in contemporary Iraq is not a military assignment so much as a death sentence. Yet in Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker, Army Staff Sergeant William James—played by Jeremy Renner in one of the year’s breakout performances—finds himself gradually detaching from the lull of safety and domesticity and growing addicted to the thrill of mortal danger. In this desert, women are as rare as snowflakes—roughly analogous to Bigelow’s own remarkable presence in the boys’ club of high-intensity action filmmaking. She is one of the lone women directors to command an author-itative position in popular American cinema, attracting a devoted following among cinephile audiences at the same time. In The Hurt Locker, Bigelow turns her attention to the rough and tumble story of James and his boys with a documentary-like fidelity to detail, a Hitchcockian flair for suspense, and a visceral physicality.

At nearly six feet tall, Bigelow has an arresting and elegant presence. As a visual artist, her roots grew in the rarefied New York art world, but as a director she is widely recognized for kinetic, athletic choreog-raphy, stylized, innovative cinematography, and, above all, the ace action sequences that she terms “experiential.” The legendary bank robbery set piece from Point Break (1991) has been refracted through modern cinema history in films like Reservoir Dogs (1992), Heat (1995), and The Dark Knight. The thrill-seeking vampires that haunt Near Dark (1987) set the stage for subsequent devils, from Danny Boyle’s speed demons in 28 Days Later (2000) to Rob Zombie’s villainous backwoods family in The Devil’s Rejects (2005) and even Catherine Harwicke’s star-crossed, inter-species lovers in Twilight. At the same time, the first-person cinematography in Strange Days (1995), which documents intense physical sensations and violent crimes in single takes, combines the suspense and pacing of Terence Young’s Wait Until Dark (1967) with the creative point-of-view shots found in the opening sequence of John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978). To this mix, Bigelow added a remarkable performance by Ralph Fiennes, a streak of black Y2K humour, polluted production design, a dash of political critique, and an uncanny prescience for the turn toward torture and snuff film that the horror genre would take a few years hence.

Many of Bigelow’s characters share a deep commitment to or obsession with adventure. Their “extreme” bravery in confronting physical and psychological pain goes beyond lifestyle to become life’s

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purpose. Her working and middle-class protagonists struggle to balance their personal and professional personas. Many come from the ranks of the police force—remember Jamie Lee Curtis’ white-knuckled rookie cop in Blue Steel (1990), Angela Bassett’s hardened, avenging warrior in Strange Days, and Keanu Reeves’ young footballer-turned-FBI agent in Point Break. All are relentlessly tested before they earn their stripes, and all share an appetite for danger with their mercenary counterparts. That the thinnest of thin blue lines separates the right and wrong sides of the law surprises no one so much as it does them.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in The Hurt Locker, which is as strikingly, intuitively physical as ever. The viewer’s sympathies lie squarely with the American soldiers; at times it feels like the Middle Eastern setting is only the next level of a video game. The Americans’ distrust of the locals—who appear abruptly in the soldiers’ lives and vanish just as rapidly, their faces passing in a seeming blur and their names largely unknown—is vindicated again and again. Yet while the soldiers’ courage and skill in catastrophe pre-vention can be astonishing, the threats they face are ceaseless, severe, and unwinnable. While The Hurt Locker is not a polemic on this specific and devastating war, Bigelow is deeply concerned about the physical, moral, and psychological dangers that confront her main characters, and she knows that it’s only a matter of time before they take a toll. In Bigelow’s desert, each soldier is a ticking time bomb.

Could you describe your background, particularly your time spent as a fine artist and painter?

I grew up in a rural-suburban town called San Carlos, on the Northwest coast of California. You could jump on a train and be in San Francisco in 30 minutes, but I spent my youth out-doors and on a horse—I had a horse at the time. Things were pretty simple. My mother was a librar-ian and my dad worked as manager of a paint factory, which I think is where the painting began. It was kind of a great way to grow up. I had a lot of indepen-dence, which was certainly good for doing what I do now. As a filmmaker, even though you might be sur-rounded by a 200-person crew, you’re still by yourself. You have to keep a certain level of concentration in order to see the movie at every juncture.

I gravitated toward the art world early. I went to school at San Francisco Art Institute and was doing abstract expressionist painting when, without my knowledge, one of my teachers submitted me for the Whitney Independent Study Program. All of a sudden I was in this incredible program in New York. It was transformative, and a really rigorous induction

into the art world. The art world at the time was pre-dominantly focused on conceptual and political art. I gravitated toward those artists—I was mentored a bit by Lawrence Weiner, I worked within his world and collaborated with him on a couple of things, as well as by various artists like Vito Acconci and Richard Serra. The material began to grow off the canvas. The minute you think about conceptual art or some-thing more ideologically based, it becomes less plastic and more intellectual.

But then I began to gravitate toward film. I was working with a great group of conceptual artists called Art & Language, and started to make short films in that context. I got a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, and shot this short film that I didn’t have enough money to complete, and so I thought: graduate school! I went to Columbia graduate school. I miss Manhattan so desperately; it provided constant stimulation. Los Angeles, where I live now, is sort of a necessary evil.

