You wouldn’t be alone in being surprised by The Hurt Locker, a powerful and
critically acclaimed American film set in the Iraq war. Surprised that it’s
the work of a director whose most successful film, until now, has been a
high-octane surfing thriller made nearly two decades ago: Point Break,
starring Keanu Reeves as an FBI agent who goes undercover as a bodacious
surfer dude. Or surprised that the director of this uncompromising movie,
which the LA Weekly believes is “the best American film since Paul Thomas
Anderson’s There Will Be Blood”, is a woman, Kathryn Bigelow.
What may be most surprising about The Hurt Locker, however, is that it’s the
first film about the Iraq war that audiences actually seem to want to see.
This is more a testament to Bigelow’s ability to thrust viewers into the
fierce, relentless, dusty crucible of war than to the public’s desire to
confront the realities and meaning of a conflict most are thankful has all
but vanished from the headlines and their consciousness. Released in America
at the end of June, the film has been slowly rolled out across the country;
it has been so well received that Hollywood observers are predicting Oscar
nominations next year, including best director, best actor for its breakout
star, Jeremy Renner, and best cinematography for Britain’s Barry Ackroyd,
acclaimed for his work with Paul Greengrass on films such as United 93.
Bigelow is a Hollywood anomaly. Most obviously, of course, as a female
director in a town that discourages them, she’s one of an endangered
species. What makes her really interesting and unusual, however, is that she
has spurned the romcoms and other chick-flicks that remain the only preserve
of so many female American directors. Bigelow has macheted her own path
through the Hollywood jungle, making intense, stylised action thrillers such
as Near Dark, her early cult vampire thriller; Blue Steel, in which Jamie
Lee Curtis played a tough rookie cop; Point Break; Strange Days, with Ralph
Fiennes, a disturbing millennial crime thriller; and 2002’s K-19: The
Widowmaker, about the crew of a malfunctioning nuclear submarine. As The New
York Times noted: “No one will ever say she directs like a girl.”
As she slides her slim 6ft frame into a booth for a late breakfast at a hotel
in Beverly Hills, Bigelow hardly seems tough enough to be the progenitor of
these meditations on violence and power. She’s starkly good-looking, with
long brown hair — it’s hard to believe she’s 57 — and is courteous,
engaging, quick to laugh. She is also clear, focused, articulate and, one
can only assume, extremely determined. Today, she’s dressed in the tight
blue jeans she almost always wears, but seems to have abandoned the black
leather biker jacket that for many years was the other half of her uniform.
Some in Hollywood were amazed when she recently appeared on Stephen
Colbert’s talk show wearing a dress. I wouldn’t dare presume which of her
many attributes attracted the director James Cameron, to whom she was
married for a couple of years at the end of the 1980s, her only marriage.
She has no children.
With The Hurt Locker, perhaps for the first time in a fitful career that has
spanned nearly three decades, Bigelow has found a subject significant enough
to match her uncanny ability to plunge an audience into a psychologically
cohesive cinematic world. (The title refers to soldier’s slang for a place
one doesn’t want to be.) We follow a three-man bomb disposal squad — an EOD,
or explosive ordnance disposal team, in military parlance — through their
unbelievably dangerous day-to-day work on the streets of Baghdad. The film
was written by Mark Boal, a journalist who was embedded with an EOD unit in
Baghdad for two weeks in 2004. It is episodic, with the action moving from
one mission to the next, focusing on the team’s brazenly courageous, even
foolhardy leader, Sergeant James Will, played by Renner. As the days of the
unit’s tour of duty tick down towards zero, Will seems disturbingly fearless
as, wearing a 100lb Kevlar protective suit, he walks towards bomb after bomb
on the streets of what was then the world’s most violent city. It’s a walk
to which he has become addicted — it gives him a purpose he cannot
find elsewhere in life.
“These men have arguably the most dangerous job in the world, yet they are
there by choice,” Bigelow says when I ask what had intrigued her about
Boal’s story. “I kept circling back to that, trying to unlock that paradox.
