy films Spanking the Monkey (1994), Flirting with Disaster (1996), Three Kings (1999), and I Heart Huckabees (2004).

Spanking the Monkey, the 1994 independent dark comedy, was his first directorial effort.

The film was produced by Dean Silvers, and starred Jeremy Davies as a troubled young man and Alberta Watson as his lonely mother.

Despite the controversial subject matter, the film received critical acclaim and won him Best First Screenplay and Best First Feature from the Independent Spirit Awards, as well as the Audience Award at the Sundance Film Festival.

Flirting with Disaster

His next project was the Miramax comedy Flirting with Disaster (1996), his second collaboration with Dean Silvers, and first with Harvey Weinstein.

The film follows a neurotic man (Ben Stiller) who travels with his wife (Patricia Arquette) and a high-strung caseworker (Téa Leoni) to find his biological parents.

The film also starred Mary Tyler Moore, George Segal, Alan Alda, Josh Brolin, Richard Jenkins, and Lily Tomlin.

It was screened in the Un Certain Regard section at the Cannes Film Festival, and was well received by most critics.

Roger Ebert said of the direction, "Russell finds the strong central line all screwball begins with, the seemingly serious mission or quest, and then throws darts at a map of the United States as he creates his characters."

Lisa Schwarzbaum of Entertainment Weekly gave the film a 'B' and declared it "one of the ha-ha funniest comedies currently at a theater near you."

Three Kings

He gained critical success with the biographical sports drama The Fighter (2010), the romantic comedy-drama Silver Linings Playbook (2012), and the dark comedy crime film American Hustle (2013).

The three films were commercially successful and acclaimed by critics, earning Russell three Academy Award nominations for Best Director, as well as a Best Adapted Screenplay nomination for Silver Linings Playbook and a Best Original Screenplay nomination for American Hustle.

Russell received his seventh Golden Globe nomination for the semi-biographical comedy-drama Joy (2015).

Russell was raised in Larchmont, New York, in an atheist, middle-class household.

His parents worked for Simon & Schuster; his father, Bernard, was the vice president of sales for the company, and his mother, Maria, was a secretary there.

His father was from a Russian-Jewish family, and his mother was Italian-American (of Lucanian descent).

His paternal grandfather, a butcher from the Upper West Side of Manhattan, lost many of his relatives in concentration camps.

When he was 13, Russell made his first film for a school project and used a Super 8 film camera to film people in New York City.

He attended Mamaroneck High School, where he was voted "Class Rebel".

He fell in love with film in his teens (his favorite movies included Taxi Driver, Chinatown, and Shampoo) but aspired to become a writer; Russell started a newspaper in high school and wrote short stories.

As his parents worked in the publishing industry, he grew up in a household filled with books.