60 Minutes - 8/5/2018: The Wounds of War, The Leaning Tower of San Francisco, Jennifer Lawrence

Episode Date: August 6, 2018

A Chicago surgeon is putting his life on the line in Syria -- to help save victims of Syria's civil war. Scott Pelley shares his story. Jon Wertheim travels to San Francisco -- where a 645-foot skyscraper has been sinking and leaning since it was built in 2006. Actress Jennifer Lawrence has an Oscar, a Golden Globe and many nominations -- but you may be surprised to know that she does not have a high school diploma. Bill Whitaker has her story on tonight's "60 Minutes." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Why do fintechs like Float choose Visa? As a more trusted, more secure payments network, Visa provides scale, expertise, and innovative payment solutions. Learn more at visa.ca slash fintech. This is a hospital during the siege of Aleppo. From the looks of it, maybe an exhausted father, a distraught mother, and a child at left curled up on a gurney. That was an airstrike.

This hospital was hit 14 times in six months. You work with the understanding that you might find yourself dead or crippled or dismembered on the floor next to the people you're trying to save. When the fog rolls in over San Francisco, the skyscrapers live up to the name. Among them, the Millennium Tower, 58 stories of opulence. Opened in 2009, it was the tallest residential building west of the Mississippi. Though priced in the millions, inventory moved quickly, attracting tech barons, bankers, and San Francisco football hero Joe Montana.

Yet for all its curb appeal, the building has one major fundamental problem. It's sinking into mud and tilting toward its neighbors. How did you get from Kentucky to the top of Hollywood? Desperation. At just 27, Jennifer Lawrence has already been nominated for four Academy

Awards, winning one. You are not a stand-up guy right now. She has starred in a range of movies, but in her latest, she does something she had always avoided. You are not a stand-up guy right now. She has starred in a range of movies. But in her latest, she does something she had always avoided. Nudity. It's my body and it's my art and it's my choice. And if you don't like boobs, you should not go see Red Sparrow.

I'm Steve Croft. I'm Leslie Stahl. I'm Scott Pelley. I'm Anderson Cooper. I'm John Wertheim. I'm Bill Croft. I'm Leslie Stahl. I'm Scott Pelley. I'm Anderson Cooper. I'm John Wertheim. I'm Bill Whitaker. Those stories tonight on 60 Minutes. Bashar al-Assad destroyed Syria in order to remain its president. The dictator, son of a dictator, has committed every war crime on the books,

bombing civilians, gassing neighborhoods, torturing prisoners. An estimated 500,000 people have been killed in the civil war, and 12 million have been forced from their homes. At the end of 2016, with his allies Russia and Iran, Assad occupied the ruins of Aleppo, Syria's largest city. As we first reported last fall, various rebel groups continue to fight, and Assad means to break them with another war crime, the destruction of hospitals. What you're about to see is difficult to watch, but it's worth it, because standing in Assad's way are courageous doctors, many of them American volunteers, risking their lives to heal the wounds of war. This is a hospital during the siege of Aleppo. From the looks of it, maybe an exhausted father, a gurney. That was an airstrike. This hospital was hit 14

times in six months. This is Aleppo again months later. Al Jazeera reporter Amro Halabi was covering the aftermath of a chemical attack. Once the ER filled up, the hospital was hit. The nursery was evacuated. Then the camera found the neonatal ICU. Targeting hospitals is the atrocity that started the Geneva Conventions 153 years ago and led to the creation of the Red Cross. It is the original war crime. Since 2011, there have been more than 450 attacks on Syrian hospitals. Emergency medicine has been driven underground. Every neighborhood airstrike delivers too many patients with too little time. Doctors improvise with scavenged drugs and salvaged equipment. So many doctors have been killed or

have fled that veterinarians and dentists are pressed to do surgery. You work with the understanding that you might find yourself dead or crippled or dismembered on the floor next to the people you're trying to save. Dr. Samer Attar is a leading orthopedic surgeon from Chicago who volunteers in Syria's makeshift hospitals. The bombs would land so close they'd knock you off your feet, and at times they would directly hit the hospital. But all I did was look around and follow everyone else's lead, because they're like rocks. They don't lose their cool, they don't lose their composure. They just keep working. Dr. Attar enlisted in the Syrian American Medical Society,

which began in the 1990s as a professional association. But since the revolution, these American doctors have raised nearly 150 million dollars in aid and sent more than 100 members into rebel-held Syria, including Aleppo, where Dr. Attar worked. We'd find ourselves doing surgeries, sometimes without anesthesia, on people lying on gurneys in the hallway because you're just so overstretched. Say hi, everybody. These are Dr. Attar's pictures of Aleppo. I remember another child that was brought in. She couldn't have been more than five.