But New York, oh, it was phenomenal. Absolutely phenomenal. I worked with Milos Forman. Edward Said was one of my teachers, as was Sylvère Lotringer; I was gratefully one of the editors of the literary jour-nal SemioText(e). That was really what was exciting at the time. The shorts were showing in the New American Filmmakers series, but the ideas began to grow and became longer. I didn’t even really know that I was necessarily “directing,” I just wanted to work in a longer format, and I started making longer films. It’s funny; filmmaking sort of found me. I suppose that’s the best way. To yearn for it, to start out wanting to direct—especially coming from the art world—can be very frustrating. They’re two totally different disciplines. But that, in a way, is the beauty of working in independent film. With The Hurt Locker, because we were working independently, we had a lot of freedom and other than financially, were able to work without compromise. Creatively, it’s really unadulterated. The importance of main-taining that, for me, goes back to an art world mentality. You can’t imagine too much creative interference in that venue!

Can one see your paintings? What do they look like?

I don’t know if many exist. When I was really painting painting, they were kind of De Kooning-esque, but then they became more mini-malist and spare. They were very large, maybe 10’ x 20’, and then they finally began to go off the canvas and onto the room itself. I think that was when Susan Sontag entered the arena [critiquing students’ work as part of the Columbia program]. Of course, I was so in awe. It took all the oxygen out of the room just to imagine that she was there. The program, which was

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maybe 15 students from around the country and these incredible advisors, was like an artwork in and of itself! It was very humbling, let’s put it that way. I sometimes think that my medium has changed, but not the impetus behind it.

How do you construct an action sequence? It really starts with the writing. When you

start from scratch, you understand the DNA of a film. In some cases, I’ve written myself. In a case like The Hurt Locker, where I worked with Mark Boal, I really begin to internalize it and shape it with the writer. That material is so rich and genuine, and the voice is so immediate and unmediated. In a way, it doesn’t feel scripted, and yet it’s highly scripted. It’s a kind of “Zen and the Art of Screenwriting.” When I’m famil-iar with the DNA and have really gotten inside that, I start to shape it on paper, working with storyboards to look at its construction.

If you’re doing something really experiential—I think of it more as experiential than action, even though those are probably just semantics—you have to maintain geography. Geography is really, really key. The minute you lose geography and just have kinetic shooting or kinetic cutting, I completely check out of it. I need to have a really rhythmic sense of the emotion on the actor, the details on the actor, and where the actor lives in that physical universe. Once you have that, then it becomes pure rhythm and instinct. How do you move between the architecture of construction and the details? The microcosm and the macrocosm inform the storyboards, and begin to shape and inform the shooting. Finally, in the cutting room, you find that rhythm once again.

For example, how did you design the scene where Jeremy Renner’s character discovers that the bomb he’s disarming is connected to an entire web of IEDs?

That was all storyboarded. I knew it was a daisy chain, I knew exactly. I knew that for complete understanding, you had to have—which we don’t often have—that kind of omniscient eye looking down from above; then parachute back into the visor and the hand; and, finally, have that omniscient eye then take you to the potential insurgent. It’s just find-ing a kind of logic. Once you find that, there can be no other way to shape it. Painting has its own logic, too. Even though all permutations are possible, once you find the logic, it makes perfect sense. It’s not arbitrarily constructed for sheer kineticism; there really is an innate physicality that reveals itself. Working with Walter Murch on K-19 (2002) was so fun. He said—and I do think filmmaking is like this—“You can push and pull and contort and fight and muscle it, but it won’t anneal until it decides to reveal itself.”

You used four discrete camera units to film The Hurt Locker, is that correct?

Yes. I had an incredible cameraman, Barry Ackroyd, and he really went with the idea. We shot in 16mm, which gave us a tremendous amount of dexterity. Some of that really slow-mo material is dig-ital; that was shot with a Phantom camera, which can shoot 10,000 frames a second. It’s way beyond photo-sonic. Talk about granular!

But if Army protocol asks for a 300-metre contain-ment around a disarmament, let’s say your set is 300 metres long. Within that location, you’re placing four different discrete units. Now sometimes the cameras would catch each other, but I’d rather have messy dailies and a tremendous number of options in the cutting room than worry about keeping it too refined. I also don’t believe in marks at all for my actors, which is very hard on my focus-pullers, but you can find those individuals that will go with you and not be threatened by it. So it’s a matter of working the volumes of space with the actors and blocking it; keeping the cameras always at a really vital position; and never duplicating an angle, because then you’ve used up a whole unit. Sometimes you’ll cross a line, which is not necessarily advisable, but can be really extraordinary if you’re creating an unsettled texture and tone with the material.

