Rob Turbovsky Interviews Kathryn Bigelow
Kathryn Bigelow’s new movie, The Hurt Locker, is the first American film to get the Iraq War right. With compelling sparseness, unrelenting anxiety, and a screenplay written by Mark Boal, a journalist who was embedded with American troops in 2004, Bigelow brilliantly captures the feeling of what it means to be a solider (in this case, a roadside bomb defuser) on the ground in Iraq, with far more impact and immediacy than any of her contemporaries have yet managed. While she was in town to promote The Hurt Locker, I spoke to Bigelow about the film and some of her other work, which is now being showcased at a retrospective at the Harvard Film Archive.
I saw The Loveless last night. It was fantastically weird.
Well, that was Willem Dafoe’s first film and my first film. It was the blind leading the blind.
Is it strange to be at the point where there are now career retrospectives of your work?
It is kind of strange. I don’t know. It’s really gratifying, I should say, in all honesty. But I think I need to be a bit older — or one likes to imagine that — to have a retrospective.
Do you ever have occasion to re-watch your films?
I tend not to, when I come across them on cable or something. I tend not to because I’ll want to go in them and rework something.
This is one of the least controlled environments you’ve ever shot in. Except, maybe, in Point Break, when people are falling out of an airplane.
And, of course, they’re falling out of an airplane with control.
Could you still storyboard in the detail you usually do?
I did board all of the set pieces, but on a piece like this especially, we boarded it before we even had our locations. Like, for instance, the car bomb sequence — we boarded that for a cul-de-sac, everything at street level. Then, we found this incredible location with an old schoolhouse and turned it into a U.N. building, which actually had happened many times in Baghdad — the Red Cross or the U.N. would take over schoolhouses. But it had all of these different elevations, that mosque, and various balconies, and suddenly, all of the ideas that we had at one level, we threw into four or five levels. So, that would be an example of doing it one way and then completely throwing the boards out. But nonetheless, it gives you a roadmap, even if it’s kind of rough and somewhat abstract.
The careful diagramming of a sequence, which you can’t do when you’re in production because you’re in a speed run, helps you. But, I tend to — not disregard, that’s too strong — but I memorize and then willfully forget, just to make sure I’m open to the environment and the set and whatever it happening in front of me.
There’s a common phoniness in a lot of movies with characters able to say everything they think and feel. That’s a big contrast with your films, where you seem to be drawn to inarticulate characters. How do you bring out their inner lives, as a director?
Hmm.
And why do you keep coming back to these sorts of characters?
Well, good question. I think I don’t consciously realize I keep coming back to characters that may or may not bear traits in common, although I suppose they do.
You should see your own retrospective; you’d be surprised.
Exactly. But then I’d be forced to change it all.
I don’t know. I tend to work very instinctually. I like provocative characters. In this case, it’s a character [Staff Sergeant William James, played by Jeremy Renner] who combines not only a profound skill set but a kind of reckless bravado. The question the film poses is if that is the combination that keeps his team alive. Anyway, that’s just an aside.
I think there’s a spareness to the characters. I tend to be drawn to writing like that, writing that’s very naturalistic. I don’t think people tend to reveal themselves only through dialogue; they reveal themselves through action and choice. And, in The Hurt Locker, the way it’s been scripted is that all of the characters reveal themselves very carefully through their actions.
But I suppose there are traits in common. I tend to think of the movies all as somewhat isolated from one another. But that’s probably because each one in and of itself is such a challenge. Had I imagined that I was going to go back to that same painful place, I probably never would’ve taken it on.
But I like provocative characters, because I think the medium can be really experiential, and you can’t do that without peak experiences, material that takes you to a place.
It’s hard for me to think of another war film that stays so true to the feeling on the ground. It’s real, not hyperreal, and you even seem to avoid lyrical or poetic shots.
