Bigelow wins best director
2010-03-08 07:20
Hollywood - Kathryn Bigelow has built her career via movies notable for their macho characters, whether it's bank-robbing surfers in Point Break to adrenaline-addicted bomb squads in The Hurt Locker.
The 58-year-old, who became the first woman in history to win the Oscars best director crown here Sunday, has demonstrated repeatedly that in the male-dominated world of Hollywood she is more than capable of holding her own.
Bigelow's ex-husband James Cameron has said his former spouse revels in proving that "she can out-gun the guys".
"I think she takes pride in the fact... that just in terms of pure technique, pure game, she's got more game than most of the male directors out there," Cameron said in a recent interview.
Bigelow herself says she was first attracted to movies as an artistic medium after watching Sam Peckinpah's infamously bloody Western The Wild Bunch while studying as a painter in New York in the 1970s.
"I'm drawn to provocative characters that find themselves in extreme situations," Bigelow told CBS television in a recent interview. "And I think I'm drawn to that consistently."
Honouring Bigelow at last year's Dallas International Film Festival, director Michael Cain cited her "virtuoso command of physical action."
"She has a gift for giving characters real emotional depth," Cain said.
Born in California in 1951, Bigelow studied film at Columbia University before later teaching at the California Institute of the Arts.
Her first short film The Set Up offered a prelude of the themes that have been found throughout her career: a 20-minute depiction of two men brawling.
Commercial catastrophes
Bigelow made her feature film debut with 1982's The Loveless, a biker movie starring the then little-known Willem Dafoe, but had to wait five years for her follow-up, the genre-blurring vampire movie Near Dark.
The action movie Blue Steel starring Jamie Lee Curtis as a New York policewoman on the trail of a serial killer was followed in 1991 by Bigelow's breakthrough commercial success, Point Break.
The film, starring Keanu Reeves as an FBI agent forced to infiltrate a gang of bank-robbing surfers led by Patrick Swayze, went on to earn more than $83m worldwide and has become a cult classic.
Bigelow's next three films, the 1995 thriller Strange Days, 2000's The Weight of Water and 2002's Cold War thriller K-19: The Widowmaker were commercial catastrophes however, each faring poorly at the box office.
The last of those three films was dubbed K-19: The Career Tanker by critics after it netted only $65m despite costing around $100m and featuring stars such as Harrison Ford and Liam Neeson.
In fact Bigelow had not made another film until she returned to helm The Hurt Locker, which saw her return once again to the familiar territory of characters struggling to adapt in the most extreme conditions.
Filmed in Jordan, Bigelow said she had intended the film to be a visceral, boots-on-the-ground experience for the audience, pointedly refraining from making any kind of overt statement about the Iraq War.
"It's really a story of courage and heroism," she has said. "These men have practically the most dangerous job in the world.
"That's an inherently dramatic subject that as a filmmaker you kind of want to step out of the way and let it reveal itself," she said.
"It definitely requires a certain amount of courage and heroism that is perhaps unthinkable to most people, and yet there are those people that when everybody's running one direction will walk with great determination in the opposite direction in order to fulfill that particular mission."