Kathryn Bigelow: Interviews

“I Like to Be Strong”

138 “I Like to Be Strong” Stuart Jeffries / 2002 From the Guardian, October 21, 2002. Copyright Guardian News & Media Ltd 2002. Reprinted by permission. In 1997 James Cameron made Titanic, a film about the real-life disastrous maiden voyage of a state-of-the-art ocean liner across the north Atlantic. Five years later, Kathryn Bigelow has got the same sinking feeling as her former husband. She has made K-19: The Widowmaker, a film about the real-life disastrous maiden voyage of the first, purportedly state-of-theart , nuclear Soviet submarine across the north Atlantic. True, there are huge differences between the two projects: not least that the story of K-19 is hardly embedded in our collective consciousness , as is the sinking of the Titanic. For decades, the events that took place aboard a submarine three hundred miles off the U.S. coast, and the very real risk the world unwittingly ran of nuclear Armageddon as K-19’s reactor cooling system malfunctioned, were kept secret by Soviet authorities. The story of K-19 deserves a place in our nightmares. It is almost intolerably grim. The film contains a particularly harrowing half hour in which Soviet submariners try to weld a new cooling system around the reactor wearing protective suits that are about as effective at repelling radiation as light raincoats. After ten-minute shifts, each two-man crew of welders emerges from fitting water pipes—vomiting, bleeding, and fatally poisoned by radiation—to be replaced by another set of hitherto unsung heroes. It’s a disaster movie, for sure, and one that needed making. Despite this harrowing material, K-19 was given a summer release in the U.S., where it was pitted hopelessly against seasonal no-brainers like Spider-Man and Men in Black II. Bigelow—prim, poised, barefoot, and stuar t jeffries / 2002 139 careful in her answers—concedes: “I think it’s not necessarily well-suited for a summer release. It’s the kind of film that’s going to have a long life. I see it as more of a Schindler’s List than a Spider-Man. Call me crazy.” Kathryn Bigelow may well be crazy. She spent six years on K-19, and came up with a film whose failure to do well at the box office (it cost $100 million to make and so far has only recouped slightly more than $35 million in the U.S.) could jeopardize her future Hollywood career. This career was already ailing following the puzzling failure of The Weight of Water , her 2000 film featuring a nude Liz Hurley rubbing her nipples with ice cubes, to attract a mass audience Stateside, or even a British release. This time, though, Bigelow is once again in the company of men. Her first short, made when she was a film student, featured two men beating each other to a pulp in a dark alley, while two professors mused in voiceover about why cinematic violence is so seductive. Her first feature film, The Loveless, starred Willem Dafoe in a violent biker picture. Later there was the very masculine Point Break, a surfer flick with Patrick Swayze and Keanu Reeves, who when they weren’t riding the waves were robbing banks. Now K-19, that floating men’s club. Whence Bigelow’s obsession with setting films in overwhelmingly male milieux? One theory is that it’s hard for an intelligent woman to be brought up watching Hollywood movies and find women depicted there interesting. Much more engaging to identify with one of the male protagonists in a western or a war movie. And perhaps this engagement with strong men has carried over to making films. Does Bigelow agree? “I’m mystified. This is a piece I saw as being universal.” Perhaps. But it’s worth looking at Bigelow’s depiction of women to get an insight into a cinematic vision that isn’t always gender-free. On the rare occasion Bigelow does women, they are appealingly tough. Take Blue Steel (1990), in which gym-buffed Jamie Lee Curtis plays a rookie cop suspended for killing on her first day and then stalked by a psychopath . Curtis’s cop is no victim—she fights back against her oppressors with intelligence and physical strength. And then there’s Bigelow’s 1995 sci-fi picture Strange Days (written by Cameron, then her husband), again a mostly all-male film, but with Angela Bassett as a chauffeur who saves Ralph Fiennes’s skinny white ass...