Her whole body was pockmarked with shrapnel from her chest to her belly. And one of the surgeons in Aleppo, a Syrian surgeon, heroically rushed her to the operating room and opened up her belly and stopped bleeding in her liver. But she had lost so much blood. You can't give all of your blood to save one life if you can save it to give a little bit each to five who you know will make it. And I saw that all the time. Did that little girl make it?

That girl? No, she did not. Seeing little bodies wrapped in white shrouds with the cloth still bleeding, because the bodies still bleed, they'd be wrapped in white shrouds and just placed outside to be taken to be buried. Six-year-old Mohamed Kemet was destined for a burial shroud until a Syrian surgeon saved his life. Mohammed's house had been hit by a mortar, and he became unforgettable to Samaritar. I remember him because he lost his mother and his siblings and both of his legs.

The day before I left Aleppo, he asked me to bring back robotic legs, prosthetic legs, if I ever returned. And if only it were that simple, he thought that I could deliver them like a pair of gym shoes and that everything would be back to normal. He'd go back to running around and playing soccer. It's the worst humanitarian crisis in our lifetimes, and because those are our own people. Basil Terminini is vice president of the Syrian American Medical Society. He's a gastroenterologist in Steubenville, Ohio. He told us that the society donated 120 ambulances,

pays the salaries of more than 2,000 Syrian staff, equips 150 medical facilities, and is building more. There have been more than 500 attacks on health care facilities, and we had more than 800 casualties from the staff. So we're trying to move all those facilities underground. Did you say 800 medical professionals have been killed in attacks on hospitals? Yes, more than 800. I think now it's the latest is 850. The attacks on hospitals, their people are detained, tortured to death. There are shelling also, mostly airstrikes and

barrel bombs. This is the number one killer for the health staff. Who are some of the men and women who work with you inside Syria? Those are our heroes. They know they're risking their lives every day, risking their family's life. But they know if they migrate and go out, nobody is willing to provide those services. So when we try to support them, whatever they need, we try to fulfill. What they need is to know that they are not alone. How many trips does this make for you? This is number four. We traveled into Syria with Dr. Attar. The road to Aleppo was in the hands of an Islamist rebel group known as Harar al-Sham.

Our route was through Idlib, the last whole province still at war. We found a hospital hit by an airstrike, but somehow still running. On the darkened but functioning side of the hospital... How are you? Samer Attar spotted Abdurram Ghanem. They had worked in Aleppo before its fall at the end of 2016. It was a massacre. A massacre. So much bodies, so much injuries.

We did our best. Which is all you can do. Yes. It wasn't enough, but what we could do. Aleppo's underground hospitals were hard to destroy, so Assad tried to root them out by doubling down on his war crimes. We found two witnesses to this, Dr. Farida, who performs cesareans on wounded women, and her husband, Dr. Abdul Halak, an eye surgeon.

They couldn't destroy this building, so they used a chemical weapon in the last two days of the siege. We noticed the smell of chlorine, and we rushed all of the staff, all the patients, to the inner room in that basement. And during this time, many children came to our hospital and we had just one remaining bottle of oxygen. So we had to transfer the mask between the children,

one small amount of oxygen for each other. No one died in the chlorine attack, but the gas shut down the hospital for a time. Now, more sophisticated underground hospitals are being built by the Syrian American Medical Society. In the countryside, they're excavating a cave to replace a regional hospital that serves more than 200,000 people. The operating rooms are where? The main two. These two? Yeah. The cave was already here. The limestone had eroded away over thousands of years. Then the engineers came in, they cleared out the cave, and they lowered this floor about six feet. When the hospital's finished, it will have three operating rooms, 12 inpatient beds, and a state-of-the-art emergency room.

This is much bigger than the basement I worked in in Aleppo. The Syrian American Medical Society has spent more than $3. half million dollars on cave hospitals. The monies come from private donations and the United Nations. Bombs fragments, the little white spots. For every life saved, there is a lifetime of recovery. So the Syrian American Medical Society supports this hospital on the Syrian border inside Turkey. It is a safe place for long-term healing. A lot of these patients had very severe injuries, such as severe, very extensive burns.