Mark and I wanted to find a framework to understand the psychology of a
person who wants to keep going towards what everybody else on the planet is
running from. What does it take?”
Boal’s first-hand experience made Bigelow realise that in Iraq, unlike earlier
wars, the bomb disposal units are the front line. IEDs (improvised explosive
devices) have been the insurgents’ most important and destructive weapons.
Boal says that when he was in Baghdad, such units would have to tackle as
many as 15 bombs a day.
What Bigelow does so effectively in The Hurt Locker is anchor the almost
unbearable tension of each mission in its specific physical and
psychological geography. “It was so important that the audience knows where
the character is, where the bomb tech is, in relation to the bomb,” she
says.
So we arrive in a Humvee with the EOD team, and they secure the perimeter,
which may be as much as 200yd of an Iraqi street; danger, including snipers,
lurks in every direction. Sgt Will puts on his Kevlar suit and stomps
leadenly towards the bomb. Each of these sequences was shot with four
separate camera units. The cinematographer, Barry Ackroyd, persuaded Bigelow
to use Super 16 film, which allowed the cameras to be more mobile, giving
the film the fluid, reportorial, observational look she wanted.
The difficult and controversial nature of the project meant that The Hurt
Locker had to be financed independently. A studio would never have allowed
such a film to shoot so near Iraq — in Jordan — with mainly unknown actors
and with a director who insisted on no interference and final cut. In the
end, the film, which cost about $11m (£6.7m), was partially financed with
money from a French company. A studio would also have insisted on a number
of things Bigelow and Boal were determined to avoid. Although Bigelow does
have bigger stars in the film — Guy Pearce and Ralph Fiennes — she knew that
to maintain tension, it was critical that the audience doesn’t know how long
they will survive. “In a studio film, such an actor would have to die
a heroic death in the last act,” she notes. A studio would also have
insisted on a clearer moral message about the meaning of war, even about the
rights and wrongs of the conflict in Iraq. Bigelow and Boal were determined
that their film should rather be an experiential immersion in the daily
lives of men in war.
Its apparent lack of a political stance has opened The Hurt Locker to attacks
from the left. David Sterritt, a respected American critic, called its
politics “worrisome — not because they’re wrong, but because there are no
politics in a film about the most politically fraught conflict in recent
memory”. These criticisms clearly sting Boal, whose article for Playboy
about the murder of an Iraq war veteran, Death and Dishonor, was adapted by
Paul Haggis as In the Valley of Elah, starring Tommy Lee Jones. “I don’t
think there are politics in the trenches,” Boal snaps, a position that is
clearly ludicrous. After all, soldiers only end up in the trenches — and
dead — because of politics. And there have been any number of good war
films that have worn politics on their sleeves. Yet Bigelow’s intention was
obviously to make a film not about the Iraq war, but rather about men and
war, which happens to be set — very specifically set — in Iraq.
It’s amazing, looking back, just how consistent her interest in men and
violence has been. She trained as an artist, working with the conceptual-art
group Art & Language in New York in the late 1970s, before moving into
film. Her first project, in 1978, was a 17-minute short about “why violence
in cinematic form is so seductive”. It showed two men beating each other up
while, in a voiceover, two well-known semioticians deconstruct what is being
shown. When I ask her about it, though, she doesn’t particularly want to
analyse her clear obsession with what The New York Times calls “men,
masculinity, violence and power”.
“I tend to be drawn to material that, for lack of a better word, can be
described as fairly robust and muscular, and I wish I had a good answer for
why,” she offers. “I come from the art world, and my canvas was abstract
expressionist — big gestures, larger formats — so that may have something to
do with it. I have just never used a small brush and a tight hand. And I
suppose I am drawn to individuals who find themselves in dangerous
situations; then the story, the struggle, becomes how they try, or not, to
overcome their circumstances. You are just exchanging crucibles, so to
speak, from film to film. There is something so powerful about those
defining moments when you are about to lose your life — you’re never more
alive. What does that feel like?”
In The Hurt Locker, Bigelow has found the cinematic language to make us feel
what those moments feel like.
The Hurt Locker opens on August 28
Your Comments
Order By: