A pivotal moment in American Hustle had Christian Bale and Amy Adams acting a certain way, but in a newly released deleted scene, they act completely different.
Probably more so than any other contemporary director whose films are always awards season threats, American Hustle co-writer and director David O. Russell uses a spontaneous, almost Judd Apatow improvisational style method of directing. He knows that performances can lead scenes in different directions and often has actors experiment.
In the final film, Amy Adams’ character gets upset at Christian Bale’s for not committing to her. She agrees to go along with their plan to con everyone else, but she says that she’ll have to get very close to Bradley Cooper’s character in order to do it. This new deleted scene was filmed somewhere in that sequence, and the way that she reacts would have changed much of the tone of the film.
It was released by EW. Check it out:
“We made all of this,” Bale’s Irving Rosenfeld tells Adams’ Sydney Prosser. “You gotta hold on to what we made, right? You can cry British. You can do it.”
It’s interesting to speculate what the film would have looked like with this scene in it. Russell clearly made a decision to not have Adams’ Prosser be as completely heartbroken as she is depicted here, but if she was, more alterations throughout the rest of the film would needed to have been made. It’s quite probable that a few of the scenes that only featured Bale and Adams wouldn’t have worked in light of this scene.
American Hustle will be released on DVD and Blu-ray tomorrow, March 18. The Blu-ray will contain 11 deleted or extended scenes, including a full version of Jennifer Lawrence lip synching to “Live and Let Die.”