Seeing through Mr Tough Guy

Its been an extraordinary career,maybe not quite fully realised until The Hurt Locker. Originally a painter so good that she studied for two years on scholarship in the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program,she segued into filmmaking via the low-end horror route. Her first film to attract major attention has become something of a cult classic: Near Dark. She made two more films with genre stylisations,Point Break,about an FBI agent infiltrating a surfer/robbery crew,and Blue Steel,about a guy morphing into alpha by exposure to a beautiful,charismatic,heavy revolver. While both did well,more was expected of her collaboration with then-husband and soon to be ex-husband,James Cameron,the millennial sci-fi detective thriller Strange Days. Equally disappointing for the director was her last film,K-19: The Widowmaker,about a heroic Russian sub crew trying to survive a meltdown in the reactor.

What the films seem to have in common is a flair for violent action and male archetypes. She did diverge from her own type in a small independent movie,The Weight of Water,with female stars and derived from a novel by Anita Shreve.

As she tries to explain her attraction to the bad boys,she returns to her beginnings: As a painter,I was drawn to gesticular canvases within the overall framework of abstract expressionism. Maybe its the same thing,and what I like about film is how experiential it is. I like extreme relationships.

The core of The Hurt Locker is exactly that as it chronicles how,under the press of the mission,the three men of a small unit of disposal technicians get along. They flash all over the insurrectionist city to deconstruct the cunning jihadists infernal machines,nests of wire and detonators and switches twisted into the nose cones of stolen artillery warheads. The problem is that two of them are normals,who want to do the job as safely as possible and make it back,and the third is your basic hero type,the guy seemingly without nerves or doubts who clearly gets a thrill out of the game aspects of it all and loves to test his mettle against the bombmakers. So the movie isnt just about the alpha; its about how the alphas and the betas get along,and what it costs vs. what it gains.

Kathryn, says her collaborator co-writer and producer,former journalist Mark Boal,is so good at this because shes the ideal referee. She doesnt have a dog in the fight. Boal should know. The Hurt Locker is based on a piece he did for Playboy based on his experiences embedded with a disposal unit in Baghdad in those very same hot days.

They made a special attempt to avoid war movie cliches: Theres no enemy bombmakers,theres no romance with a local gal or a nurse,theres no mess-hall pie fights,theres no scene of al-Qaeda planners speaking in heavy Hollywood accents about sending the infidels to hell. Instead,the structure of The Hurt Locker is chronological,the countdown as the small,elite units tour nears its completion. There arent heavier ideological points being made,no war movie clichés. Though the details appear to be perfect,its almost pure myth as it studies the men who fight the wars and deal,privately,with the humour and loneliness of the job.

I direct with a light hand, Bigelow says. I kind of nudge it. You create a visual languageI can do thatand trust the actors. We used Super 16 Digital,extremely dexterous,constantly in motion. Using that technique underscored the reportorial element.