Temur Ghanem is a surgeon from Detroit who re-sculpts the disfigured. He volunteers when he can get away about a week at a time. Tamer Ghanem is a surgeon from Detroit who re-sculpts the disfigured. He volunteers when he can get away about a week at a time. One of the most important things is the face, is how people identify themselves. There are also functional aspects to that. Things like being able to open your mouth so you can get a spoon inside your mouth so you can feed yourself. What can you do for these people? It's very rare that one surgery would fix everything.

Some of the surgeries I cannot do here are just because of limitation of the equipment. Some of these injuries are so horrific that really you're not able to rebuild, face back again with the tissues that that patient has. It must be frustrating for you to see these patients in so desperate a need and you not being able to help them. Yes, it was very hard. Absolutely.

Especially the children. Especially, I have my own children, and it's very difficult to see children, you know, with those injuries and their parents and how that affects them. One of those injured children in the Turkish hospital was Mohamed Kement, the same boy from Aleppo who asked American doctor Samir Attar for those robotic legs three years ago. This was the first time they had seen each other since then. Mohamed's prosthetics were supplied by a New Hampshire-based charity

called New Day Syria. We asked Mohammed what he wants to be, but we could have guessed. He wants to be an orthopedic surgeon. I'll bet you'd be a very good doctor. Thank you. You understand patients really well. Thank you. The Syrian American Medical Society says that over seven years of war, it has delivered more than 100,000 babies and supported almost 400,000 surgeries. What's his name? Why risk your life for this? Well, the Syrian nurses and the doctors, the rescue workers that I met, told me that they would rather risk their lives dying in Syria, trying to save lives,

than grow old comfortably from a distance, watching the world fall apart. He's going to be okay. And I thought 20 years from now, I didn't want to look back and say that I wasn't a part of that. The war against the hospitals is designed to break the will of the rebellion. But as long as some will fight for mercy, there is reason for all to hope. When does fast grocery delivery through Instacart matter most? to hope. Instacart has all your groceries covered this summer. So download the app and get delivery in as fast as 60 minutes. Plus enjoy $0 delivery fees on your first three orders.

Service fees, exclusions, and terms apply. Instacart. Groceries that over-deliver. Sometimes historic events suck. But what shouldn't suck is learning about history. I do that through storytelling. History That Doesn't Suck is a chart-topping history-telling podcast chronicling the epic story of America, decade by decade. Right now, I'm digging into the history of incredible infrastructure projects of the 1930s, including the Hoover Dam, the Empire State Building, the Golden Gate Bridge, and more. The promise is in the title, History That Doesn't Suck, available on the free Odyssey app or

wherever you get your podcasts. It's a story as old as cities themselves. Prosperity comes to town and triggers a building boom. In modern San Francisco, rows of skyscrapers have begun lining the downtown streets and recasting the skyline, monuments to the triumph of the tech sector. Leading this wave, the Millennium Tower. 58 stories of opulence, it opened in 2009 to great acclaim, then the tallest residential building west of the Mississippi. Though priced in the millions, the inventory of posh apartments moved quickly. Yet for all its curb appeal, the building has quite literally one foundational problem. It's sinking into mud and tilting toward its neighbors. Engineering doesn't often make for rollicking mystery, but San Francisco's captivated by the tale of the Leaning Tower and the lawsuits it spawned. As we first reported this past fall,

it's a story positioned, albeit at an angle, somewhere between civic scandal and civic curiosity, an illustration of what can happen when zeal for development overtakes common sense. When the fog rolls in over San Francisco, the skyscrapers live up to the name. The Transamerica pyramid, long the gem of the skyline, now dwarfed, quaint as a cable car. The new Salesforce tower stands as the tallest building in town. Nearby, Facebook signed a record-breaking lease on this building. And across the way, the Millennium Tower at 301 Mission Street. 645 feet of reinforced concrete wrapped in glass. Inside the $550 million construction, as advertised, lavish

condominiums flush with amenities, attracting tech barons and venture capitalists. San Francisco royalty, former 49ers quarterback Joe Montana, bought here. It's a wonderful location. So did Jerry and Pat Dodson. Ten years ago, they paid $2.1 million for a two-bedroom and planned to live out their retirement enjoying the sweeping view from the 42nd floor. Everything I had read indicated that it was the best building in San Francisco. It had won numerous awards. It had particularly won awards for construction, which was very important if you're thinking of moving into a high-rise. Initially, no buyer's remorse. No, not at all.

