‘It’s extraordinary to look at a day in the life of a Baghdad bomb tech,’ begins director Kathryn Bigelow, 57, chipper on the phone from LA. ‘There’s no margin for error: no “I almost cut the right wire,”’ she continues. ‘These individuals arguably have the most dangerous job in the world, and they volunteered for it.’
The Hurt Locker, Bigelow’s incendiary yet contemplative action drama, is her first feature since 2002’s Harrison Ford nuke-sub thriller, K-19: The Widowmaker. Prior to that, she made a string of odd genre movies, impressively wide-ranging efforts that are like catnip to outsider tastes: an unusually affecting vampire film, Near Dark (1987); the surfer-narc mano a mano, Point Break (1991); the Ray Fiennes millennial thriller, Strange Days (1995). Her work over the past six years has been less visible, mostly television and shorts.
‘That’s the cost of wanting to make something with total creative control,’ Bigelow says, with time-tested serenity. ‘Filmmaking is not for the faint of heart.’ The Hurt Locker, produced via indie fund-raiser Nicolas Chartier (also responsible for helping to sell Paul Haggis’s Crash), afforded Bigelow final cut and the ability to cast two excellent non-A-listers, Jeremy Renner and Anthony Mackie, in key roles as a daredevil defuser and a by-the-book sergeant. The resulting film, which looks more expensive than most studio blockbusters, earned a 10-minute standing ovation at the 2008 Venice Film Festival.
‘For me, it always starts with the character,’ Bigelow offers, uneasy with being pegged as a genre specialist. ‘I need to work from the inside out. Seriously, what would incite you or I to wake up one day and think, “Hmm, bomb defusing is a vocation I’d like to pursue?” And what’s the price of that heroism? They call it the lonely walk – the walk in the heavy suit toward the suspicious object. You’re by yourself. The war has stopped for you. It’s probably a very existential moment.’
Bigelow met with soldiers in Kuwait and elsewhere to understand that moment, also leaning heavily on journalist Mark Boal’s screenplay, the product of a 2004 embedding with an Army bomb squad. Rooted in its characters’ stoic sense of professionalism and shot in and around Amman, Jordan, The Hurt Locker is refreshingly free of politics – indeed, the filmmaker considers it the first Iraq War movie that’s actually about the ground situation itself. ‘I do consider myself a political person,’ she says, ‘but we’ve lost sight of the troops that are fighting over there. There’s now a perception among them that this is a job – a good one, even – and not the Vietnam-era draft mentality of old.’
These are the kind of comments that make critics swoon over Bigelow, an artistic heir to Howard Hawks. She has a sensibility that recalls films like Only Angels Have Wings and Rio Bravo, which focus on characters quietly working through jeopardy with a minimum of fuss. ‘Courage is not the absence of fear,’ Bigelow continues, ‘but maintaining a sense of humor in the face of fear.’ That’s as far as she wants to explain it; we move on to the logistics of a summer shoot in the Middle East and the immersion of her actors in four-camera disarmament sequences, take after take. (Bigelow, once married to James Cameron, can talk shop with the best of them).
Inevitably, the question does arise, the one that’s tailed Bigelow throughout her career making pictures associated with men’s tastes. Actor Renner, by phone, is direct in his defense: ‘I always get a little tense when people bring it up. Just because she has long, shaved legs means she can’t direct a great movie?’ Renner calls his character in The Hurt Locker an ‘addict’ and credits Bigelow for the confidence. ‘She quietly commands everything she needs,’ he adds. ‘Kathryn was definitely in control.’
‘I’ve been fortunate and tenacious,’ Bigelow admits on the gender issue. ‘It would be impossible for me to not be who I am, and do what I do.’ She laughs. ‘I simply don’t bifurcate the job description.’ Howard Hawks would smile.
The Hurt Locker is in Abu Dhabi cinemas from February 11.
