Most actresses who become box-office heavyweights end up creating their own production companies to develop material for themselves, like Sandra Bullock, Drew Barrymore, and Reese Witherspoon have. But Lawrence is not so interested in producing. “I want to direct. But I would rather just do it than talk about it.” Jacobson thinks Lawrence will probably direct a movie when she’s still in her 20s, like Jodie Foster. “I think as a woman, she knows: You may need to create the content that is worthy of you. So to give yourself the tool kit is just smart adaptive behavior.” As part of her film schooling, Lawrence has been sitting in on Russell’s editing sessions for Joy. “It’s funny because I’m like, This process is so unique to him. There’s almost nothing I can take away from it. It would be like watching a dolphin and being like, Oh! So that’s how you swim in the ocean!”

When I ask Russell about the idea of Lawrence directing, he starts to laugh. “Well, first of all, I can’t wait to see this creature of now, of pure this-momentness, have to be the one who has to worry about everything. I think it will be a very interesting change for her. But she’s got a big soul and a big life ahead of her, and she can do really whatever she wants.”

Lawrence seems determined to learn as much she can from the legends and lunatics she is often surrounded by. It’s as if she hopes to fill in the gaps in an education that was eclipsed by her own raw talent: “I have a seventh- to halfway through eighth-grade education. But I’m not stupid.” Her Hunger Games nemesis Donald Sutherland recently gave her a big box of classic books. “Anna Karenina, it was just like, putting your socks on and reading, like, a pile of _Vogue_s. East of Eden, I love it so much, but there’s a part of me that thinks it shouldn’t be a movie. The beauty is in the writing.”

Despite her aura of fearlessness, there are some things about which she still feels insecure. Theater, for instance: “It scares me. My fear comes from feeling like theater is vocal and physical, and film is all eyes and subtlety. That I can do.” She pauses for a moment. “Isabella Rossellini”—who plays the girlfriend of her father in Joy—“told me that I would love theater because it’s only acting and none of the bullshit. But if I have to do more than three takes I start to just, like, die. Every time I’ve said that to somebody from theater, though, they always say it’s completely different every single night.” She’s such a live-wire presence in person and on-screen, it’s hard to imagine that wouldn’t translate onstage.

Lawrence, who grew up in horse country, fifteen minutes from a farm where she went to ride every day as a kid, managed to scare herself at her Vogue shoot, which took place in the desert outside L.A. “They gave me this amazing horse,” she says, eyes wide at the thought. “Fastest I’ve ever ridden in my life. As soon as we wrapped, I took that horse and galloped him so deep into the desert. That horse has seven speeds. I would give him one more kick and he just kept going faster. And there was this sunset in the desert and these big desert rocks and I just kept going and going and going, and by the time I turned around, I couldn’t see people and I was worried I wouldn’t find my way back. I can’t see anybody! And I gave him one kick, and horses are amazing: He was like, Food! And he galloped all the way home.” She laughs. “Oh, and I was wearing Tom Ford.”