I mean, in fact, buyer euphoria. One feature the Doddsons hadn't counted on... These devices are what? They're stress gauges. Dozens of stress gauges dot the walls of the Millennium Tower's basement. They measure in millimeters the slow growth of cracks along the columns that rise up from the building's foundation. There's enough of them, a spider web of cracks, that you have to be concerned about what's going on underneath.

These cracks are one of the only visual clues that there's anything profoundly wrong here. These are the rounds you do now. Yeah, I've been told by structural and geotechnical engineers that I should be watching. Both an engineer and a lawyer, Dodson makes daily rounds of the basement looking for signs of deterioration. It's a routine he's kept since the homeowners association called a meeting of residents in May of 2016. They just said we should be there and made a sign in which alerted us at that time that there was something serious. So what was the nature of that meeting? It was the first time we were told that the building was sinking and was tilting.

Engineers have tracked sinking here since the day the foundation was poured in 2006. Nothing unusual about that. Here's what is unusual. Their data shows the Millennium Tower sinking 17 inches so far and tilting 14 inches to the northwest. Let me ask you this. What do you think is going on? Why is this happening? What can be done about it? Once news got out, local politicians seized on the story. I don't know. And the very engineers celebrated for the building's design suddenly were being compelled to explain why the building was moving.

If you'd like to speak, please do approach the mic. When the Millennium hearings opened to public comment, it brought some livelier moments. I think what's needed here in the city by the bay, where everybody thinks everything's okay, but they might want to hear what I've got to say. This, after all, being San Francisco, a city once described as 49 square miles surrounded by reality. Aaron Peskin has a certain vitality himself. A longtime city supervisor, he starts most days with a swim in the bay, then meets constituents at a North Beach coffee shop, where the Millennium

Tower is a popular topic. Peskin is leading hearings into what is causing the trouble. You subpoenaed some of the engineers involved with Millennium Tower. Why? We don't generally like to subpoena people. That power has not been used by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors for some quarter of a century. 25 years, you've never issued a subpoena before. That's correct. When you got them in here, what did you learn?

Their answers were less than satisfactory. Nobody has owned up to why this building is not performing. Some homeowners aren't waiting around to find out. Andrew Falk and Frank Jernigan, who worked at Google when it was still a startup, got all the answers they needed when they rolled a marble across their floor. We didn't do it but once, and this is what we got. We were shocked when that thing stopped, turned around, and started rolling back, back to where the building is tilting.

The northwest side. I thought, we don't know if this building is going to stand up in an earthquake. And so I became severely frightened of that, and we got out and we left. We left really most all of our belongings. We just left. The couple sold their apartment last year and moved to a two-story home in the Pacific Heights neighborhood. We sold it for approximately half of what it was valued at before this news came to light. You lost seven figures on the sale of this apartment. I would say we lost three to four million dollars. Speaking of astronomical figures,

half a world away in a suburb of Amsterdam, San Francisco's sinking tower came across the radar of Peter Marinkovic, an engineer who works with the European Space Agency to track earthquakes. Using signals from a satellite 500 miles above the Earth, Marinkovic measures ground movements around fault lines. In 2016, he happened to be studying the Bay Area when something caught his eye. This is obviously downtown San Francisco. What do the green dots represent? Green dots represent stable. No displacement or no significant displacement. Stable structures. Stable structures, yeah.

And the red dots? Few red dots means something's going down, something's settling, something's subsiding, something's sinking. Did you know what it was? No. Had you heard of Millennium Tower before this? No. Ever been to San Francisco? No. What can you tell us about the rate of sinking? It's in a ballpark of between 1.5 to 2 inches a year. 1.5 to 2 inches a year? Yeah. And there's nothing to suggest the sinking and tilting are slowing down,

much less stopping. But is it dangerous? Last summer, the city of San Francisco and its engineers asserted the building is safe, even in the event of an earthquake. Even so, and this is a central theme to this saga, there are as many opinions about the trouble at the Millennium Tower as there are engineers in the Bay Area. There's a lot of things about this building that are unprecedented. Jerry Cawthon, one of those

local engineers, did not work on the tower but has worked on nearby projects. Some sinking for buildings is acceptable, right? Some is. They actually anticipated over the life of the building it would sink about four to five inches. That's like a hundred-year life. This is double and triple that. Yeah, I don't think they, they obviously didn't anticipate anything like this close to it. By they, Cawthon means Millennium Partners, brand-name developers with high-end skyscrapers all over the country. Cawthon says their big mistake was building Millennium Tower out of concrete instead

