Going Down A Bomb

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.
She even looks cool. At 58, she still favours the classic biker chick uniform, zippy jacket and jeans, a look that only serves to emphasise her willowy Amazon physique. Six feet tall and neat as a pin, no wonder she is not like the other girls.
It wasn’t just the movie smarts or height advantage that set Bigelow apart. Ever since The Loveless (1977), a Leone-inspired biker flick and her directorial debut, the filmmaker has consistently plumped for robust subject matter. She is that rarest of animals, a woman who makes kick-arse action films, the Alpha Girl’s Alpha Girl. Near Dark re-imagines vampires as hobos and drifters and finds its focus in a grand testosterone stand off between Adrian Pasdar and Lance Henriksen. Blue Steel sees good cop Jamie Lee Curtis take on departmental prejudices and a psycho killer. In Strange Days, Ralph Fiennes’ cop-turned-hustler stumbles on a futuristic conspiracy and spends a lot of time in chase scenes.
Bigelow infuses her high-octane films with a keen sense of Kubrickian subterfuge; in surfing thriller Point Break, Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze are, like, sooo gay for each other.
“I’m not conscious of it,” she says. “Oh God, no. I suppose I come from fine arts, so I’m used to working with big, brash ideas. I guess when people say I don‘t direct like a girl they‘re talking about genre. But I don‘t believe in this idea of a gender specific cinema. Oh, it‘s a cop movie or an action movie so it‘s male with a male director. You see the same thing in other fields like journalism. Assignments are made on grounds of gender and people end up in a little ghetto. If I’m attracted to action and genre, it’s because cinema is fundamentally defined by movement, by action.”

In this spirit, Bigelow’s latest film The Hurt Locker gets its kicks from hanging around with three members of the US Army’s elite Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) squad. It’s the summer of 2004 when devil-may-care staff Sergeant James (the excellent Jeremy Renner) joins Company Bravo bomb ops, Eldridge (Brian Geraghty) and Sanborn (Anthony Mackie). Bravo spends their days on the roads around Baghdad dismantling Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs). They have only 38 days left in Iraq; a maverick sergeant is the last thing they need. But that’s what they get.
Rendered in edge-of-your-seat vérité, Bigelow’s war-based thriller has attracted more positive notices than any other film this year, not to mention scooping several major awards. Bigelow was named Best Director at the Seattle International Festival and again the film took the Outstanding Direction Award at the ShoWest Convention. And it was the big hit of the Venice Film Festival, where The Hurt Locker took four awards including the Grand Prize for Best Film and garnered a 10 minute standing ovation. No wonder; it‘s hard to think of a more exciting movie device than watching someone figure out the right wire to snip as the clock ticks down. It’s a trope that The Hurt Locker delivers in just about every scene.
 “There is something inherently dramatic about it,” nods Bigelow. “Not just about the unexploded devices, but being in Iraq. We wanted the kind of immediacy that goes with a day in the life of a bomb tech over there. We wanted a really boots-on-the-ground feel about the movie. It was the idea of being on the ground that appealed to me. There are no bombs coming down or trenches, so bomb disposal is the closest thing there is to a front line in Iraq. So I was fascinated by that process. I was hungry to know all the details.”
Her primary informant and screenwriter was Mark Boal, a noted investigative reporter whose byline has appeared in Rolling Stone and Village Voice. (He is currently writer-at-large for Playboy.) Mr. Boal, who also contributed to the screenplay for In The Valley of Elah, had spent several weeks embedded with a Baghdad-based US Army bomb squad in 2004.
“The film comes from first hand reporting,” says Bigelow. “It’s entirely based on observation, on videos and photographs and reports that Mark brought back. My role as a filmmaker was to let that material speak for itself. Because I honestly think that for the general public in America this stuff is very abstract. I wanted to convey the answers to the questions I had pondered. What is all this IED stuff? What do the ground troops do? And what the hell is this war? There’s no engagement in the literal, conventional sense. Define it for me.”

