“If
there’s specific resistance to women making movies, I just choose
to ignore that as an obstacle for two reasons: I can’t change my
gender, and I refuse to stop making movies.” -Kathryn Bigelow
If someone made a movie about Kathryn
Bigelow's career, it contains all the elements for a success story. A
comeback story, if you will.
Her first film, Loveless, a
biker movie set in the 1950s starring Willem Defoe, introduced
Bigelow and her highly stylized approach to the independent film
scene.
In 1997, Near Dark, a vampire
Western by Bigelow was released and quickly disappeared into video
stores. However, the movie gained a cult following for its dynamic
cinematic style.
Already questions arose about a female
director's place in the action movie world. During filming for Blue
Steel, Bigelow said: "There's
nothing, culturally or socially, that would limit women to the more
ephemeral, sensitive subjects or men to hardware films.” The
director said she wanted to “push the limits” of her subject,
whether it be vampires or a police case.
Although
Blue
Steel had
bigger names than her last two pictures—Jaime Lee Curtis was the
lead—it was still unsuccessful at the box office.
Point
Break (1991)
was Bigelow's most financially successful film, making over $100
million at the box office. It featured Keanu Reeves and Patrick
Swayze as bank robbing surfers.
Bigelow's
1995 picture Strange
Days,
starred Ralph Fiennes in a futuristic version of Los Angeles, and was
written and produced by Bigelow's ex-husband, director James Cameron.
It was a commercial and critical flop, but much of the blame was
placed on Cameron for its failure.
Bigelow's next release in 2002, K-19:
The Widowmaker, starring Harrison Ford and Liam Neeson, was yet
another box office flop.
Although her stylistic choices as a
director were admired, the typical Hollywood studio action movie was
not doing Bigelow any favors.
After an eight year absence, Bigelow
found her footing again and came back with a high tension film with
political and philosophical weight, The Hurt Locker. Set
during the Iraq War, it explores the work and lives of Army bomb
squad technicians.
During an interview with The A.V. Club,
Bigelow was asked about the seven year gap between pictures. “I
became familiar with Mark Boal's journalism....These things take
time, is all I'm trying to say. I think what people don't realize is
how long these things can take in development. I've always developed
all my own pieces, and they're time consumers,” Bigelow said.
The Hurt Locker was based off
Mark Boal's reporting during his time on an embed with a bomb squad
in Baghdad. The film, which featured unknown actors and had a
documentary, 'day in the life' style, was nominated for many awards,
including nine Academy Awards.
Bigelow, nominated for Best Director,
was ironically up against her ex-husband James Cameron, for his work
on his self-proclaimed labor of love, Avatar.
On
March 7, 2010, Bigelow became the first female director to win an
Academy Award. The Hurt Locker
also won Best Picture and Boal was awarded for Best Screenplay.
Bigelow grew up in Northern California,
where she studied painting at the San Francisco Art Institute. While
there, she was accepted into the Whitney Museum's independent study
program. While in New York, Bigelow apprenticed with artists Vito
Acconci, Richard Serra, and Lawrence Weiner.
She earned a master's degree from
Columbia University, studying film theory and criticism. Bigelow
continued to work with avant garde and conceptual artists after
earning her degree and in 1978, began work on a short film, The
Set-Up.
In
typical Bigelow style, The Set-Up,
was a film commentating on the violence in film. The Set-Up
portrays two men fighting, as voice overs deconstruct the violent
images. Bigelow asked her actors to punch and hit each other during
the film's all-night shoot. Director Milos Forman, teaching at
Columbia at the time, liked the short, and Bigelow used it as part of
her application to Columbia's MFA film program, where she studied
screenwriting and directing.
Bigelow
was not stymied by tepid box office reception for her early films or
any possible reluctance by Hollywood to have a woman direct
high-paced films, but she prefers to work outside of the studio
system.
With
Hurt Locker, Bigelow
wanted to film in the Middle East and she knew this would garner her
a lot of no's in terms of securing financing from a studio. “I also
wanted to retain complete creative control, I wanted final cut, and I
wanted the opportunity to cast breakout, emerging talent,” Bigelow
said.
The
team of Bigelow and Boal seems to fit Bigelow's desire to use film to
comment on society. “If you hold up a mirror to society and you
don't like what you see, you can't fault the mirror. The toughest
decision was not wanting to shy away from anything, trying to keep
the truth of the moment, of the social environment. It's not that I
condone violence. I don't. It's an indictment. I would say the film
is cautionary, a wake-up call, and I think that is always valuable.”
Bigelow said these words in regard to her movie Strange
Days and the social and racial
tensions in Los Angeles after the riots in the 1990s, but the same
could easily apply to the contents of Hurt Locker.
