American Bigelow

The Hurt Locker opens in medias res, and then it pretty much stays there for two solid hours. The heroes of the new film from director Kathryn Bigelow are the members of an elite U.S. bomb squad in Baghdad in 2004; every time an army patrol spots a suspicious nest of wires or a parked car with an unusually heavy load sitting in the trunk, they’re the ones who get called in to defuse the threat. Usually they’re working in an area crawling with locals, any number of whom could be hostile — which means anyone who pulls out a cellphone could simply be checking his messages, or they could be sending a “detonate” order to their confederates.

The film was written by Mark Boal, who based his script on his experiences as an embedded journalist in Iraq. (He wrote the Playboy article that Paul Haggis adapted into the moody 2007 homefront drama In the Valley of Elah.) The script is practically all setpieces: one tension-filled, you-are-there bomb scenario after another. And that’s how we get to know our three heroes (played by unknowns Anthony Mackie, Brian Geraghty, and Jeremy Renner) — not through monologues, or voice-overs reading their letters home, but almost exclusively through their behaviour on the mission.

I’d call it an existential war movie, but the appeal of The Hurt Locker is more visceral than cerebral. After all, it’s directed by the woman who made Point Break, perhaps the most shamelessly enjoyable action picture of the ’90s, and in an odd way, The Hurt Locker could be looked as a companion piece to that film: like Patrick Swayze in Point Break, Jeremy Renner plays a leader driven by his addiction to danger. He’s defused more than 800 bombs in his career, we’re told, and he sleeps with a box of bomb components under his cot — “stuff that nearly killed me,” as he puts it. He courts danger so relentlessly, in fact, that in one scene, Mackie and Geraghty semi-seriously contemplate killing him before he can pull them into a situation that kills them first. They’re convinced he has a death wish, but by the end of the film, Bigelow makes it clear that the truth is more complicated: this job is the only thing that gives Renner’s life meaning. If the situation isn’t life-or-death, how is he supposed to make any decisions at all?

The Hurt Locker is relentless, but the same couldn’t be said for the pace of Kathryn Bigelow’s career of late. One of the few female directors to have made her reputation almost exclusively in the action genre, Bigelow has stayed under the radar since the box-office disappointment of 1995’s Strange Days, with only two little-seen films, 2000’s The Weight of Water and the 2002 submarine thriller K-19: The Widowmaker to her credit. But with The Hurt Locker, which she filmed in Jordan just over the border from Iraq during the U.S. “surge,” she’s rediscovered the energy of her early genre landmarks like Near Dark, Blue Steel, and Point Break and combined it with a real-world, journalistic immediacy.

I had the chance to speak with Kathryn Bigelow on Friday. She's been talking about this movie for about a year now, but she had obviously not tired of discussing the material or the experience of helping to turn it into a film. Here’s our conversation.

Q: I rewatched your vampire movie Near Dark the other night to help prepare myself for this interview, and there are many moments in that film where characters say, “Fuckin’ daylight.” I couldn’t help but think that you must have said that a lot as well when you were making The Hurt Locker. It looks like it must have been a punishing movie to make.

Kathryn Bigelow: I was just going to use that term! Actually, though, the light and the landscape were so epic that you kind of forgave the heat and savoured the look. It was probably the most punishing on Jeremy Renner, who had to wear that 100-pound bomb suit. We were in the Middle East, it was summer, it was 100, maybe 110 degrees, and that was a real bomb suit full of Kevlar and metal plates — it was not a creation of the wardrobe department. And then you add the helmet, which has a fan, but which was not as effective as it could have been. That was perhaps the most logically challenging aspect of the shoot — just making sure Jeremy was cool and comfortable and conscious.

Q: I wonder if there were challenges conceptually with the film as well. It’s so much about these setpieces without a lot of dialogue — was it hard to envision the film from what was on the page?

KB: Well, actually, the script was very carefully crafted with such a high degree of specificity. Our goal was to transport you, the audience, into what it’s like to be a bomb tech in Baghdad and walk in their shoes. So a lot of that was right there on the page. And Mark was present during the shoot, and we were both very careful to ensure accuracy where we could.

Q: I was very impressed by how the tension is sustained throughout the whole film — especially since, in most conventional thrillers, scenes where the hero has to defuse a bomb are actually kind of... well, boring. There’s no doubt that the hero is going to survive. Were there strategies that you came up with in the writing or the shooting to keep the suspense alive?