It was a tough sell. Gulf conflict movies have, to date, proved to be box office poison. Robert Redford’s Lions for Lambs, Brian De Palma’s Redacted, Kimberly Peirce’s Stop Loss – we could go on – have all floundered with audiences, both in the US and Europe. To date, the appetite doesn’t seem to have been there. Bigelow may have changed that.
“The desert is really cinematic,” she notes. “Think of Lawrence of Arabia. It shouldn’t be so difficult. In my mind, there are only two movies about the war, this one and Fahrenheit 911. The others are more about re-integration into the home front or the political situation. Perhaps we were just naïve. We just wanted to make the movie and get it out there.”
She didn’t make things easy for herself either. She went against box office wisdom by making her name stars – Ralph Fiennes, Guy Pearce, David Morse, Evangeline Lilly – take a backseat to her talented, but relatively unknown leads. And, just to endear herself to the insurance company, she insisted on filming in the Middle East.
“I find it very distracting if I’m watching a film that is supposed to be set in the region and yet is clearly all filmed in North Africa,” she says. “North Africa always looks like North Africa, I think. We always knew it wouldn’t be straightforward. We always knew we wanted to make this independently. We wanted to retain control. We wanted to put the audience into the Humvee, basically where Mark was positioned. We wanted no compromises from a creative standpoint. We wanted to cast relative unknowns, as you say. We wanted to keep the cameras going. It turned out to be a very freeing experience. Like going live into cinemas.”
In order to best replicate war torn Baghdad, Bigelow shot in east Jordan, close to the Iraqi border. It was high summer and the conditions for the cast members, who had to wear tonnes of Kelvar and ceramic body armour, were far from ideal. In the middle of summer, this is a very hot part of the world.
“We couldn‘t shoot in Baghdad, unfortunately,” says Bigelow. “So we needed somewhere that had precisely the same architecture, climate, culture. And God, it was hot. We found Jordan to be very hospitable and generous, but the July weather really was a huge logistical challenge. I’d have to tell Jeremy to put on this 100 pound bomb suit in the middle of the punishing heat and sand and wind. I have to say, he carried on admirably.”
Working around the slums of Amman, Bigelow was delighted to discover that she had a sizeable population of displaced Iraqi actors at her disposal. Indeed, two of the men playing Iraqis captured by the Americans, had, just prior to the shoot, been prisoners in Iraq.
“I couldn’t have imagined it before,” explains Bigelow.  “It was a great boost for us in terms of making the film as authentic as possible. There are more than a million Iraqis living in Jordan, as war refugees. So a lot of people involved in the production were Iraqi. The guy who plays the unwilling suicide bomber – who gives such an emotive performance – had been a prisoner of the Americans.”

Despite generally rave reviews, there have been a couple of naysayers. While no one has been crazy enough to fault the film at the level of suspense, some commentators have puzzled over the absence of polemic. Writing in Salon, Stephanie Zacharek wondered where “the raw anguish or sense of outrage” had got to.
“The film isn’t entirely apolitical,” says the director. “Well, it depends what you mean by political content. If you mean that the actor stops what he’s doing – in this case wearing a bomb suit and walking toward a live, ticking device – to make speeches about geopolitics, then no, that doesn’t happen in this movie. But nobody goes to war without some political underpinnings. You can’t depict an occupation of a Middle Eastern country without the politics coming through. But my own feeling is that it’s far too complicated a situation to be addressed in a movie. And this is a complicated two-hour movie. I didn’t want to start simplifying everything down into soundbites.”
 “What people are reacting to is the absence of partisan thinking,” adds Mr. Boal, who is obviously and understandably proud of the movie he has written. “They don’t like that the film isn’t Democrat enough or Republican enough. But not being partisan is not the same thing as not being political.”
If the bookies in Vegas are to be believed, come next spring, The Hurt Locker should land Bigelow an Academy Award nomination for direction. And if that happens, she’ll be just the fourth woman – the others are Lina Wertmuller, Jane Campion, and Sofia Coppola – to be so honoured since the Oscars began.
“I have no idea where all the women directors are,” she says. “I‘ve been making movies for a while now and I still haven‘t been able to figure it out. There is definitely a lack of balance. I try not to think about it. I think you‘d just make yourself crazy.”