Even though Bigelow's Hurt Locker
success gave her the cache to do whatever film she wanted, she chose
to team with Boal again for her next project. “Once you embark on a
project that is both topical and relevant, I suppose it sets a new
bar,” Bigelow said.
Bigelow claims she's a delivery system
for Mark [Boal]'s content and their latest idea was to make a movie
about the failed capture of Osama Bin Laden in Tora Bora in late
2001. But even after Hurt Locker's success, Bigelow and Boal
couldn't sell the pitch to a studio. Backed by an independent
investor, Boal and Bigelow continued to work on the project, after
shopping it around Hollywood.
On May 1, 2011, Bigelow and Boal
watched as President Obama informed the nation of Bin Laden's death
at the hands of a Navy SEALS team in Pakistan. The news turned out
to be both good and bad for the Tora Bora project. The day after the
news, Sony's Amy Pascal, remembering their pitch from months earlier,
called up Bigelow and asked if she was still doing a movie about Bin
Laden. Sony agreed to distribute the picture before even really
knowing what the picture was.
But writing a movie about the failed
capture of Bin Laden seemed silly after his killing. Not wanting to
scrap the entire script, Bigelow and Boal talked about trying to
frame both events in one movie, but ultimately decided to drop the
Tora Bora incident altogether.
Boal still faced a mountain of a task
to get through in order to even begin piecing together a new script.
He researched the events almost contemporaneously, uncovering
information on the SEALS mission and about how the CIA finally, after
four years of almost no news, tracked down Bin Laden. Although there
is some contention about whether the CIA allowed Boal and Bigelow
access to classified files in order to research the movie,
researching the script was only the beginning.
And Bigelow seems to have a penchant
for never taking the easy way. Like with Hurt Locker, Bigelow
wanted to cast mostly unknown actors (Jessica Chastain was not an
Oscar nominee when she was cast.) “If you are dealing with
characters who are meant to be true to life, I want it to be an
original experience for the audience. I don't want them thinking
about a past performance of the actor,” Bigelow said during an
interview on Charlie Rose.
Again, shooting took place in the
Middle East, in Jordan and India, and the forty minute action
sequence that ends the movie was the biggest object of all. Bigelow
described the process: how the actors playing the SEALS team had to
learn how special forces operate and how she had to work with the
crew to figure out the logistics of shooting. The raid took place on
a moonless night and Bigelow wanted to recreate it as well as use the
night vision lenses the real SEALS would have used. “And we built
the compound [where Bin Laden was killed] from the ground up,”
Bigelow added.
Just as putting the film together
wasn't a simple process, Zero Dark Thirty's
plot is not simple to describe. Boal and Bigelow say
it's really three stories in one: 1) How the CIA found someone to
lead them to Bin Laden, 2) How they made the decision to go in, and
3) How they actually killed Bin Laden.
The story revolves around Jessica
Chastain's character, Maya, a CIA operative who followed a lead—one
of many—that eventually leads to bin Laden.
Many assume the fact the main character
is female is a creative choice made by Bigelow and Boal, but in
Boal's research, he found a female CIA agent was the one who worked
on this particular lead over a period of many years.
“It
wouldn't have mattered to me if the main character was a man or
woman,” Bigelow said. “I want to tell the story.” In a recent
New
York
magazine Vulture interview, Bigelow recounted a story about a
screening of the film in New York. “This woman came out of the
theater, and she was crying and shaking, and she came up to me and
said, ‘It wasn’t a woman, though, was it?’ And I said, ‘No,
it was!’”
Upon its release, there was criticism
from politicians and critics alike saying the film supported the use
of torture to gain intelligence information.
Both have tried to address the
accusations, but Bigelow might have said it best in a recent
acceptance speech after winning Best Director at the New York Film
Critics Circle. "I
thankfully want to say that I'm standing in a room of people who
understand that depiction is not endorsement, and if it was, no
artist could ever portray inhumane practices," Bigelow said. "No
author could ever write about them, and no filmmaker could ever delve
into the knotty subjects of our time."
On
Thursday, January 10, when the Academy Award nominations were
announced, Bigelow was not nominated for Best Director. Zero
Dark Thirty
garnered nominations for Chastain, Boal's screenplay, and Best
Picture.
Maybe
the lack of a nomination for Bigelow this year will simply lead to
another great comeback story when she makes her next picture.
When
asked if the next film she's going to make will be easier than
filming in 130 degree heat or Jordanian prisons, Bigelow confesses
she often promises herself the next film will be easier. “Oh, I say
it all the time,” she said. “All the time. I just don't mean it.”
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