Monday, Feb. 04, 2013
Kathryn Bigelow: The Art of Darkness
By Jessica Winter
In the late 1970s, the young artist Kathryn Bigelow had a thought-provoking conversation with a friend of a friend by the name of Andy Warhol. "Andy was saying that film is way more populist than art — that art's very elitist, so you exclude a large audience," she recalls. Around the same time, she visited the Museum of Modern Art, paying special attention to Kazimir Malevich's Suprematist Composition: White on White and Piet Mondrian's color-block grids. "I remember thinking, The audience for this is very specific," Bigelow says over lunch in her hotel suite at the Ritz-Carlton Central Park, not far from the museum. "A Malevich or a Mondrian requires that you come to it with a certain amount of information, a context. And you don't necessarily need that with film. A movie is accessible, available. That was exciting to me from a political standpoint."
She emphasizes the word political, lingering over it for a moment. Bigelow's film The Hurt Locker (2009), which logs 38 days with a bomb-disposal unit in Baghdad, was widely perceived as taking a neutral or apolitical stance on its subject matter — if such a stance is possible when the subject matter is the U.S. occupation of Iraq. It won nearly universal praise as well as the Academy Award for Best Picture. Bigelow's follow-up, her second collaboration with screenwriter and journalist Mark Boal, was originally planned as a feature about special forces hunting Osama bin Laden in Tora Bora in 2001. Boal was deep into his screenplay when news broke of the SEAL Team 6 operation that killed bin Laden in Abbottabad, Pakistan. Almost immediately, he and Bigelow switched gears, instead mounting a chronicle of the 10-year hunt for the al-Qaeda leader.
(MORE: Richard Corliss' Oscar 2013 Picks)
The movie that resulted, Zero Dark Thirty, which was No. 1 at the U.S. box office in its first week of nationwide release and has been nominated for five Oscars, is in many ways as dispassionate a procedural as The Hurt Locker. Yet it has become the most politically divisive motion picture in memory. Not only does it stage brutal scenes of American operatives practicing torture at CIA black sites in the wake of Sept. 11, 2001, but in the eyes of many experts, it also forges false connections between information gleaned by torture and the eventual discovery of bin Laden's hideout.
In December, Senate Intelligence Committee chair Dianne Feinstein and Armed Services Committee member John McCain and chairman Carl Levin wrote a letter to Sony chairman Michael Lynton calling Zero Dark Thirty "grossly inaccurate and misleading in its suggestion that torture helped extract information that led to the location of Usama bin Laden" — specifically, the nom de guerre of bin Laden's courier Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti. The Senators also asked the CIA to disclose what access and information Bigelow and Boal received from the agency. According to a statement by Michael Morell, acting director of the CIA, which cooperated with Bigelow and Boal in the making of Zero Dark Thirty, the film "creates the strong impression that the enhanced interrogation techniques that were part of our former detention and interrogation program were the key to finding" bin Laden, but "that impression is false."
Journalists with deep knowledge of post-9/11 CIA culture, interrogation techniques and black sites, including the New Yorker's Jane Mayer and Pulitzer Prize winner Steve Coll, have lambasted the film, with Mayer accusing it of "providing false advertising for waterboarding." New York magazine critic David Edelstein labeled Zero Dark Thirty "borderline fascistic." He also called it the best movie of 2012, as did the New York Film Critics Circle.
Some 35 years have passed since Bigelow's chat with Warhol. Back then, she was picking up work as an artist's assistant and had a small National Endowment for the Arts grant for a short film, The Set-Up, in which semioticians provide running commentary on a fistfight between two men. Now she directs major Hollywood productions with high-level CIA input; Zero Dark Thirty is poised to become the highest-grossing movie of her career, with $58.1 million in receipts to date.