The thing is — just to back up for a second — it’s based on Mark’s embed in 2004. I perhaps, like the general public, found this conflict to be fairly abstract. You read these acronyms, IED, EOD, whatever, but you’re not quite unpacking it. Mark came back with some extraordinary stories. It began as journalism.
See, I’m trying to talk all of these journalists into writing scripts, because I think that’s the future of the movie business if we want it to be imbued with any integrity. I wanted to keep the film reportorial, very real, very authentic. We both wanted this. And, very raw and immediate and visceral. But, if you’re going for realism, you can’t go for heightened, arch, surreal, or something with more artistic reach. The substance really dictated the form, in this case, except for a few of those — I would call them — grace notes.
What you said about trying to convince journalists to write scripts — what problem do you see that as a corrective for? Do you think that’s the flaw in some of these recent war movies, that filmmakers go in with all of their pre-existing ideas and there’s no discovery?
That’s what’s interesting. It’s this process of discovery that’s the beauty of journalism, and that’s perhaps what I was so drawn to with Mark’s embed. The opportunity to make this reportorial, to make it a process of discovery, so that the surprise and the suspense and the tension, it just comes with the territory. You’re seeing this conflict through this soldier’s eyes. As they have no idea what to predict, we have no idea what to predict.
But I mention it because I see news getting so titillating, and I think the reverse needs to happen. If news is becoming more entertaining, then I think entertainment needs to become more journalistic. I don’t know. I’m just pitching it, as an idea. Why not?
Do you like to dive into topics you don’t know much about?
You know what’s interesting? Not that I’m like her at all or could ever bear any resemblance work-wise, but I once sat next to Joan Didion at a dinner thing. This was many, many years ago. And I kind of shyly but eventually worked up the courage to ask her about her process. She said, “I always start with a question. If I have the answer, I can’t write the book. I start with a question, and the book becomes the answer.” It’s a series of discoveries. Working with an actor every day is a discovery. The location, figuring out the blocking, the choreographer, you could’ve pre-shot it in your head over and over, and it’d be nothing like what you’re going to experience on that day. I think that’s also what allows you to work on something for a matter of years. Five years for Mark, four years for me. For something to have that kind of pull and traction in your psyche and your imagination, so you can work up the stamina for it, you’ve got to be pretty curious about it. Then you try to be as well-versed in the subject as possible.
Why do you think we’re seeing war movies made by people who lived through the Vietnam era? Does the historical perspective add something to your approach?
I think it’s —
To put it another way, why isn’t this subject tackled by some young filmmaker just out of film school who is closer in age to those soldiers?
It’s a really valid question. I don’t know. Is it a question of perspective? Is it a question of access? Is it a question of desire? It’d be really hard for me to answer. I think of this as a combat film, so I think it has more in common with combat films, not reintegration in the home front films, which I think is how the bulk of contemporary cinema has dealt with this conflict. And that has a lot to do with the fact that there’s been very little access, from a journalistic standpoint, to this conflict. When Mark was over there, he said there was a handful, if that, of other embeds. It’s unlike Vietnam, where there was a proliferation of information, but that also has to do with the fact than then there was a front and a rear, and there’s no front or rear there. So, I think access has a lot to do with it.
You said you can’t watch your movies without wanting to change something. If you could change one thing in, let’s say, Point Break, do you know what it would be?
Oh, it’s when I’m watching it. I’m the last person that you’d want to watch a film of mine with, because I’d just rip it apart as we went through it, from a technical standpoint. I don’t know. It’s very gratifying, I’m very proud of it.
You must be happy that it’s spawned a stage show [Point Break Live!].
Not only a stage show, but they actually have a character who plays me. It’s hysterical. It’s fabulous. But there’s this one character who, every now and then, runs onto the set, and she has a megaphone and she yells, “Cut, cut, cut!” Actually, the person who took me to see it was Edgar Wright [director of Hot Fuzz, itself full of tributes to Point Break]. So, it was just this sort of meta-meta-meta experience. It was a bit more surreal than I was expecting.
— Rob Turbovsky
