Debra Granik
Granik at the 2010 Deauville American Film Festival
Born	(1963-02-06) February 6, 1963 (age 49) Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States
Occupation	Director, cinematographer, screenwriter
Years active	1997–present

Debra Granik (born February 6, 1963) is an American independent film director. She has won a series of awards at the Sundance Film Festival, including Best Short in 1998 for Snake Feed (her first film, made while a student at New York University), the Dramatic Directing Award in 2004 for her first feature-length film, Down to the Bone (a tale of addiction she co-scripted with Richard Lieske), and the Grand Jury Prize for Drama in 2010 and Prix du jury at Deauville American Film Festival 2010 for her second feature, Winter's Bone.

Early life[link]

Born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Granik grew up in the affluent suburbs of Washington D.C. She received her B.A. from Brandeis University in 1985, where she majored in politics and became very interested in documentary film, democratic media, and feminism. After graduation, Granik started making educational films for trade unions. She later earned an MFA from the graduate film program at New York University (Tisch School of the Arts). While at NYU, she mentored under Boris Frumin and directed her first short, "Snake Feed" ^[1]. Granik is the granddaughter of broadcast pioneer Theodore Granik (1907–1970), founder-moderator of radio-TV's long-run panel discussion program, The American Forum of the Air.

Film Career[link]

[edit] Snake Feed & Down to the Bone

Granik calls filmmaking “an organic, incremental process”. Her first short, Snake Feed, was accepted into Sundance Film Festival's labs for screenwriting and directing, and eventually this short grew into her first feature-length film, Down to the Bone in 2004 ^[1]. This chilling film tells the story of an upstate New York mother who goes to rehab to kick her cocaine addiction and ends up falling in love with a male nurse and, with his help, she ascends back into her old drug habits ^[2]. This film was based on an original screenplay written by Granik and her creative partner, Anne Rosellini. The main character, played by a then-little-known Vera Farmiga, was inspired by a woman that Granik met while attending film school in New York ^[1].

[edit] Winter's Bone

Granik's second feature, Winter's Bone, tells the story of Ree Dolly, an Ozark teenager who is the sole caretaker of her two younger siblings and her catatonic mother. She is forced to hunt down her missing drug-dealing father in order to save her family from eviction and poverty. The screenplay was adapted by Granik and Anne Rosellini from a 2006 novel by the same name by Daniel Woodrell. The film, starring Jennifer Lawrence and John Hawkes, won the Grand Jury Prize: Dramatic Film at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival and garned distribution with Roadside Attractions as a result. Additionally, at the Seattle International Film Festival Granik's feature won the Golden Space Needle Audience Award for Best Director, and Best Actress award for Jennifer Lawrence^[3]. The film went on to receive four 2011 Academy Award nominations: Best Picture, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Actress and Best Supporting Actor.

The film was shot on location in the Ozark territory of Missouri. Granik cast many of the supporting roles with first-time actors from the surrounding area ^[4] and all of the homes on screen were established Ozark homes--no sets were built for this film ^[3]. For the look of the film, Granik kept most of the established aesthetics of the homes in which they were shooting and many of the few momentos that were added to the homes were contributed by Ozark people in the community ^[2].

Winter's Bone was shot using a RED Digital Camera, a new favorite piece of technology in the independent film community ^[1].

Themes[link]

Interviewed by Jeremiah Kipp, Granik gave an overview of the challenges involved in doing a film about addiction:

The traditional storyline in an American film is usually in the form of a V shape. I am oversimplifying, but we see someone tumbling down, they hit bottom, and then they rise up again and find redemption. Anyone who personally, tangentially or culturally knows anything about addiction is aware that it resembles an EKG. Up and down, up and down. Very few people ever get clean on the first or second attempt. For many people, it’s something they have to try over and over again. You get knocked down and ask all the ethical questions like how many chances do you give a person? When is the last chance? How many chances do they get? Can you imagine how difficult it is to fit that in a feature-length film? But those are the questions that are worth asking... The reason why boils down to the word “dark”. It is the scariest four-letter word in American storytelling and in this culture. Our film had a strong reception in Europe and achieved distribution, but that was not the case here. We received so many responses like, “We love the film, but we cannot do anything with it or we’ll lose our shirts. We’re sorry.” The intervention comes from people like Laemmle/Zeller Films. Every couple of years, some mavericks take on this challenge of distributing so-called un-distributable films. They take those films on a small run and allow them to see the light of day. Those efforts are what give a film like Down to the Bone a chance to have a life of some kind.^[5]

Debra Granik's films deal with issues of personal strength and will power, like the character of Ree Dolly in Winter's Bone. She cites Mike Leigh, Ken Loach, Shane Meadows, the Dardenne brothers, Laurent Cantet, and Abbas Kiarostami as some of her major influences in her directing career ^[1].