Like a white-on-white canvas, Zero Dark Thirty has become a projection screen for the audience's perceptions and sympathies, taking on different colors and contours depending on what the viewer brings to it. And though the debate over the U.S.'s use of torture has been pursued and inflamed in endless articles as well as books and television series (nonfiction and fiction alike), none have been as high-profile or as lavishly funded and marketed as Zero Dark Thirty, and none have borne the imprimatur of the first woman to win the Academy Award for Best Director, as Bigelow did for The Hurt Locker. She is not up for the same prize at this year's ceremony on Feb. 24, though the omission is less attributable to the fracas around her film than to a combination of new voting deadlines and an unusually strong field; Argo's Ben Affleck and Les Misérables' Tom Hooper were also left off the Best Director short list. (All three are nominated for the Directors Guild Award, to be announced Feb. 2, and all three movies are nominated for the Best Picture Oscar.)
"This territory has been controversial since the early part of the decade, so I knew that the film was going to be controversial, though perhaps I didn't anticipate this kind of volume," Bigelow says. Slim and just shy of 6 ft. tall, in a black sweater and jeans, she is an astonishingly youthful 61 and exudes a warm elegance, equal parts Northern California mellow and Northeast patrician. "I feel we got it right. I'm proud of the movie, and I stand behind it completely. 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."
In common with Bigelow's other films, Zero Dark Thirty doesn't tell the audience how to answer the questions it raises. Instead "the film creates a conversation," says Jessica Chastain, who gives Zero Dark Thirty's protagonist, CIA operative Maya, shades of austerity and obsession that edge into a kind of religious devotion to tracking her prey. "I believe that was Kathryn's intention when she made the film — to open a conversation. She ends it with an unanswered question, Where do you want to go? She's asking the audience, Where have we been, and where do we go from here?"
Maya — an ethereally beautiful redhead whom we first glimpse hidden behind a menacing balaclava — is what she does; her mission is all we know of her identity or of her CIA colleagues. "Part of Kathryn's brilliance has always been that she doesn't let you get involved in trying to know what the person onscreen is thinking," says the conceptual artist Lawrence Weiner, one of Bigelow's early mentors. "She takes the trouble to show you what they are doing, and then she steps back." It's that space between the action and the stepping back that helps define Bigelow as a filmmaker. It's that space, perhaps, that has allowed so much controversy into the frame.
CRACKING THE CODE
Bigelow grew up in San Carlos, Calif., in the Bay Area. As an only child, she says, "you kind of become peers with your parents." Her mother taught English; her father managed a paint factory and was something of a frustrated artist. "I guess his great passion in life would have been to be a cartoonist, but he could never figure out how to go from A to B," Bigelow says. "But he would draw for me, day in, day out — sketches, caricatures. He thought of himself as extremely unattractive, and he would exaggerate his features."
She painted from age 6 and after high school attended the San Francisco Art Institute. "I loved de Kooning, and I loved big canvases, and I loved oil, not acrylic. I loved the smell of it and the giant brushes and the goop — I mean, I was always covered head to toe in paint. I'd kneel down, and the paint was so thick on my pants that it would crack. I would do these big pieces that were like Abstract Expressionist — Renaissance fusion. I would take a corner detail from a Raphael, blow it up and paint it in an Abstract Expressionist way."
In her early 20s, she enrolled in the Whitney Museum of American Art's independent-study program. "I remember walking all over Manhattan in my little Levi's jacket and my jeans and cowboy boots, so excited, so happy to be there and, I suddenly realized, so cold. I went into a hardware store because I could no longer feel my legs." The Whitney gave her a studio, which doubled as a living space, in a repurposed bank vault three stories below ground level in an offtrack betting facility in present-day Tribeca. "Tribeca, SoHo — those concepts didn't really exist in the early 1970s," she says. "You actually couldn't get a cab to take you down there. So I'd be down in the freezing bank vault in a sleeping bag, hearing gunshots up top quite often. But none of us students were worried for ourselves. It was a great community that formed. We were constantly communicating to one another about what we were making and trying to challenge one another. In film you don't find that. Like, I never see other directors."