KB: I was very inspired by Mark’s first-hand reporting, and I was very keenly aware upon reading the script of how inherently dramatic and inherently tense the life of a bomb tech would be, so I wasn’t actually comparing it to other films. I was just very focused on what it would be like to be there — in an environment that provides 360 degrees of potentially volatile situation with no respite. There’s no Saigon. Even in the green zone, you could potentially be hit by a mortar round. It’s a pervasively threatening environment, and I think that really informed the screenplay and the production. Then you add the camerawork, which is very alive and muscular and gets you inside the emotions of the characters while also placing you within a clearly mapped out geographic space. I think this conflict has been kind of abstract — at least, it has been for me, as a member of the general public. So I was keen to grasp the opportunity to make it specific, even if the film is set circa 2004.

Q: And there’s no clear enemy. There’s the bomb that has to be deactivated and a whole lot of people who might be enemies or might be innocent bystanders.

KB: It’s one judgment call after another. The thing to remember is that their job is to render safe these devices. Their job is to save lives. But you’re right: it’s not like the plot transitions into something where they have to track down the triggerman. I think a lot of that comes from the nature of Mark’s reporting. During his embed, he saw everything from the soldiers’ perspective, and that became the perspective of the film. That’s your point of entry. And at the time, language was a huge barrier — engaging with the local population was very difficult, even if you as a soldier wanted to. Which telescopes the perspective of the film even more.

Q: Some pundits have said this could be the first film about Iraq that actually does some business at the box office.

KB: I think there’s always a market for a classic war film. Yes, Platoon is specific to Vietnam, but it’s also a classic, defining film about men during wartime, and the psychological price of war. Those are timeless, universal thematic investigations worthy of constant exploration.

Q: I read Manohla Dargis’ recent profile of you in The New York Times, and was fascinated by her description of your first short film, The Set-Up, which shows two men fighting while a pair of female semioticians provide a voice-over that deconstructs the symbolism of the images. So you come to filmmaking from this academic background, you studied with Susan Sontag, and you have a deep familiarity with critical theory. So I’m curious to know the extent to which that background comes into play with a film like this one. You watch a movie like Blue Steel, and you practically hear all the academic papers being scribbled down. But does the semiotician in you have a place in a more reportorial film like The Hurt Locker?

KB: I think it’s perhaps relegated to the deep background or the subconscious. But it never really disappears. There’s that thing called “clean room” theory — they use it in the legal world — that says you can never un-know what you know. So it’s there, but it certainly doesn’t become the text, the way it did in The Set-Up, which is all about puzzling out what creates that engagement with what you’re seeing onscreen. What makes your heart pound? You know, when people watch The Hurt Locker, in that scene where Brian is trying to clean the blood off the bullet, they sometimes find themselves trying to conjure up spit in their mouths along with him.

Q: Right — I think David Edelstein from New York magazine said that in his review, didn’t he?

KB: Exactly. My interest was always in what creates that physiological reaction and trying to unpack that process.

Q: You get asked this question a lot, but here it is again: one of the things that people always note about you is that you’re this anomalous figure, a female director who is interesting in portraying — and so good at portraying — these insular male worlds. And The Hurt Locker is no different. Is that kind of milieu something you’ve always understood from an early age, or is it that you’re simply curious about them and ask a lot of good questions?

KB: I definitely pursue these films, so it’s not that they just land in my lap with all the financing. I wish they would! I’m interested in character first and foremost, but I am drawn to characters who find themselves in great danger or who have these peak experiences. And that ties in with my desire to use the medium in a really experiential way — to put you at ground zero in a particular conflict. This is me kind of analyzing it all after the fact, but for me, you get excited by character, and then the character finds himself in these potentially threatening, dangerous situations that allow you to use the medium in a way that expands and stretches the form. It goes from the inside out.

Q: How would you describe your relationship to violence? Are you fascinated by it? Appalled by it? How do the percentages break down?

KB: I don’t really look at it as violence per se, but I am fascinated by that physiological contract that the viewer makes with the screen, and that a certain kind of material can achieve. Comedy is a similar thing too — you’re laughing at those characters. So what transcends the purely visual process of watching? How and why are you engaged to a point of... I mean, when I was screening Strange Days, I loved watching the audience react to that opening sequence, the point-of-view shot of that character running up those stairs. People in their seats would have their legs moving! What creates that engagement?

Q: I still remember that long, long foot chase in Point Break through those narrow back alleys where you don’t really know what’s around each corner. And I don’t know what the trick is — like, if you put the camera the right number of feet above the ground combined with the right lens, does some magical alchemy happen with the viewer?

KB: You never quite know. It’s not scientific — it’s ephemeral, you can’t quantify it. I think that’s where art comes in.