Going Down A Bomb

KATHRYN BIGELOW is one of the few women directors to break through the glass ceiling in Hollywood. What’s more, she makes action movies of a kind not normally associated with ‘girls’. The release of her latest meisterwerk, The Hurt Locker, an extraordinary movie about the activities of a US Army bomb disposal unit in the war in Iraq, sees her being tipped as a contender come Oscar season next year.

Tara Brady, 08 Sep 2009

Way back in the mid-nineties, as ordinary citizens strained to avoid Ace of Base airplay and the culture wars struck a giddy crescendo, film academics were zoning in on their new pin-up of choice.

Kathryn Bigelow was not like the other girls.

Sure, the Nora Ephrons and Penny Marshalls of the world may have had to bust balls to get the opportunity to direct within a studio system where feminine duties normally extend to tea-making. But they made girl films like Sleepless in Seattle and Awakenings. Marriage comedies. Gentle drama. That sort of thing.

Ms. Bigelow was not that sort of lady director.

Armed with a Masters in Film Criticism and a scholarly background in fine arts – she was a fellow at the Whitney Museum in New York and an associate of the Arts and Language collective – her work displayed a keen awareness of the medium, of ways of seeing, of geeky knowledge of an acute kind, rarely witnessed outside Scorsese and crew’s Brat Pack.

“It’s such a wonderful form,” she says about movie-making. “Like putting together a huge 3-D puzzle. Such an education.”

She looks aghast when I tell her I’ve heard of respectable film programmes where students are required to see more Bigelow than Godard. “Oh that’s no good,” she winces. “If you want to know the first thing about film, you must watch Godard, Godard, Godard.”

Sitting down to tea in a preposterously postmodern London hotel – paintings on the ceiling, open plan lavatories – it’s one of the few times she becomes completely animated during our time together.

Bigelow is far too composed for that sort of thing. She says ‘interesting’ from time to time by way of punctuating the conversation. There’s something unflappable and queenly about her. She dislikes talking about herself; nobody would dare ask her about her one-time marriage to Titanic director, James Cameron, for example. Inquiries about film preferences and her place in the canon are waved on imperiously. And she has a disarming way of laughing that allows her so say only what she chooses to say.

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