At that time, she was also constantly communicating with an all-star cast of cultural figures. At the Whitney, her advisers included artist Brice Marden and Susan Sontag. Other formative influences were Weiner (Bigelow served as subject or editor of several of his 1970s videos) and sculptor and video artist Richard Serra (she appeared briefly in his film Prisoner's Dilemma). She teamed with her friend Philip Glass to fix up former printing factories in SoHo as artists' lofts, living in the spaces while she worked. (Bigelow sanded the floors and put up the Sheetrock walls; Glass handled the plumbing.) In one of these buildings, photographer Robert Mapplethorpe lived above her. Later, when she was crashing in a condemned building with no electricity near the South Street Seaport, photographer Cindy Sherman lived below her. Filmmaker Milos Forman saw an early version of The Set-Up and offered her a scholarship to a Columbia graduate program. At a Wooster Group performance toward the end of the decade, she went backstage and offered a role in her first feature film, a 1950s-set biker-gang tone poem called The Loveless, to the young stage actor Willem Dafoe, who accepted on the spot.
"Kathryn then is the same Kathryn now," Dafoe says. "She's attracted to something instinctively, and then she researches it, and her research becomes an adventure. In the late '70s there was a lot of interest in rockabilly and appreciation of '50s outlaw culture, so she would go to clubs to scout people for their look and style, and worry about coaxing a performance out of them later. She was so interested in the slang and the idiom and the ritual of that world, which wasn't really of her own experience. And she's still interested in learning the language and rituals of hidden worlds. Just look at her titles — Hurt Locker, Zero Dark Thirty. It's like coded language and she's cracking the code." (Zero Dark Thirty's title is a tweak of "oh-dark-thirty," a military term for half past midnight.)
The Loveless (co-directed with Monty Montgomery) led to a development offer at Universal that took Bigelow to Los Angeles. The studio deal didn't pan out, but she eventually secured financing for Near Dark (1987), which relocated the vampire myth to the American desert, followed by Blue Steel (1990), starring Jamie Lee Curtis as a rookie cop with a stalker and a missing gun.
(MORE: Richard Corliss' Oscar 2013 Picks)
"She had a quiet strength," says Curtis. "There was this machinery to her. She was all business. Even down to her clothing — black jeans, black T-shirt, very simple, militaristic if you will, like a uniform. I used to do an imitation of her taking her shot list out of her pocket, unfolding it, looking at it and then folding it up and putting it in her back pocket. She would do that over and over. She's not a cold woman, she's not a machine, but there's a machinelike execution to what she does. She is only there for the film."
Bigelow followed Blue Steel with the sublimely goofy action hit Point Break (1991), starring Patrick Swayze as the ringleader of a band of bank-robbing surfers and Keanu Reeves as the hotshot FBI agent on their case; the film's kinetic foot chases were captured with a "pogo-cam," a handheld 35-mm camera with a gyrostabilizer. Her technical ambition expanded with the dystopian Strange Days (1995), which featured action sequences so complex that her production company had to design and build new camera equipment to capture them. (Point Break was executive-produced by her then husband James Cameron, who also co-wrote and produced Strange Days; they divorced in 1991 after two years of marriage.)
Bigelow's career foundered somewhat near the turn of the millennium, particularly after the box-office disappointment of K-19: The Widowmaker (2002), a would-be summer blockbuster. In the years between K-19 and her next film, The Hurt Locker, she met Boal. "Mark opened up a window for me onto how you can make a film that's part of the current conversation," she says. "The Hurt Locker was an opportunity to make a deep dive into content that was contemporaneous, an opportunity to reflect in a way that might make you uncomfortable, which was something we continued with Zero Dark Thirty."
and a little FYI for those that don't know she is also the ex-wife for Avatar director James Cameron. If they both get nominated for Best Director and both of their films are up against each other in the Best Picture category at the Oscars it could get very interesting 
.