Filmography[link]

• Snake Feed (Short) (1997) - writer & director
• Down to the Bone (2004) -- writer & director
• Winter's Bone (2010) - adapted screenplay & director

Awards & Nominations[link]

Further information: List of accolades received by Winter's Bone

Won[link]

• Gotham Independent Film Awards
  • Best Feature: Winter's Bone
• Deauville American Film Festival
  • Prix du Jury, Winter's Bone
• Seattle International Film Festival
  • Golden Space Needle Award for Best Director: Debra Granik, Winter's Bone
• Sundance Film Festival
  • Directing Award Dramatic: Down to the Bone
  • Grand Jury Prize: Dramatic Film: Winter's Bone
  • Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award: Debra Granik and Anne Rosellini, Winter's Bone

[edit] Nominated ^[6]

• Academy Award
  • Best Picture: Winter's Bone
  • Best Adapted Screenplay: Winter's Bone
• British Independent Film Awards
  • Best Foreign Film: Winter's Bone
• Independent Spirit Awards
  • Best Feature: Winter's Bone
  • Best Screenplay: Debra Granik and Anne Rosellini, Winter's Bone

See also[link]

• List of female film and television directors
• Women Screenwriters
• List of Sundance Film Festival award winners
• Seattle International Film Festival
• Independent Spirit Awards
• List of accolades received by Winter's Bone
• Winter's Bone
• Down to the Bone

References[link]

External links[link]

• Filmmaker: Interview with Debra Granik
• Down to the Bone official site
• Winter's Bone official site
• Debra Granik at the Internet Movie Database
• "Interview with Debra Granik regarding Winter's Bone in The A.V. Club.
• "A Director Ever in Search of Survivors" in The New York Times
• Moon, Michael and Colin Talley. "Life in a Shatter Zone: Debra Granik's Film Winter's Bone." Southern Spaces, December 6, 2010
• "An Interview with Debra Granik, director of Winter's Bone" The Seatlest.

Jennifer Lawrence
Lawrence at the 83rd Academy Awards, February 27, 2011
Born	Jennifer Shrader Lawrence (1990-08-15) August 15, 1990 (age 21) Louisville, Kentucky, U.S.
Occupation	Actress
Years active	2006–present

Jennifer Shrader Lawrence^[1] (born August 15, 1990) is an American film and television actress. She had lead roles in TBS's The Bill Engvall Show and in the independent films The Burning Plain and Winter's Bone, for which she received nominations for the Academy Award, Golden Globe Award, Satellite Award, and the Screen Actors Guild Award. At age 20, she was the second youngest actress ever to be nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress. She is also known for playing Mystique in X-Men: First Class. In 2012, Lawrence achieved wider recognition starring as the heroine Katniss Everdeen in The Hunger Games, an adaptation of Suzanne Collins' best-selling novel of the same name. Her performance in the film garnered her notable critical praise and marked her as the highest grossing action heroine of all time.^[2][3] Lawrence's performances thus far have prompted Rolling Stone to define her as "the most talented young actress in America."^[4]

Early life[link]

Lawrence was born and raised in Louisville, Kentucky, and has two older brothers. Her parents are Karen (née Koch), who runs a children's camp, and Gary Lawrence, who once owned a concrete construction firm, Lawrence & Associates.^[5][6][7] She acted in local theater^[8] and, by the age of 14, had decided to pursue an acting career, persuading her parents to take her to New York City to find a talent agent. Prior to finding success in Hollywood, Lawrence attended Kammerer Middle School. She graduated from high school two years early with a 3.9 average in order to begin a career in acting.^[5][9] While growing up and in between acting, Lawrence served as an assistant nurse at the children's summer day camp that her mother ran.^[10]

Career[link]

Early work[link]

Lawrence had never taken any drama classes/lessons for acting.^[5] She started out her acting career in the TBS comedy The Bill Engvall Show, playing the eldest daughter of Lauren Pearson. Written and created by Bill Engvall and Michael Leeson, the show is set in a Denver suburb and follows the life of 'Bill Pearson' (played by Engvall), a family counselor whose own family could use a little dose of counseling. The series went on the air in September 2007 and was canceled in 2009 after three seasons. Lawrence received the Young Artist Award for Outstanding Young Performer in a TV Series for her role in the show.

Lawrence had guest-roles in the television series The Devil You Know, Cold Case, Medium, and Monk.^[11]

In 2008, she appeared in a small role in the film Garden Party as Tiff. It was directed by Jason Freeland. The same year, Lawrence appeared on the big screen in Guillermo Arriaga's film directorial debut The Burning Plain, opposite Charlize Theron and Kim Basinger. Her performance in the film earned her the Marcello Mastroianni Award for best young emerging actor/actress at the Venice Film Festival in 2008.^[12]

Still in 2008, Lawrence had the lead role in another film director's debut, Lori Petty's family drama The Poker House, opposite Selma Blair and Chloë Moretz, where she starred as Agnes, a young girl victim of abuse.^[13] Lawrence was awarded the Los Angeles Film Festival for Outstanding Performance for her role in the film. She appeared in the music video for the song "The Mess I Made", from the 2009 album Losing Sleep by Parachute.

