Kathryn Bigelow made history in 2010 as the first woman to win the Academy Award for best director for The Hurt Locker.
Kathryn Bigelow made history in 2010 as the first woman to win the Academy Award for best director for The Hurt Locker, and has followed that triumph with one of the most controversial movies in memory, Zero Dark Thirty that chronicles the decade-long manhunt of Osama bin Laden. Here she sheds light on what it takes to delve into the heart of real issues and the tightrope walk undertaken while exploring subjects that evoke strong reactions...
How is it being a female pioneer in the male-dominated world of action movies?
Life doesn’t change after winning the best director award. If there’s specific resistance to women making movies, I just choose to ignore that as an obstacle for two reasons: I can’t change my gender, and I refuse to stop making movies. There should be more women directing; there’s just not the awareness that it’s really possible.
Your movies have mostly dealt with issues of violence and tension. What is it that fascinates you to come back to this genre?
I always wish I had a good answer for that, like I was traumatized in childhood. I think that films have the potential to be very cathartic. I respond to movies that get in your face, have the ability to be provocative or challenge you. I don’t want to be pacified or made comfortable. Since the time I began making films, my focus has always been to deliver high impact movies.
Terrorism evokes strong reactions, how did you manage the tightrope walk of chronicling a 10-year manhunt in two-and-a-half hours?
I started with this project six years back with a very different ending, until one day president Obama announced that “the United States has conducted an operation that killed Osama Bin laden.” I became familiar with (screenwriter Mark Boal’s) journalism and turned one of his articles into a television series. Later I thought of making a movie because I felt the story should be told and seen from the eyes of those who lived it without a personal agenda.
A lot of the criticism of the movie has been based around the impression that it implicitly endorses enhanced interrogation techniques by showing that they get results...
The intended perspective was always to stay on the ground, in the center of that hunt. I wanted to put the audience right in the middle of it and keep it as subjective, immediate, visceral and primal as I possibly could. I think that it’s a deeply moral movie that questions the use of force. It questions what was done in the name of finding bin Laden.
Did being a woman director influence the decision of making Jessica Chastain, a young CIA agent, as the main protagonist who pursues Bin Laden right till the very end?
Zero Dark Thirty is meant to be an imagery of living history. And since this is a movie, we had to have a narrative thread and humanize the hunt through one character’s perspective. Jessica’s character emerged through this reasoning and the fact that she is a woman made it more exciting and emotional.
One distinctive style of you as an auteur has been the use of slow motion in action sequence...
An audience can be titillated by violence in a cinematic context. So, the use of slow motion effects is experimental where it can be perceived in a meditative manner, reflecting on the action and its effect.
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