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Essential Director: Kathryn Bigelow |
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While Kathryn Bigelow’s star has shot to prominence since her film The Hurt Locker fell from the rafters to snare the director an Oscar for best picture in March this year (the film won six in all), it’s probably fair to say that the tens of thousands of illegal torrent users soon to be caught up in a lawsuit filed by the film’s producer, and backed by the U.S. Copyright Group, aren’t exactly hailing her latest work.
Litigation aside, fans of Bigelow’s influential pre-Twilight-hijack of the vampire genre film, 1987’s brilliant Near Dark, would probably view her in a distinctly different light.
Released at a time when the 58 year-old from the rural suburb in San Francisco was still married to Hollywood mega-director James Cameron of Titanic and Avatar fame, Near Dark, like much of Bigelow’s work, challenged conventional sympathies with its gritty blending of love and collective bloodlust.
As with The Hurt Locker, the film was shot in a desert – albeit the American West rather than anything as exotic as her Iraq war film’s Jordanian locale. Yet unlike the Oscar winning film’s documentary stylisations, which reach all the way down to a perennially unsteady camera lens, Near Dark was a purely visual, action-driven expedition in storytelling.
This was the same brief that drove what is perhaps Bigelow’s second best known film. 1991’s Point Break was hardly Shakespearean in its efforts to expose the soul of surfing culture via its cops and robbers shtick.
That Keanu Reeves built on his Bill & Ted persona in the lead role opposite a campy performance from Patrick Swayze certainly didn’t help. (For some years a US based travelling theater company was performing a show titled Point Break Live! – the twist being that starred a bonafide walk-up audience member performing Keanu Reeves’s lines from cue cards).
Nonetheless, Point Break is easily Bigelow’s standout North American box office earner, despite its modest take of USD$42 million. Many of her films, The Hurt Locker included, have struggled to make their budgets back on ticket sales.
Her action flick K19: The Widowmaker in particular struggled, pulling in just half of its hefty $80 million dollar outlay.
Yet Bigelow’s films have generally all been well received by critics. Bigelow has also spoken out in recent times about the difficulties associated with being a female director in Hollywood (she was the first woman to win an Oscar for Best Picture, ditto for the BAFTA she also won for The Hurt Locker).
Her most famous quote on the subject was given to the MIT’s The Tech Newspaper in 1990. She told interviewer Michelle Perry that “If there’s specific resistance to women making movies, I just choose to ignore it as an obstacle for two reasons: I can’t change my gender, and I refuse to stop making movies. It’s irrelevant who or what directed a movie, the important thing is that you either respond to it or you don’t. There should be more women directing; I think there’s just not the awareness that it’s really possible. It is.”
Bigelow explained to Newsweek in 2009 that she has a unique method of auditioning actors for film roles. The director says that she “Prefers observing to participating”.
So the casting process for a Bigelow film often involves her watching an actor talking to someone else, and not necessarily reading from a page of script. Again, this reflects Bigelow’s intensely visual approach to direction – something no doubt influenced by her former career as an accomplished visual artist.
While it remains to be seen whether Bigelow’s legacy will extend to her being the director of the film that brings down online piracy, it seems certain that she will direct another film soon – something that may not have seemed as likely if The Hurt Locker had sunk rather than swam after it disappeared from cinema screens in the US so quickly.
At the time of writing Bigelow’s name has been attached to in-development action thriller Triple Frontier, set in the border zone between Paraguay, Argentina and Brazil, which would reunite her with Hurt Locker writer Mark Boal.
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