Senior Theatrical Editor
www.moviefreak.com
a SIFF 2009 interview
Bombs Away
Kathryn Bigelow Goes Ballistic with The Hurt Locker
For a filmmaker known for hard-hitting testosterone fueled action-thrillers like Point Break, director Kathryn Bigelow has got to be one of the most easygoing and likeable celebrities I’ve met in quite some time. “Life’s too short to be a bitch,” she laughs. “Besides, it’s fun to talk about a film I’m passionate about.”
The Hurt Locker director Kathryn Bigelow at the 2008 Venice Film Festival
Said film is The Hurt Locker, Bigelow’s visceral journey into Iraq following a three-man bomb disposal unit as they finish out their tour of duty. Written by journalist Mark Boal – whose story In the Valley of Elah was based upon – and oozing in authenticity, this is as exciting and as thought-provoking a piece of entertainment as any I’m going to see this year.
One of the highlight entries in this year’s Seattle International Film Festival, I caught up with the filmmaker a few hours before her film’s first local screening. Our conversation touched upon a lot of topics including the director’s own legacy behind the camera. Yet it seldom went too far off the rails, her masterful epic – and potential Oscar contender – impossible to keep out of the spotlight.
“I was really lucky with the material,” admits Bigelow. “Mark Boal was on an imbed [in Iraq] and came back with all these extraordinary stories. Not only did these men have the most dangerous job in the world, it’s an all-volunteer military so that is an interesting paradigm. Talk about interesting psychology to work with.”
Talking with the writer Bigelow found herself drowning in wonderful ideas. But it was the stories of the Army’s Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) unit that captured her imagination the most, trying to get inside the psyches of these men a challenge she felt more than up to.
It started with the style of the storytelling, a standard framing device ill-suited to the multitude of tales Boal’s screenplay reveled in. “I wanted to keep it reportorial,” states the director. “It gave the whole production a kind of electricity. You couldn’t fall back on something that was cinematic if it hadn’t happened, it had to have that kind of authenticity and realism. If it was not firsthand observed, than it had to have been second or third-hand observed. In other words, the events had to be confirmed or we weren’t going to use them in the [script].”
Of course, shooting first person isn’t exactly a new thing for the filmmaker. From Near Dark to Point Break, a case could be made that she was all over the handheld phenomenon long before Jason Bourne went on his first adventure or James Bond reinvented his mythology. Her underappreciated gem Strange Days has arguably the best scene shot in this fashion of all time, the opening restaurant robbery and subsequent rooftop plunge as invigorating a piece of first person cinematography that I’ve ever seen.
Anthony Mackie and Jeremy Renner take aim in Summit Entertainments' The Hurt Locker
“It always goes back to the material,” she responds. “In this case you’re talking about bomb disposal, so as a filmmaker you sort of want to stand aside. Let [the story] unfold on its own, let it reveal itself. There is something inherently riveting about the process of bomb disarmament because you just don’t know what’s going to happen. Is that guy up on the roof calling in your coordinates or is he just hanging out doing his laundry? Does that bomb have a secondary trigger or is it something designed to only look like a bomb while the real [one] fifty feet behind me?”
“There’s just this sense of surprise and no margin for error, and I think you combine that with a first person shooting style. I mean, that’s how you step back and let [things] unfold. You get out of the story’s way creating, I think, I healthy excitement [for the audience].”
The film opens with a quote from author Chris Hedges that hit me up the side of the face. Having friends and family who have spent time in Iraq and Afghanistan, the one thing that always surprises me when I talk to them is their admission that, every now and then, they miss the excitement of being in a war zone. They are bored being back home, nothing here able to match the feeling of being on the edge of death they lived with every minute of every day over seas.
This is a dynamic The Hurt Locker lives and breathes in, Bigelow taking Hedges theorems and using them to give viewers insight into some of the soldiers’ riskier actions. “You’ve got to read [his] book, War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning,” she explains. “It basically says war’s dirty little secret is that some men love it. He then elaborates, [Hedges] is an extraordinary writer, but he basically talks about the kind of purpose and meaning soldiers find in war. Nothing else comes close.”
“You have to appreciate, even though you’re living in fear you can’t be frightened that long. You kind of go through it to this other space that makes [war] attractive. I don’t know if he’s ever written about this, but I think that’s probably a survival mechanism. It allows you to sustain to being in that sort of environment for an extended period of time instead of the split-second of say a car accident or something. You’re sustaining a psychological or emotional state you’re not really designed to sustain.”
I wonder about the shooting of the film and the decision substitute Jordan for Baghdad. After all, she couldn’t go to Iraq herself. Or couldn’t she? “You’re right,” Bigelow admits, “I couldn’t go over there. I did want to shoot some footage there but we couldn’t get the permissions. Two of our locations [in Jordan] were five kilometers from the border, and Barry Ackrody, who is just an amazing cinematographer, and I thought just to shoot some footage in Iraq would be amazing. I mean, I could see it, but our security detail said they couldn’t guarantee our safety because of snipers. We wanted to go, though. We really wanted to.”
A bomb tech trying to escape in Summit Entertainments' The Hurt Locker
“Nonetheless, [the set] was a very experiential, cinematic place to be. It was total immersion. There were no trailers for actors or crew. We created this kind of Bedouin style tents and [everyone] kind of cohabitated when they weren’t on set. We shot in the middle of July in the Middle East so the temperature was 140 to 150-degrees, so you put that bomb suit on Jeremy [Renner] which was somewhere between 80 to 100 pounds it was probably as immersive as actually being there.”
That authenticity is a hallmark of all of Bigelow’s productions, and even in lesser films like K-19: The Widowmaker the attention to every detail on her part is beyond impressive. “You have to do your own research,” she explains. “I think to be able to internalize and accurately visualize [things] when you haven’t actually been there the details become of paramount importance. You kind of develop that muscle over time. From Near Dark to Strange Days to this, you kind of have to develop the ability to re-imagine something as accurately or as experientially as possible.”
“For this, I spent time with bomb techs – Jeremy did as well, even going through an accelerated and modified training regimen – at Ft. Irwin, just outside of Los Angeles. After that we then started scouting locations in Kuwait because originally we were thinking of shooting there as we knew we had to shoot [the film] in the Middle Easy. We ended up shooting exclusively in Jordan, and I ended up spending even more time with bomb techs there. I think that was an opportunity to learn for all of us. There was some real hands-on experience and that’s what we tried to bring to the shoot.”
“Listen, without having the opportunity to actually go over there [to Iraq] I think you need to be as fluent in the experience as possible or you can’t recreate it, or at least as possible from the outside looking in. That’s what I’ve always believed and what I’ve tried to bring to all my sets.”
Unfortunately, the elephant in the room is the fact that The Hurt Locker is another project, like The Kingdom, In the Valley of Elah and Stop-Loss (just to name three) before it, set in the ongoing Middle East quagmire. These pictures have either failed miserably or underperformed at the box office, and although Bigelow’s has garnered the best critical responses of her career and one awards at just about every film festival in which it has played, the chance it might meet with a sadly similar fate is all too possible.
Jeremy Renner in Summit Entertainments' The Hurt Locker
