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::FILM NEWS::
LE Newsletter - March 11, 2010
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Bigelow Is A Director, Plain And Simple
Source:
www.globeandmail.com -Johanna
Schneller
(March 08, 2010)
The
producers of Sunday night’s Academy Awards show obviously
were counting on
Kathryn Bigelow
to win best director for The Hurt Locker when they booked
Barbra Streisand to open the envelope. Streisand, a showbiz icon
as an actress and a singer, is also the director of three
features, and she has been a long-time, vocal critic of how the
Hollywood boys’ club marginalizes women filmmakers. Bigelow,
whose eight features can hold their own against any action
helmer’s, was only the fourth woman to be nominated for best
director. Oscar knew it had a potentially historic moment on its
hands, and made the most of it. As did Streisand: Upon opening
the envelope, she touched her heart and breathed, “Well, the
time has come,” before announcing Bigelow’s name. (I imagine she
would have looked quite different if “James
Cameron ”
had been in there.)
But if anyone was expecting Bigelow to wax emotional about the
sacrifices of the women who had gone before her, as Halle Berry
did in 2002 when she became the first African American to win
best actress, they were sorely disappointed. That’s not how
Bigelow rolls. “I try to distance myself from gender
distinctions,” she told me when I interviewed her in 2002. “They
seem arcane to me. I suppose it [being a woman director] is seen
as a novelty, but it’s also a ghettoization.”
Bigelow is a director, no adjective required. She’s 58 but looks
nearly 20 years younger (and is currently dating Mark Boal, 36,
who also won an Oscar on Sunday night, for writing The Hurt
Locker). She’s six feet tall and unafraid to wear heels. She
scuba-dives, mountain-bikes and practises yoga. She speaks in a
soft, lilting voice, and her sentences are beautifully composed,
full of complex clauses, with nary a split infinitive. And her
films, though varying widely in subject and tone, are all
infused with some serious macha.
The Loveless (1982), starring Willem Dafoe, is about
bikers ripping up a small southern U.S. town. In Near Dark
(1987), she hipped up the western genre by making her cowboys,
played by then-newcomers Bill Paxton, Lance Henriksen, Adrian
Pasdar and James LeGros, into vampires, and shot it in 40 nights
straight. She gave
Jamie Lee Curtis
a really big gun and a fetish for shooting it in Blue Steel
(1990), and she cast Keanu Reeves as an Federal Bureau of
Investigation agent who infiltrates a gang of surfing, skydiving
bank robbers led by Patrick Swayze in Point Break (1991).
In 1995’s Strange Days – written by her ex-husband, James
Cameron (they met in 1986 and divorced in 1991) – she cast
Angela Bassett and Ralph Fiennes as ex-cops experimenting with
avatars long before Avatar.
I first met Bigelow on the Nova Scotia set of The Weight of
Water (2002), about a researcher (Catherine McCormack) who
is pulled into a 100-year-old murder mystery; Sean Penn and
Sarah Polley also starred. I also spent time with her while she
was editing 2002’s K-19: The Widowmaker, starring
Harrison Ford and Liam Neeson, based on the true story of a
Soviet nuclear submarine rocked by a near-meltdown off the coast
of Iceland in 1961. With a budget of $90-million, it was the
costliest movie ever made – and the first time Ford had ever
been directed – by a woman.
Bigelow earns more raves than she does dollars, however. The
Hurt Locker may be the first film directed by a woman to win
best picture, but it is also the lowest-grossing winner in
modern history. She is drawn to challenging material, which she
makes independently, outside the studio mainstream, on insanely
small budgets. She doesn’t merely direct, she spends years
researching stories and developing scripts with her writers.
(That’s why she has made only eight in 27 years.) For K-19,
for example, she travelled to Russia to examine nuclear subs
first-hand, pored over military documents and extensively
interviewed fusion experts at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology. “How do you design a shot if you don’t understand
the underlying mechanics?” she asked me. “How can you convey the
information without knowing it yourself?”
She has always been independent. The only child of
liberal-minded, middle-class Norwegian parents in San Carlos,
Calif. – her late mother was a high-school English teacher; her
late father managed a paint factory – Bigelow started painting
at the age of 6, and for a while made that her career. She
graduated from the San Francisco Art Institute, did postgraduate
work at New York University and Columbia, and made her first
film, Set-Up, a 20-minute short, with a $2,000 grant from
the National Endowment for the Arts. While teaching a six-month
class at the California Institute of the Arts in Los Angeles,
she met director Walter Hill. He offered her a job and she never
looked back.
Bigelow excels at making tiny budgets look bigger. To make her
vampires in Near Dark appear to catch fire in the sun,
she tucked ashtray-like contraptions full of lit cigarettes
under her actors’ clothes. To show her sailboat being whipped by
a storm in The Weight of Water, she anchored it just off
the dock at the Chester Yacht Club in Nova Scotia, affixed a
long rope to the main mast, handed it to a dozen burly men and
had them run up and down the dock to rock it back and forth,
while motorized rubber rafts zipped around churning waves.
But for all her love of action, Bigelow’s films stand out
because they are also careful character studies. The
bomb-defusing scenes in The Hurt Locker are textbook
exemplars of tension, rendered with the kind of exquisite shots
and lens usage of 1970s classics, but it’s the off-duty scenes –
such as the men erupting in a spontaneous-looking fist fight –
that give it the human texture that makes us feel something.
“My goal is to make material as accessible as possible, but with
a conscience,” she told me. “So I include some genre elements,
which gives you a comfort level, and then I add other
dimensions, which you don’t see coming, to make you walk out of
the theatre and think. But it can’t be pedagogical. You have to
keep the material subversive, so it doesn’t reveal itself. I’ll
crawl through fire for that.”
Maybe now, with her film winning six Oscars, she will be able to
afford a bigger fire. |
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::LANGFIELD
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