THE take on Kathryn Bigelow is that she is a great female director of muscular action movies – the kind with big guns, big scenes, big themes and big camera movements, as well as an occasional fist in the face, or a knee to the groin.
Sometimes, more simply, she's called a great female director. But here's a radical thought: she is, simply, a great filmmaker.
Because, while it is marginally interesting that Bigelow calls "action" and "cut" while in the possession of two X chromosomes, gender is the least remarkable thing about her kinetic filmmaking, which gets in your head even as it sends shock waves through your body.
Her latest is The Hurt Locker, a film about men and war. Set in Iraq in 2004 and shot just over the border in Jordan, it centres on a three-man American bomb squad that sifts through the sand, day and night, disabling explosives. It was first shown at the Venice Film Festival in September 2008 (it is scheduled for a second screening at the Edinburgh International Film Festival tonight), where it was greeted with rapturous praise and some misapprehension. Mostly, it seems, because its extraordinary filmmaking, which transmits the sickening addiction to war as well as its horrors in largely formal terms, doesn't come wedded to a sufficiently obvious anti-war position. One British critic went so far as to say that, while the film had "excellent acting, camerawork and editing, it could pass for propaganda".
The Hurt Locker doesn't traffic in the armchair militarism of Hollywood products such as Top Gun and Transformers, but neither is it an anti-war screed. It takes an analytical if visceral look at how the experience of war can change a man – how it eats into his brain so badly he ends up hooked on it. And, like all seven of Bigelow's previous feature films, this new one is also as informed by the radical aspirations of conceptual art as it is by the techniques of classical Hollywood cinema.
She might live and sometimes shoot within driving distance of the major studios that have distributed (if not financed) her films, but, in many respects, Bigelow remains an industry outsider. "I've never made a studio film," she gently reminded me during a leisurely conversation not long ago.
Although most of her films have been released by studios, they have been bankrolled by independent companies, which don't necessarily grant the autonomy any artist seeks. The experience of making The Hurt Locker – the "purity" of it, as she puts it – marks her return to the liberating conditions under which she thrives. She hasn't had this kind of freedom since her 1987 breakthrough, Near Dark, an erotically charged vampire movie made on the cheap, or her 1995 science-fiction thriller Strange Days, which came with heavy protection from one of its producers, her former husband James Cameron, the Oscar-winning director of Rambo, Terminator, Titanic and many more blockbusters.
It's hard to imagine Bigelow letting anyone push her around. She's unfailingly gracious, but there's a ferocious undercurrent there too, as might be expected. She works to put you at ease, but even her looks inspire shock and awe. Because she was early for our interview and already tucked into a booth, I didn't realise how tall she was until we both stood up, and I watched her unfurl her slender, 6ft frame. Like a lot of tall women she describes herself as shy, but she has learned to take up space.
At first, that space wasn't on screen but on canvas. An only child, she was born in 1951 and raised in San Carlos, 25 miles south of San Francisco, where she nurtured a lifelong love of art and horses. She was a student painter at the Art Institute of San Francisco and later the Whitney Museum's Independent Study Programme, where she studied with Susan Sontag.
She appeared in the feminist film Born in Flames and earned her masters in the film division of the Columbia University School of the Arts, where she immersed herself in theories about signs and meaning and the cinematic spectacle. "Film," she says, "became the interchange where all these ideas were intersecting." In 1978, made her first film, a short called The Set-Up. Although she now plays down that film, it seems like a template for much of her later work, with its emphasis on men, masculinity, violence and power. She once elaborated on its themes: "The piece ends (discussing] the fact that in the 1960s, you think of the enemy as outside yourself… a police officer, the government, the system, but that's not really the case at all. Fascism is very insidious, we reproduce it all the time."
That enemy lurks in the anomie of the motorcyclist (Willem Dafoe, in his screen debut) who motors through her 1982 debut feature The Loveless and in the young cowboy initiated into a gang of vampires in Near Dark, the western-horror hybrid that made her a cult favourite. It sneaks into the head of the undercover FBI agent in Point Break (1991) who's philosophically seduced by the koan-spouting leader of some bank-robbing surfers. And it slips into the rigid body of a devout 19th-century immigrant wife in The Weight of Water (2000), who, after sharing a chaste bed with another woman, responds to her awakened sexual desire with a murderous swing of an axe.