of steel. Concrete is often cheaper and it's just as good, but it is a lot heavier. So you've got to design your foundation and your subsurface to support that higher weight. What lies beneath the surface at 301 Mission Street is critical to the story. It fell to Millennium's geotechnical engineers to analyze the ground below and design an appropriate foundation. They went with a foundation driven 80 feet deep into a layer of dense sand, and the city approved the plan. Larry Karp is a local geotechnical engineer. He did not work on the tower either, but specializes in Bay Area soil conditions. What is under the ground here? What is under the ground here?

What is under the ground here at the surface is rubble from the 1906 earthquake. Brick and sand and debris, everything you can imagine is down here. You have to go 200 feet below the Millennium Tower through layers of history in the ground, below landfill from the time of the gold rush, sand, mud, and clay, to reach solid rock, or bedrock. Karp says the fact that the tower's foundation isn't anchored in bedrock, well, that's a problem. For a big heavy building, a concrete building, those foundations have to go deeper. For a building like this, they have to go to bedrock. Otherwise, he says, the structure will sink into less sturdy layers of sand and mud. And because it doesn't sink or settle uniformly, you get tilting.

Look at the whole line. Karp told us he can see the tilt from the middle of Mission Street a few blocks away. We couldn't see it, so we asked Jerry Cawthon if he could. No. It's very hard to see. It's not enough of a tilt to see. This is not like the Leaning Tower piece of it. And there it is, the inevitable comparison to that greatest engineering gaffe of them all. Not the landmark any present-day developer wants to be associated with.

Millennium Partners declined our request for an on-camera interview, but pointed out their tower was built to code. They blamed their neighbors, specifically construction of the Transbay Terminal, San Francisco's answer to Grand Central Station, right next door. Transbay declined an on-camera interview, too, but told us Millennium had already sunk 10 inches before work began on their project. And right on cue, here come the lawyers. Lawyers for Millennium Partners, for the Transbay Terminal next door, for the tower's structural engineers and geotechnical engineers, for the architect and the builder, for the homeowners association,

and for the city, and yes, even for Joe Montana. There are 20 parties to various Millennium Tower lawsuits and counting. It takes a half an hour just to take attendance of the lawyers in the courtroom. I mean, literally. That's a lot of billable hours. A lot of billable hours. Courtroom circus aside, we asked Aaron Peskin, the city supervisor, simply, what's going on here? Everybody is afraid to tell the truth, because if we get to the bottom of this,

they are worried that it is going to, in some way, slow down the building boom that is happening in San Francisco. Time is money in construction, and we don't want to stop this frenzy. Absolutely. Absolutely. This drama has hardly had a chilling effect. Everywhere you look in downtown San Francisco, they're building another skyscraper. And the latest must-have amenity for all these new constructions, bedrock. In what might be the first act of building-on-building bullying, tech giant Salesforce stuck it to Millennium via Twitter.

Bedrock, baby. You think that was in reference to what's going on across the street? I don't think it was in reference. I know it was in reference because I know the people who built that building. The city still doesn't require all skyscrapers to go to Bedrock, but it has made some changes to prevent another tower from leaning. More review of foundations for new tall buildings, for one. As for the Millennium Tower, on this, almost everyone agrees.

It needs to be fixed. What do we do with a tilting, sinking building? I've heard freeze the ground. In perpetuity, freeze the ground. Perpetually freeze the ground? Perpetually freeze the ground. They've talked about removing 20 stories from the top of it to reduce its weight. What do you think of that? Lopping off the top 20 stories. That sounds like a horrible mess. I think more likely the surest way is to

get it on piles to rock. Bedrock. There may be no avoiding it. The parties are in mediation debating just how to drill down to bedrock under an existing skyscraper with a thousand people living upstairs. And then there's the indelicate question, who pays for all this? I am hopeful that the city and Millennium and the Homer Association will implement a fix in the near term and fight about the money later. But time's ticking. Since our story first aired last fall, engineers have begun drilling beneath the Millennium Tower.

