Kathryn Bigelow names the director who invented the political thriller: “Like none other”
There aren’t many directors who are guaranteed a place in the history books, but as the first woman to ever win a ‘Best Director’ Oscar, Kathryn Bigelow absolutely is.
It wasn’t just a one-off, either. Since the early 1980s, she’s been testing the boundaries of filmmaking in pulse-pounding, nerve-shredding fashion that has demanded the attention of audiences and awards juries.
From the brutal surfer thriller Point Break and the Rodney King-era dystopian thriller Strange Days to The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, her movies are visceral, edge-of-your-seat experiences that draw heavily on real-life events for inspiration. Most of her movies are more stereotypically masculine than the movies that male directors make, which is really saying something in a world in which Clint Eastwood is still operating.
During her visit to the hallowed Criterion Closet in 2025, the multi-time Oscar winner offered a glimpse into her own viewing habits, and it all made perfect goddamn sense, and after alighting on the Edgar G Ulmer noir Detour, the Gillo Pontecorvo landmark thriller The Battle of Algiers, and Sam Peckinpah’s controversial thriller Straw Dogs, she took a moment to talk about a filmmaker who has had a particular impact on cinema and her career, specifically, Costa-Gavras.
According to Bigelow, she had recently bumped into the Greek director at an event and talked to him about his 1969 film Z, telling him that he had damn-near invented the political thriller, saying, “[I] love Costa-Gavras,” adding that his contribution to the history of cinema is “like none other”.
It’s hard to imagine a time without political thrillers. Plenty of movies were made about real-life scandals and real-life dictatorships before Costa-Gavras, but it was Z that paved the way for the type of ripped-from-the-headlines, documentary style that filmmakers like Bigelow have turned into a genre unto itself. Z is a French film, but it is a thinly-veiled portrayal of the American-backed military junta that ruled Greece in the late 1960s and early ‘70s, and it even more specifically takes inspiration from the 1963 assassination of the left-wing activist Gregoris Lambrakis.
Its documentary style puts you right in the thick of the unrest, as crowds of protestors clash with police and thugs brutalise would-be peacemakers, and in addition to the heart-racing suspense and constant feel of volatility, it takes a painstaking approach to the business of politics and the slow, steady work of the legal system, and even though most of the film centres on the killing of a prominent left-wing politician (played by Yves Montand) and the prosecutor seeking to uncover who was behind the assassination, it’s the last 60 seconds that really make the horror sink in.
Gavras, who was living as an expat in France at the time, didn’t want to be coy about the real-life events that he was depicting. At the beginning of the film is a non-disclaimer: “Any resemblance to real events and dead or living people is not a coincidence. It is INTENTIONAL.”
It was a film calling out a specific regime in real time, a courageous, furious stand that got it banned in Greece, and more than five decades later, it is just as anxiety-inducing and realistic as ever, and it should come with a trigger warning for any Americans brave enough to watch it in the year 2026.
In 1970, it became the first film to receive nominations for the ‘Best Picture’ Oscar and the ‘Best International Feature’ Oscar, and it won the latter.
