Kathryn Bigelow: Interviews

Introduction

ix Introduction Despite the millions of viewers and all the hoopla, the Academy Awards rarely amount to much of cultural significance. Not so the 82nd annual Oscar ceremony, which took place on March 7, 2010. Though there were ten nominees for Best Picture, the first time more than five had competed since 1944, the contests had come down to only two films and two directors, who, adding to the drama, were also formerly husband and wife. They were James Cameron with his sci-fi epic Avatar, and his ex-spouse Kathryn Bigelow with her tale of bomb disposal crews in Iraq, The Hurt Locker. The films had much in common. Both drew on anxieties about the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—though, as Bigelow would insist to Scott Tobias on the A.V. Club website in 2009, her film was “nonpartisan .” Both explored the nature of heroism and the attraction of danger and violence while attempting to re-create the subjective experience of the protagonist. And both sought to elevate popular entertainment into art. Then there were the differences. Cameron’s Avatar cost $200 million to make, consisted almost entirely of special effects, and employed state-of-the-art 3-D. Bigelow’s budget for The Hurt Locker, on the other hand, was minuscule and she achieved her effects the old-fashioned way, employing hand-held cameras , long takes, and meticulous sound design. “I wanted to give the audience a real, boots-on-the-ground, you-are-there look at what it would be like to have the world’s most dangerous job,” she told Ryan Stewart on the Slant website in 2009. “So, that necessitated a kind of presentational, reportorial, immediate, raw, visceral approach.” So where Cameron exalted fantasy, Bigelow aspired to reality. The contest could be seen, then, as a battle between two philosophies of filmmaking. But the main reason people were excited about this Oscar race was that if Bigelow won, she’d be the first woman to receive an Academy Award for Best Director. x introduction In true Hollywood fashion, Bigelow triumphed. She won the Oscar for Best Director and The Hurt Locker won for Best Picture and in four other categories. But if Bigelow felt her victory marked a turning point for women filmmakers in Hollywood, she didn’t mention it in her acceptance speech. She refused to identify herself as a woman filmmaker. For her, the Oscar was not a landmark for women, but “the moment of a lifetime.” You can hardly blame her. For twenty-five years she had been patiently fending off questions about being a beautiful woman who makes bloody films. Interviewing her in 1987 for the Chicago Tribune about her second feature, the vampire thriller Near Dark, Marcia Froelke Coburn asked, “What’s a nice woman like Bigelow doing making erotic, violent vampire movies?” Four years later, Mark Salisbury wrote in the Guardian: “Why does she make the kind of movie she makes? . . . ‘I don’t think of filmmaking as a gender-related occupation or skill,’ Bigelow recites in response. It’s an answer she must have given many times before.” And over two decades later this writer tried to obliquely broach the subject in the Boston Phoenix by writing, “Everyone makes a point of Bigelow ’s gender and height and good looks, [but] what’s germane is that even if she was short and had bushy eyebrows like Martin Scorsese, she still would be directing action pictures like no one since Sam Peckinpah and Sergio Leone.” So by the time she received her Oscar, Bigelow probably thought it was time for people to get over her gender and appearance. Instead, a more fruitful discussion might focus on how an academically trained artist ended up making genre films for a mass audience. Her being a woman who makes violent movies makes for a less engaging story than how she evolved from the avant garde to the mainstream. Born in San Carlos, California, on November 27, 1951, Bigelow’s first vocation was to be a painter. “When I first started painting, I loved the Old Masters,” she told Gavin Smith in a 1995 Film Comment interview. “When I was thirteen or fourteen, I was . . . blowing up a corner of a Raphael. I loved doing that, taking a detail and turning it into twelve by twelve feet.” This love of painting took her to the San Francisco Art Institute in 1971. While there the Whitney Museum Program in New York offered...