They're testing a proposed fix for the tilting building, one that would extend the existing foundation all the way to, you guessed it, bedrock. Still, no agreement on who will pay for the fix. Jennifer Lawrence is one of the most popular, highly paid actresses in Hollywood, one of the biggest movie stars in the world. And she's only 27. She's the youngest actor ever to be nominated for four Academy Awards. She won once for Best Actress. She can give dramatic performances or romp through madcap comedies,

a range that gets her compared to Katharine Hepburn and Meryl Streep. As we first reported in February, Jennifer Lawrence took an unconventional path to Hollywood, a risky and surprising part of her story. We found a young woman with a fiercely independent spirit living a life she could only have dreamed of growing up in Louisville, Kentucky. How did you get from Kentucky to the top of Hollywood? Desperation.

An appetite. Desperation, an appetite, confidence, and ambition. You really wanted this. I knew if I just was given the chance that it would work. I just knew. But not even she knew it would work so well. For a decade in Hollywood, she has been defying odds and breaking barriers. At 21, she shattered the myth that women can't carry an action franchise. Her four Hunger Games movies earned almost $3 billion. She made three comedy dramas in as many years, playing unforgettable, flawed, resilient women. Hey!

Whoa! Hey! Tiffany, a young widow in Silver Linings Playbook. You are not a stand-up guy right now. If it's me reading the signs, if it's me reading the signs... You reading the signs? You reading the signs? Oh, okay. In American Hustler... She played Rosalyn, a loony Long Island housewife.

You fell in love. Don't you dare forget that part. We fell madly in love. And in Joy, she was a desperate mother turned entrepreneur. It's the only mop that you're ever going to buy, the best mop you're ever going to use. She earned Academy Award nominations for all three movies. I'm just a crazy slut with a dead husband. And took home the Best Actress Oscar for Silver Linings Playbook. Hey, Tiffany.

But Jennifer Lawrence is not one to rest on her laurels I am hard on myself why I get paid a huge amount of money to be able to do what I love so you're the one putting this pressure on you yes too many people sacrificed so that I could be here my parents you parents changed their entire lives to support me, and I worked too hard to get here to be stupid about it. Lawrence's father owned a construction company. Her mother ran a summer camp. She told us her two older brothers pretty much ignored their annoying little sister.

Did you used to play act when you were growing up? Oh, yes. I was constantly performing but we just didn't know that that meant I was an actor. I just thought you know I was a weirdo. But I understand that you pretended to have a problem with your leg at school. Who told you that? Oh we've got our sources. In school I told everybody I had a wooden leg and I like walked in a very consistent lap. Like, incredibly consistent. And when my mom came to get me from school, my teachers were like, it's awful, what happened to Jennifer's leg?

And my mom was like, she does not, her leg has not been amputated. I used to just invent stories just to invent them. She used zany antics to hide the fact she was a poor student, hyperactive, didn't fit in. She could drive her parents crazy. My parents were just, you know, they would go through periods of time where they just wanted me out of the house. And it was called a lockout. And so I'd go to the door, and it was locked, and I'd be like, all right, I've got to find something else to do until my parents are ready to deal with me again.

You were a handful. I was a handful. And I got it. We never fought about it. I've always been very self-aware. I felt my annoying goodness. She told us she felt lost in school and dreamed of becoming an actor. At 14, she badgered her parents to visit New York, where improbably she was discovered by a modeling scout, then given some scripts to read.

I've struggled through school. I never felt very smart. And when I'm reading this script and I feel like I know exactly what it would look like if somebody felt that way. That was a whole part of my brain that I didn't even know existed. Something that I could be confident in, and I didn't want to let it go. What was it you wanted so much? It's so hard to explain. It was just an overwhelming feeling of, I get this. This is what I was meant to do. And to get people to try to understand that when you're 14 years old, wanting to drop out of school and do this, and your parents are just like, you're out of your mind.

Did you finish up high school? I dropped out of middle school. I don't technically have a GED or a diploma. I am self-educated. Do you regret that? No, I really don't. I wanted to forge my own path. I found what I wanted to do, and I don't want anything getting in the way of it. And even friends for many years were not as important to me as my career, I mean the age of 14 that stubborn determination landed her a role in a sitcom when her parents saw her

happy and focused for the first time they agreed to accompany her to hollywood she never went back to school spell house at 18 she wrangled the lead in a small, bleak, independent film called Winter's Bone. I don't know what to do. It was a breakout performance that earned her first Oscar nomination. There's not a lot of dialogue, but yet your presence fills the screen. It was really just feeling, believing, you know, in this situation, look at it through her eyes. And then that's always going to come across in your eyes, in your face, in your body language. That empathy, you can channel that into acting.

