Sitting in the Sanderson Hotel in London with five minutes to go before meeting Kathryn Bigelow there is suddenly a screeching siren and an announcement that we should all leave the building immediately. Thankfully it’s only a fire-drill, but you couldn’t time it better if you tried. The Hurt Locker is all about people who head in to danger when you’re heading out and when the landscape is already the deadly battleground of Iraq, you couldn’t be more dramatic.
Bigelow, thin tall and striking rises to shake your hand and grips it firmly. This is a woman who has a reputation for a no-nonsense approach and a grim determination, but today she’s equally enthusiastic, warm and inviting. She seems genuinely enthused and relieved when you tell her you liked the film.
Despite her resume, Bigelow might seem like an unlikely choice to make such a testosterone-fuelled outing. The plain truth is, she’s produced a movie that is up there with the best directors. (“I can’t be someone else and do this movie, but I don’t think film-making is gender-specific. Subjects can be, but not the process itself. At some point someone is going to have to say ‘Action!’ and ‘Cut!’, someone’s going to have to choreograph things and tell the camera where to go and block the action…” she later offers, pragmatically).
I start by asking Bigelow how the finished movie first started taking shape. It would have been easier, in Hollywoodland, to have gone for a generic gung-ho adventure, but thankfully that was never the intent. Instead the tone dispenses with politics and makes it up close and personal.
“I think it really came from constant dialogue with (screenwriter) Mark Boal and wanting to protect the reporting… we didn’t want to impose a critical aesthetic on it. The main objective was ‘How do you put the audience in a position in the Humvee where the journalist was?’. You make them the eyes of the observer, you make it as much an experience as possible - a ‘you are there - boots on the ground’ look at a tour of duty with soldiers in Baghdad back in 2004. The aesthetic came from that original reporting… how does it look, how does it feel… making the audience understand the importance geography of any given situation.,“ Kathryn explains. “The ground troops contain an area which is about 300 metres and then the EOD tech takes what is called ‘The Lonely Walk’ all by himself… the war stops for him as he walks towards something… he can’t know what he‘s walking towards - and there‘s no margin for error. That in itself is an inherently dramatic piece and it doesn’t require a lot of cinematic massage. I’d say it was… logistically challenging but really, having the opportunity to work such observational material about a subject is very rich and abstract for most people, to unpack it a bit and give it some specificity was very exciting for me. To put all the elements together… it all came together and was pretty exciting.”
Jordan doubles well for downtown Baghdad, but was there ever any discussion about actually filming in Iraq?
"At one point we discussed it, but somebody said something about snipers if we went across the border… so that was a decision that wasn’t debated!" she laughs. " It was hot! That was one of the most punishing elements. The bomb suits were not a creation of the art department, that was real Kevlar and plating weighing about 100lbs. The average temperature during the day when we were shooting was about 110 degrees, so that was probably the single most challenging aspect of the film. But Jeremy (Renner, the fiolm's lead) is not only extremely, extremely talented but very resilient. He pulled it off."
Though the film has a collection of familiar faces, the film uses them sparingly and with no guarantee of them surviving the experience. It's an interesting way of wrong-footing the audience.
"Hopefully it’s done in a way that you have some sense of how it’ll be presented. But I think that when the audience approaches a particular actor within his or her relative stature… with a degree of expectation… they presume that if that actor comes into harm’s way, then it’ll be dangerous, it might be tense… but they’re going to survive. You take that out of the equation then it definitely amplifies the tension. It was a heightened degree of realism and the fact that Mark Boal was there and on set… when an opportunity came to block and choreograph a sequence, you could constantly be consulting. Without going into classified material, we could still be in ‘the zone’. I’ve never had that before - it’s always been imagined or fantastical or historical - I haven’t had that liberty and luxury before and to be doing so on something that’s topical and relevant. I love it," Bigelow expains.
Something that’s rarely thought about in most movies is the sound. It’s very clear from early on that the sound is going to play a big role in the film - as much as any of the visuals. When I saw the film a few months ago at a private screening, I could feel the vibrations of a bomb going off as well as watching it…
"That means the sound was at the right level then!! she smiles. "Sound was critical to both of us, going in. We both met with Sound Designer Paul Ottosson before we went off to Iraq to shoot it. We knew going in that sound would play a greater role than, in many ways, even the score. A score, music… it’s repetitive and rhythmic - and rhythm creates a pattern. A pattern can diffuse tension because people know the beats… you take it away and it’s like an unfamiliar face. We also had an on-set recordist, Ray Beckett, who Barry Ackroyd, our cinematographer suggested. Ray works with Ken Loach predominantly and he came back from the set with incredible tracks with which to work. Combined with Paul’s sound design, they were great. They blurred the distinction between the two.
It’s interesting that Iraq is still a hugely controversial hot topic on a personal and political level and yet The Hurt Locker bypasses all of that, it’s remarkably apolitical, it doesn’t have an agenda. And yet it’s an ‘action’ film which feels very topical to where we are now, with casualty numbers rising on a very human level.
"I think the humanity was definitely what was most important to look at with the individual and how he copes with the extremely, almost unimaginable risky situations, but I think of it’s more… well, I’d say rather than non-political, it’s non-partisan… it’s not Republican/Democrat. Regardless of where you are, the conflict has been so politicised. I think the ‘takeway‘, for me personally, is that at the end of the day we’re sitting here with this round table in London in the summer, but there are men and women - RIGHT NOW - who are taking that lonely walk. Regardless of what you feel about whether we should be there or not be there, we’re reminded of people who are risking their lives. Those people didn’t start the conflict…" she acknowledges.
