A loud, jubilant laugh escapes Kathryn Bigelow, startling the pigeons in the back garden of the Greenwich hotel, where we are sitting drinking tea and lemonade. I’ve just told her how some people see her: the female director with a thing for action. As if there has to be something, you know, weird going on there.
“Well, it’s unanticipated, I suppose,” she says. “Coming from the art world, the distinction of gender — I don’t remember it having any kind of traction. You don’t think in terms of Yvonne Rainer happens to be a woman or Richard Serra happens to be a man. But moving into film, all of a sudden I’m asked these questions. I actually didn’t know how to respond, because it never occurred to me I was a woman film-maker, not just a film-maker.”
The question calmly dispatched, her air of sphinx-like inscrutability returns. Bigelow at 65 is one cool cucumber, tall and lanky in T-shirt and sneakers, like the more glamorous type of academic, with a long curtain of dark hair behind which a watchful intelligence keeps guard. She’s as soft-spoken as her films are intense: modest, polite and a million miles away, like an addict on her best behaviour to meet the in-laws. She lives for the rush, the adrenaline surge, the contact high of film-making. Not sitting answering questions about what she was like when she was six.
“Kathryn is a woman in a man’s world,” says Jessica Chastain, who played a CIA officer helping to track down Osama bin Laden in Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty. Like her Oscar-winning The Hurt Locker, that film was a stark, unsentimental procedural in which character was revealed entirely through viscerally propulsive action. “When you’re on set with Kathryn, you don’t think she’s an amazing film-maker and she’s a woman. You just think she’s an amazing film-maker. The fact of her being a woman never comes up.”
After one of her films is released, on the other hand — that’s usually when the fires start. Her new movie, Detroit, is no exception. A scalding, immersive race drama, it zeroes in on a little-known incident during that city’s riots of 1967, in which a battalion of cops and National Guardsmen, thinking they’d heard sniper fire, descended on a flophouse at the Algiers Motel. There they found two white women partying with black men, at which point the evening metastasised into a horror show of racial subjugation, involving a “death game” that would leave three of the men dead and everyone else sworn to secrecy.
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“Why a white woman gotta do it?” asked Michael Eric Dyson, a sociology professor from Detroit, at the film’s premiere, held in the city’s Fox Theatre, a remark that summarised some of the online controversy regarding Bigelow’s film, before quipping that since white people were responsible for the tragedy, they “gotta clean up the mess”.
Bigelow read the screenplay for Detroit, by her longtime collaborator Mark Boal, as the 2014 race riots in Ferguson, Missouri were filling the TV with images of quasi-martial law on American streets. “Am I the right person to make this film? Absolutely not. That was my feeling. But I felt it was a story that needed to be told. It felt contemporaneous and ironically journalistic, and I wondered, how many more stories like this are there, and how many more Fergusons will there be in our future? There’s a beautiful quote by Martin Luther King, ‘A riot is the language of the unheard.’ I think we’re experiencing it today.”
This is Bigelow’s third collaboration with Boal, who has called their work together a “hybrid of the filmic and the journalistic” — docudramas that don’t just document the drama, but advance it. “This is like f*****’ ’Nam,” one cop says of the panoply of tanks, Jeeps and helicopters that descend on Detroit to quell the riot. “Can you believe this is the USA?” Once the action hunkered down at the Algiers Motel, Bigelow and the cinematographer Barry Ackroyd kept everyone on their toes with prowling cameras to cover the events, vérité-style, often running them a few minutes after the scene had technically ended to catch every last aftershock and tremor.
“She’s a master of controlled chaos,” says the British actor Will Poulter, who plays the baby-faced and pathologically racist cop who instigates and leads the abuse. “That environment was so affecting. That hotel became like a hell house after three weeks. There was a real energy and a real tension — a sense of death in the air. It had quite a tolling effect. You wanted to get the hell out of there.”
After one scene, in which he was called on multiple times to mock-execute one of the captives, played by Jacob Latimore, pleading for his life, Poulter broke. “How many more times do we have to do this?” he cried. “I can’t do this any more.” He recalls: “I had to step away. She gave me a moment to pause. Then I was able to return to the scene. She forced me back to my feet and sort of jammed me into doing something I wasn’t capable of doing in that moment. She’s interested in capturing the realest of the real.”
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In fact, his flickers of doubt and panic as events spiral out of his control are there on the screen, strengthening our queasy understanding of the pathology that drives such men. “I think you’re looking at a real wartime mentality,” Bigelow says, comparing what went on at the Algiers to the events at Bagram airfield and the early days of Guantanamo. “I could not have made this film without first making The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty.” Add the sexual component of the two white women into the mix and you have a “wildfire that was looking to ignite. They couldn’t process it. And everything ratcheted up at that point.”
