Kathryn Bigelow: Interviews

Interview: Kathryn Bigelow

153 Interview: Kathryn Bigelow Scott Tobias / 2009 Originally appeared at AVClub.com, June 24, 2009. Used by permission of Onion, Inc. Drawn into filmmaking after earlier creative endeavors as a painter—first at the San Francisco Art Institute, and later as a fellow at the Whitney Museum—director Kathryn Bigelow made her feature debut with the 1982 biker movie The Loveless, but her real breakthrough was 1987’s Near Dark, a superb vampire Western that showcased a graphic intensity and a love of genre cinema. Those same qualities are apparent in her subsequent work, including 1990’s Blue Steel, 1991’s Point Break, 1995’s Strange Days, and 2002’s K-19: The Widowmaker. Bigelow’s résumé also includes directing stints on acclaimed television shows like Homicide: Life on the Street and Wild Palms, and the less-circulated 2000 ensemble piece The Weight of Water. After a seven-year absence from the big screen, Bigelow has returned with a vengeance with The Hurt Locker, a thrilling, nerve-racking Iraq War action film about Army bomb-squad technicians who spend their days defusing improvised explosives. Jeremy Renner (Dahmer) stars as a brash, recklessly confident sergeant who plunges his team headlong into harrowing life-or-death situations. Anthony Mackie co-stars as a subordinate who struggles to keep his new superior in check. Bigelow recently spoke to the A.V. Club about shooting in 135-degree weather, the psychological profile of people who deal with bombs, and where she’s been for the last seven years. A.V. Club: There was a seven-year gap between K-19 and this new movie. Were you attempting to get other film projects off the ground during that time? What finally brought you to The Hurt Locker? Kathryn Bigelow: Well, actually, I became familiar with [screenwriter 154 kathryn bigelow: inter views Mark Boal’s] journalism and turned one of his articles into a television series [Fox’s The Inside]. That took a fair amount of time. And then it was a short-lived series, so it’s not one to dwell on. But then at that time—it was 2004, so two years after K-19—I realized he was going off to do an embed in Baghdad with a bomb squad. And not unlike the general public , I felt fairly unaware of what was going on in Baghdad. I think it’s a war that has been underreported in many respects, so I was extremely curious, and I kind of suspected that, providing he survived, he might come back with some really rich material that would be worthy of a cinematic translation, and that’s what happened. So then he came back and we started working on the script in 2005, raised the money in 2006, shot in 2007, cut it, and here we are. These things take time, is all I’m trying to say. I think what people don’t realize is how long these things can take in development. I’ve always developed all my own pieces, and they’re time-consumers. AVC: Mark comes from a journalistic background, too, so was there a learning curve for him as a screenwriter as well? KB: Yeah, I think so, though he worked with Paul Haggis on In the Valley of Elah, because that was also based on an article he did for Playboy called “Death and Dishonor.” So he began to become familiar with the craft of screenwriting there, and then in my opinion, mastered it on this. But definitely going from fact-based writing to fictionalization—and then creating the kind of architecture for cinematic translation—was a bit of a process. Although he took to it quite naturally. AVC: Was it always a certainty that the film would have to be made outside the studio system? KB: We never approached any other financing avenue. I wanted to keep it as independent as humanly possible, and I wanted to shoot in the Middle East. That alone probably would have been a non-starter. And then I anticipated that and didn’t pursue. And also, to be honest, I’ve never made a non-independent movie. No matter what scale it’s been, it’s always been independent. So I wanted to retain complete creative control, I wanted final cut, I wanted the opportunity to cast breakout, emerging talent, and as I said, shoot in the Middle East. AVC: Have those been the conditions you’ve always had? Final cut? Is...