Kathryn Bigelow: Interviews

Kathryn Bigelow

67 Kathryn Bigelow Ana Maria Bahiana / 1992 From Cinema Papers, January 1992, 32–34. Reprinted by permission of Ana Maria Bahiana. Born in 1951 and raised in San Francisco, Bigelow was trained in the arts; first in the San Francisco Art Institute and then at the Whitney Museum in New York. She found herself bored with what she called the “elitist limitations” of traditional visual arts, so with a group of other avantgarde painters and sculptors Bigelow started dabbling in film as an expressive medium. The passion struck immediately and lasted. Bigelow enrolled in Columbia University’s Graduate School of Film, where she studied under Milos Forman. In 1978 she completed her first project, Set-Up, a muchpraised short film chronicling a violent street gang confrontation. Three years later Bigelow directed her first feature, The Loveless, a stylish biker movie starring Willem Dafoe. Bigelow’s next film, Near Dark, had a troubled postproduction. “The company that made it lost its distribution [deal] while we were cutting the movie,” recalls Bigelow. “They sold it to Dino de Laurentiis, but DEG went bankrupt while it was releasing the picture. So it happened twice on the one film! That’s terrifying for a filmmaker.” Still, when the film finally hit the major markets in 1987, it firmly established Bigelow as one of the most promising and interesting American filmmakers—“nongender specific,” she adds with a mischievous grin. Blue Steel (1990), a gripping thriller starring Jamie Lee Curtis and Ron Silver, and this year’s surfers-on-a-crime-rampage, Point Break (starring Patrick Swayze, in his first post-Ghost role, and Keanu Reeves), further expanded her clout as an action director who, of course, also happens to be a woman, and is married to another master of the genre, James 68 kathryn bigelow: inter views Cameron. “It’s funny,” she says. “No one approaches Walter Hill and says, ‘Walter, because you’re a man, how do you make such and such a movie?” Q: After making Blue Steel, where the female character is the driving force, you chose to do Point Break, which is essentially a male-bonding picture. What attracted you to this project? A: It had everything: characters with really great psychological dimensions and an environment and setting which I thought offered a lot of possibilities. It is a world that hasn’t been seen before. You might think you know a lot about surfing, but when you analyze it under a microscope , it becomes very surprising: primal, tribal, mythical, and romantic. Q: Did you do a lot of research into the California surfing community? A: I met and talked to some of them. They have a really strange spirit and are very spiritual, but in a crude, inarticulate way. They don’t communicate verbally and are very Zen—there is no other way to describe it. It is like they have evolved to a higher state of consciousness. Q: Did you uncover any violent strain in the community, such as the one you portray in Point Break? A: No, no, no. They’re not violent. In the film Bodhi [Patrick Swayze] says, “I hate violence,” and that’s very important for his character [a mystical mastermind who shows Johnny (Keanu Reeves), an FBI agent, a whole new way of looking at the world and himself]. Surfers are not violent people unless they’re pushed into a situation. There is certainly a lot of aggression out on the water, but surfing is a singular quest and a personal challenge. They put themselves in lifethreatening situations every single day because they love it. They are very surprising. Q: You certainly portray them with an almost mythological dimension. A: I look at things not in the specific but metaphorically. Politically, it’s really interesting to keep those myths alive, to not buy that grid, that system, without challenging it. Maybe they don’t articulate it, but surfers do challenge the system. There’s a myth here, an American Spirit; they’re like cowboys. ana maria bahiana / 1992 69 Q: Did you get a lot of feedback that you, a female director, were shooting a macho-action film? A: I had people saying that the audience would never know that this was written and directed by a woman [laughs]. I don’t think directing is a gender related job. Perceptions that women are better suited to certain types of material are just...