Yeah, I mean, that's how I act. That's really my only tool, I think. No acting training? No. It's just empathy? Yes. Is that difficult or easy for you to do? It's easy. To just let go of Jennifer Lawrence? Yeah, because that's when you get the high. That's what I crave, that really getting lost into something, being almost possessed by another emotion, that's the adrenaline rush, that's the high that I can't live without. In her latest movie, Red Sparrow, Lawrence stars as a Russian ballerina, coerced into being a spy.

It calls for nudity, something she thought she'd never do after she was traumatized when her most private pictures were hacked in 2014 and spread across the internet. Well, you told us you didn't like doing movies with a lot of sex in them, but Red Sparrow is all about sex. Why'd you change your mind? I read this script that I'm dying to do, and the one thing that's getting in my way is nudity. And I realize there's a difference between consent and not. And I showed up for the first day, and I did it, and I felt empowered. I feel like something that was taken from me, I got back, and I'm using in my art.

And that hacking incident, did it just vaporize? It didn't vaporize, but I did feel like I took the power out of having my body taken from me. I felt like I took it back and I could almost own it again. Are you worried that audiences won't see it the way you see it? I was, but it doesn't matter. It's my body and it's my art and it's my choice. And if you don't like boobs, you should not go see Red Sparrow. After making two movies a year since the age of 20, Lawrence is taking some time off.

Aha! My whole silver! She wanted to go fishing, something she's always found relaxing. So we found a trout lake in Anaheim. Here, away from paparazzi and the pressures of celebrity, we found her playful and fully aware she's a 27-year-old in a high wire act with the whole world watching. It's problematic for you to go out into the public? I just have to like prepare a little bit. It's always the one day that you look like crap that a paparazzi just jumps out from behind a car and you're like, oh, I looked so cute yesterday.

Does the fame sort of lock you in? It does, but like my favorite activity is sitting by the fire drinking wine with my girlfriends. That's why you're coming. It's a girl's night with Bill. This is good. She invited us over to meet her three closest friends, Laura, Justine, and Lauren. They've known her since long before she became a movie star, and she says they keep her sane. So you're like her rock, her foundation? We are her security guards.

I was going to say, we're much more secure. Yeah Emotional security guards. They tease her. I told her the other day, I'm like, you know, your classic dance moves. She got so mad at me, she said, I don't do that. I don't dance like that. And then she goes, wait a second. This feels like home. When Jennifer left the room, her friends conspired. Should I bring him the self-portrait? It was a masterpiece she'd painted at 16. A self-portrait. Oh, my God! No!

What is it? Do it! What is it? I did not know it was going to go that far. I mean, that was really bold. You literally jumped over me to get to this picture. God, talk about laughing therapy. That seems to be kind of central to who you are.

Laughing? The laughing and the fun. Oh, I've got to have it. You've got to have it. I've got to have it. It's her defense against the brutal, cutthroat side of show business, which has been on conspicuous display recently, with shocking allegations of sexual harassment and assault.

Lawrence has added her voice to the Time's Up movement and spoke to us about Harvey Weinstein. He produced her Oscar-winning movie, Silver Linings Playbook. Was he ever inappropriate? No, he was never inappropriate with me. But what he did was criminal and deplorable. And when it came out and I heard about it, I wanted to kill him. The way that he destroyed so many women's lives, I want to see him in jail.

She was one of the first to speak out publicly about pay inequity in Hollywood. When it got out three years ago that her male co-stars in American Hustle had been paid more than she had, Lawrence wrote an essay blaming herself. Why not blame the studio? They're the ones who didn't pay you.

Because I didn't fight hard enough. It was my own mentality that led me to believe that I didn't deserve to be paid equally. Would you do that again? No. You feel you know your worth now? I feel I know my worth

and I feel like I work to keep it that way. Does that translate into money and power? Yeah. I can work with directors who I've admired for a very long time and get a screenplay written. I have an amazing career, Bill. But you do. There's a lot of risk, too.

This is right now. It's all very temporary. Hollywood is very fickle. What, you're like the flavor of the month? I could be. If the next few movies don't do well in the box office, I won't get paid the same. That's the way it works. If you can't prove that you deserve that number, then you're not going to get it.

So it's very fickle. So I don't want to sound like I'm on a high horse because I might be on a tiny little Shetland pony in a month. I'm Scott Pelley. We'll be back next week with another edition of 60 Minutes.