As such, the film marks both an evolution from Zero Dark Thirty and a response of sorts to the controversy surrounding its depiction of torture — not an act of atonement exactly, but a film playing much more solidly to the liberal Hollywood base, in which torture is not only seen not to work, but careens out of control, an expression of pure sociopathology, a race vendetta run amok.
“I think I was surprised to have the film suddenly become so politicised,” Bigelow says when I ask her about the controversy surrounding Zero Dark Thirty. She continues with a confusing answer. “But on the other hand, I’m drawn to challenging, compelling stories. I was surprised in so far as I — I mean it’s surprising suddenly to have the film so politicised... but at the same time it resonated — it became topical, but, you know, the messenger was being challenged, yet the authors of a particular narrative were not being challenged. It kind of got hijacked. It was a very challenging period.”
This zigzagging back and forth via multiple buts and yets, before closing down the conversation (“I want to stick with this film,” she urges me), is telling. The row affected her more than she lets on, I think, if only because it opened up some of the contradictions implicit in the journalistic-filmic mode she and Boal had pioneered. As journalism, the film was as partial as any piece of yellowing newsprint from 2012: the Saudi on whom their captive was based, Mohammed al-Qahtani, gave up the information that led the Seals to bin Laden before he was tortured, not after, as their film had it.
Films are not articles, though. Zero Dark Thirty is no more “pro” torture than Apocalypse Now is “pro” or “anti” war, when in fact it is both — doveish anti-Vietnam sentiment and hawkish enthusiasm for “the smell of napalm in the morning” both nestle within the same movie. That is what makes it great. Out of fierce ambivalence comes great art.
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This ambivalence is the key to understanding Bigelow, I think, both in person — that super-removed, diffident affect of hers — and in her work, whose spare, uninflected observational style goes right back to her first film, shot on 16mm in 1978, when she was 27. Called The Set-Up, it showed two men beating each other to a pulp for 20 minutes, while the cultural theorists Marshall Blonsky and Sylvère Lotringer deconstructed the queasy allure of the violence.
“What attracts you?” Bigelow says by way of summary. “One of my advisers when I was kind of transitioning from two-dimensional work to conceptual art was Susan Sontag. And she talks a lot about identification. What is the captivating principle of film or photography? How can they be as mesmerising as they are? What’s interesting about film is the potential for immersion, and the more immersion, the more active the engagement.”
She looks around the quiet backyard where we are sitting, at the other guests, the waiters ferrying drinks to tables. “Here we are in this place, right now, and we think, OK, I’m sheltered, so I’m safe.” Suddenly she returns us to the events at the Algiers. “And in fact it was anything but. Events were unfolding that they knew nothing about, and unfolding against a backdrop of social disintegration and an anger that had reached a crisis point.”
A safe world suddenly broken open by the hunt for danger: we could be talking about her films, but equally about her upbringing in northern California, where Bigelow, a gawky and awkward art lover, the only child of an English teacher and a paint-factory manager, immersed herself in Haight-Ashbury and the beginnings of the Vietnam protest movement. She studied at the San Francisco Art Institute before moving to New York in the early 1970s, mixing with the conceptual artist Richard Serra and the minimalist composer Philip Glass, then taking a masters in film criticism at Columbia, where she studied under Sontag and fell under the sway of directors such as Peckinpah and Scorsese, whose violent work left her Lacanian deconstructivist theory flapping in the wind.
“I wanted to access more populist culture,” she says of the transition to movies. “Because film has the potential or capacity to cross all class cultural lines.” Her career seems composed of such abrupt and seismic reinventions, in which she reimagines herself across the divides between disciplines: from painting to conceptual art, from conceptual art to film, from the Hollywood entertainments she made in the 1980s and 1990s — Near Dark, Point Break, Strange Days — to the more socially and politically engaged docudramas portended by The Hurt Locker.
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“Entertainment alone wasn’t enough,” she says of that most recent transition. “I felt almost a kind of responsibility to use the medium and really challenge it and stretch it and see how journalistic and how topical you can be. As a film-maker, it’s no longer a question of a command of the medium. I mean, not that I have it, I’m not saying that. But if the purpose of art is to agitate for change, then that’s kind of my motivating principle.”
She recently shot a documentary about elephant poaching, using 360-degree VR technology, but is unclear on what her next project might be. Another transition seems to be in the works: from the supercharged rush of The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty to the angry, wounded heart of Detroit and whatever lies beyond. “That’s where I think this story feels extremely resonant,” she says with characteristic restlessness. “Can a film actually begin a dialogue? Or encourage other stories to come forward? I think to do nothing is not an answer. You know, it’s not an option.”
Detroit is released on August 25
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