The units were small: an operator, a focus-puller, a loader. But the loader was off at the side of the set, so I had just two, three, at the most four men, if I needed any kind of shiny board or reflector. There were also many shots that required a grip on the cameraman. For instance if he was running—we had tracks running in and out of the set—he had to be looking though the camera and couldn’t even look down at his feet. A grip had to hold the cameraman in order to make sure he didn’t lose his footing. The grip had to keep him, guide him with his body so that he didn’t fall, especially if he was moving at top speed.

How did your directorial approach to The Hurt Locker compare to the way you approached Point Break or Near Dark?

When shooting Point Break, I was learning the craft. In fact, I was in the process of being very exploratory, really from Near Dark on. You’re always learning, and I’m still learning; we all are. But then, I was really learning the language—what’s possible, finding limitations, and what best serves the mate-rial and the story. It’s a trial by fire, I suppose; you learn in situ so much. Sometimes I’m an advisor at the Sundance labs, and it’s so great to see directors working on material sometimes for the first time, and who are beginning to develop their own cine-matic language. You find that in your material.

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In Point Break, we had always two cameras. I started with two in Near Dark for the more demand-ing sequences, and I began to realize that multiple cameras were wonderful tools for getting to the cut-ting room with a lot of meaningful options. Not just footage for the sake of footage; every frame needed to be available as a possibility. Learning how to work with angles and blocking was what developed over the years.

I feel really good about The Hurt Locker from that standpoint. It developed very effortlessly, easily—how to shoot it, where to block—though much was also dictated by the specific protocol of bomb disar-mament. I’d spent time with these Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) techs in Kuwait, Camp Arifjan—which is kind of the last staging area before you go into Iraq, and is actually the camp that Obama visited before he went into Iraq. There, I met with quite a big EOD unit, maybe ten or 12 individuals, a couple of whom are team leaders and a couple of whom are training bomb techs. The mechanics really dictated staging and blocking; there’s a protocol. You can’t just invent a new methodology because it looks good, or the background is better, or the light is won-derful. Something simple, for instance, is that you can’t cut two wires simultaneously. The cutting appa-ratus is metallic, so you’d create a closed a circuit! It’s basically a pair of pliers and an incredible ability to make life or death decisions under stress—extreme stress. You’ve also only got about 45 seconds, because the minute you’re on the ground for any length of time, your coordinates can get called to a sniper in the area. I think it’s obvious how futile the situation is, and how extraordinarily threatening it is.

In preparation for filming, you immersed your actors in two different training programs?

Yes. They did an extraordinary job, and Jeremy was working with live ordnance—huge, real explosions—at Fort Irwin in California. He learned how to work with the material and how to be com-fortable and confident—to the point where he actually wound up being very impressive to the head of that unit at Fort Irwin. But that’s Jeremy. He’s one of the great actors of his generation, and I think that’s because of his ability, focus, and attention to detail. He immersed himself completely.

In casting, I knew I wanted a relative unknown. I was looking for great face, great talent, and somebody for whom you wouldn’t bring preconceived baggage. I wanted a fresh face for whom the prospect of living or dying would be impossible to call. That was another reason to work independently: because cast-ing is the first thing that happens. It’s like, “Here are four guys, and there’s your financing.” Had we not been working independently we would have obvi-ously had different actors, and potentially a much bigger budget. But we never would have been able to shoot in the Middle East—ever—from an insurance standpoint, even though the film was perfect: it came in on schedule and on budget.

Finding three relatively fresh, relatively unknown faces—not unknown within the industry, but unknown within the zeitgeist of public actors—or re-purposing somebody in a way that you haven’t seen them before—I love doing that. I mean, finding Willem Dafoe in The Loveless (1982), and to a certain extent, Keanu in Point Break…Otherwise, it just feels like you’re working with an actor for whom the audi-ence has a tremendous number of pre-existing associations. “Wait a minute, he played that, in that…” This way, you come to it with a kind of neu-tral—and hopefully open and available—attitude.

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But the cameos are also fun! Those are just actors I love, and have worked with before, as in the case of Ralph Fiennes. They helped us enormously, gracing us with their presence—and I think they had a good time. It was short but sweet, and they left an indelible impression on the film.

What was your experience like filming in the Middle East?

If one has any preconceptions about shoot-ing in the Middle East, it’s certainly what the media in America has created or fostered. I was embraced. There was such an open and enthusiastic response to us among the Jordanians. There’s a burgeoning film community and a film school there as well. I created an intern trainee program from all the departments, because the film infrastructure there is small, and it’s in the process of being able to accommodate more complex productions; this production certainly helped. Also, having done some work, they trusted me, in a way. That became reciprocal, and we worked together really, really well. The royal family was also very helpful, and they often visited the set. It was a truly supportive environment.

Because of perceptions of the Middle East, how-ever, it was hard to get some crew members I’d worked with before to come over. So I found crew both in the area and in Europe—some from Lebanon, some from Israel, some from South Africa, from Norway (my production designer lives in Norway though he’s actually Icelandic), some European, German (my special effects crew, but not the supervisor, he came from Los Angeles). So it was a real UN for a crew…And suddenly, all socio-political tensions abated in the service of making a movie.