Much as she does in her feminist freak-out Blue Steel, about a female cop (Jamie Lee Curtis) seduced by a male killer, Bigelow isn't just playing with genre. She's having her way with gender, sometimes by inverting traditional masculine and feminine roles, as in Strange Days, a future-shock love story that also explores voyeurism and the pleasures of violent spectacle.
In 2002, she returned to blockbuster form with K-19: The Widowmaker, an unnerving thriller about the first Soviet nuclear submarine. It died a quick box-office death: she had to scale back for the next one.
"I definitely wanted to have full creative control and final cut," she says of The Hurt Locker, written by Mark Boal and based on his experience as an embedded journalist in Iraq. She wanted up-and-coming actors who weren't so famous that their characters couldn't die; she also wanted to shoot in the Middle East. She was talked out of filming in Iraq, though she inched close to the border. Given her demands and the scant interest of US audiences in fictional films about the war, she looked outside the country for financing. The French company Voltage Pictures gave her money and control.
"It was a no-note experience," she says, referring to the suggestions film executives like to issue – and enforce – "absolutely zero interference". She laughs when I ask if she might become addicted to the freedom, but movie-making is littered with broken spirits, and there's something improbable about the longevity of her career in the mainstream. Partly because, yes, she's working in a sexist field where even female studio chiefs are loath to hire female directors, but also because of the stubborn persistence of her artistic vision.
It's telling that after she made The Loveless, she started receiving scripts for high-school comedies, which she quickly realised was considered a suitable subject for her gender. "It was an intersection of absolutely inappropriate sensibilities," she says, though I would love to see what havoc she could wreak on that genre. A juvenile comedy might have paid the bills, but instead she accepted an offer from her friend, the artist John Baldessari, to teach at the California Institute of the Arts. Hollywood was the inevitable next step. Through the director Walter Hill, she landed a deal at a studio, but it led to nowhere.
It was at this point, she said, that she understood "if I had a prayer of shooting something that intrigued me, I was going to have to be the architect of my own fate." She went off and made Near Dark, a vampire film steeped in the kind of hot, sticky, shocking violence that's alternately exciting and appalling. Bigelow's refusal to make the kind of films most associated with women suggests that, in American movies at least, genre is destiny. She's steered clear of the industry ghetto to which female directors are consigned, bypassing the chick flick for stories traditionally seen as the province of men.
• The Hurt Locker, 9.15pm, Cineworld 3, Edinburgh (
www.edfilmfest.org.uk)
Strange Days (1995)Written by James Cameron and starring Ralph Fiennes, Angela Bassett and Juliette Lewis, Strange Days tells the story of a cop-turned-small-time-criminal who accidentally uncovers a police conspiracy in Los Angeles. Described by Rolling Stone as "dazzling" and "era-defining", the film grossed nearly $8 million at the box office.
Near Dark (1987)Starring then little-known actors Adrian Pasdar and Jenny Wright, vampire western Near Dark may have done poorly at the box office upon its initial release (it grossed $3.4 million, significantly less than its $5 million budget), but it was well received by critics and has become something of a cult classic.
Point Break (1991)Point Break stars Keanu Reeves as an FBI agent who goes undercover with a gang of surfers, who are suspected of bank robberies led by the charismatic Bodhi (Patrick Swayze). The film took over $8 million in its opening weekend and has since gathered a cult following. The title refers to the surfing term "point break", and the film features a cameo by the Red Hot Chili Peppers' frontman, Anthony Kiedis.
Blue Steel (1990)Bigelow's police thriller stars Jamie Lee Curtis as a cop who witnesses a robbery on her first night on the job and becomes the target of an obsessed psychopath. Also starring Ron Silver and Clancy Brown, it has taken over $8 million at the box office.
Article produced in syndication with the New York Times 