2010–present[link]

Lawrence's lead role in Debra Granik's Winter's Bone, which won best picture at the Sundance Film Festival in 2010, is generally cited as a breakout performance for her.^[14] She portrays Ree Dolly, a seventeen-year-old in the Ozark Mountains who cares for her mentally ill mother and her younger brother and sister. Ree then discovers that her father put their house and land up as a bond for a court appearance before he disappeared, and the family now faces eviction.^[15] The performance was highly acclaimed by film critics. David Denby, writing in The New Yorker, said "the movie would be unimaginable with anyone less charismatic playing Ree."^[16] Peter Travers from the Rolling Stone also spoke highly of her and noted that "her performance is more than acting, it's a gathering storm. Lawrence's eyes are a roadmap to what's tearing Ree apart".^[17] Receiving accolades for her performance, Lawrence was awarded the National Board of Review Award for Best Breakthrough Performance. She received a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actress on January 25, 2011, becoming the second-youngest actress to date to be nominated for the category,^[18] and also accrued nominations from the Golden Globe Awards, Screen Actors Guild Awards, Independent Spirit Awards, and the Satellite Awards among others.

Lawrence had a role in The Beaver, a dark comedy starring Jodie Foster and Mel Gibson that was filmed in 2009, but which spent an extended period of time stalled due to controversies surrounding Gibson. It was released on May 6, 2011. Lawrence co-starred in the independent film Like Crazy, which premiered at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival and received a wider release by Paramount Pictures.^[19]

On June 18, 2011, it was announced that Lawrence was invited to join the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

In June 2011, she starred as shape-shifting villain Mystique alongside James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender in X-Men: First Class,^[20] a prequel to the rest of the X-Men film series and will be reprising this role again in the sequel. Lawrence's Mystique is a younger version of the character played by Rebecca Romijn in earlier X-Men films.

She is also set to star alongside Elisabeth Shue in Mark Tonderai's thriller House at the End of the Street,^[21] which completed filming in 2010 and is in post-production.^[22]

Lawrence was cast in David O. Russell's The Silver Linings Playbook, opposite Bradley Cooper and Robert De Niro. She was originally cast to play "O" in the film Savages directed by Oliver Stone, but dropped out due to scheduling conflicts.

In 2012, Lawrence replaced Angelina Jolie in Susanne Bier's period thriller, The Falling, based on the novel Serena by Ron Rash.^[23][24] She will be playing the role of Serena who learns that she can never bear her husband children and is set out to murder the woman who bore her husband an illegitimate son before their marriage.

[edit] The Hunger Games

In March 2011, Lawrence was offered the part of Katniss Everdeen in the film The Hunger Games, based on the best-selling novel of the same name by Suzanne Collins. Despite being a fan of the books, Lawrence took three days to accept the role because she was initially intimidated by the size of the movie and what it may mean for her fame.^[25] She underwent extensive training to get in shape for the role, including stunt training, archery, rock and tree climbing, combat, running, parkour, pilates, and yoga.^[26][27] The film was released on March 23, 2012, and set the record for the third-largest opening weekend of all time, making a record-breaking $152.5 million in three days for a non-sequel film.^[28]

The fact that The Hunger Games emerged as a big box office hit with a female lead represents a dramatic shift for the action film genre because historically, among the "top 200 worldwide box-office hits ever ($350 million and up), not one has been built around a female action star" and for the first time ever, Lawrence contradicts that.^[29] She is currently the highest grossing action heroine.

Though the film generally received positive reviews, Lawrence's strong portrayal of Katniss Everdeen was the most highly praised with Todd McCarthy from The Hollywood Reporter saying Lawrence embodies Katniss, "just as one might imagine her from the novel" and "anchors" the whole film "with impressive gravity and presence", ultimately calling her "the ideal screen actress".^[30] Kenneth Turan from the Los Angeles Times stated that Lawrence is the "best possible performer as Katniss and is the key factor in making 'Hunger Games' an involving popular entertainment with strong narrative drive that holds our attention".^[31] Chicago Sun-Times film critic Roger Ebert also agreed that "Lawrence is strong and convincing in the central role".^[32]

Lawrence will start filming the film adaptation of the second novel in the The Hunger Games trilogy, Catching Fire, this summer, which is scheduled to be released on November 23, 2013.^[33]

Personal life[link]

Lawrence lived in New York City for the first few years of her career, but now resides in Santa Monica, California.^[5] She likes to paint, knit sweaters and scarves, surf, and play the guitar.^[34][35] She has been dating English actor Nicholas Hoult since 2011.^[36]

Filmography[link]

References[link]

External links[link]

• Jennifer Lawrence at the Internet Movie Database