What Is This ‘Project Delirium’ Jennifer Lawrence Wants To Direct?
Jennifer Lawrence, out promoting the final installment of The Hunger Games, that disclosed she wants to make her directing debut on a picture called Project Delirium. What exactly is going on with this? It’s set up to be financed by 2929, with Lawrence and her partner Justine Ciarrocchi producing along with Todd Wagner and Ben Cosgrove. Lawrence doesn’t plan to act in it.
Although the pickup the trades gave the story after Lawrence made comments in EW has her defining the project as funny, I’m not sure comedy is the best way to describe it. In fact, enough commenters have chimed in that I believe they are right and Lawrence’s quote got a little mangled in her use of the word “funny.” Because the subject matter is anything but funny. Written by Raffi Khatchadourian and published in the December 17, 2002, issue of The New Yorker, the article — headlined “Operation Delirium” — details the military career of Col James S. Ketchum. He didn’t distinguish himself on the battlefield. A psychiatrist by training, Ketchum fought the Soviets in a Cold War race to test psychochemicals that temporarily incapacitated the minds of soldiers in the field. The fear was that one side could gain advantage by frying the brains of the enemy, which could be rendered docile and harmless by nerve gases. The test subjects –experiments ran in the 1960s and ’70s — sampled drugs that ranged from LSD to nerve agents such as VX and BZ.
They start looking for a writer next week to draft the story into a film. The article itself is a bit disturbing, as test subjects were seriously impaired by the dispensing of psychochemicals. If there is a comedy in this article, it would definitely be a black comedy of the Dr. Stranglove variety; it’s certainly ambitious subject matter for the Oscar-winning actress to get behind the camera, as she continues to surprise.
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