How Sam Peckinpah changed Kathryn Bigelow’s life: “Sheer genius in storytelling”
It took the Academy Awards 81 years to honour a woman with the ‘Best Director’ prize. The history-making moment came in 2010 when Kathryn Bigelow was awarded the accolade for her movie The Hurt Locker, which also won ‘Best Picture’.
The filmmaker began making movies in the 1980s, releasing her debut, The Loveless, to moderate acclaim, although her breakthrough came with 1991’s Point Break. The action film, which features Patrick Swayze and Keanu Reeves engaging in a rather homoerotic companionship, was heavily praised upon its release.
Bigelow continued to find success with movies like Strange Days and K-19: The Widowmaker before releasing The Hurt Locker, proving herself to be a giant of the action genre. Typically dominated by male filmmakers, Bigelow offers a refreshingly female gaze to the genre when depicting stereotypically masculine themes, such as war.
Yet, before she entered the world of cinema, Bigelow studied art in both San Fransisco and New York, hoping to become a painter. She spent most of the 1970s living in the latter city, eventually enrolling in a master’s degree in film theory. Here, Bigelow honed a love for cinema, realising that she wanted to become a filmmaker.
The ‘70s was an incredible time for film; the New Hollywood movement was in full swing, and directors such as Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg were rising to prominence. Bigelow was enamoured by the new movies she was able to go and watch at the cinema, but there was one double bill that she called a “life-changing experience”.
She explained to Rotten Tomatoes, “I had a studio and I was basically a practising artist, working with various art groups — Art & Language, conceptual arts, political arts. We were doing environments, we were doing installations, performance pieces… and I stumbled into this incredible double bill.”
The movies were The Wild Bunch by Sam Peckinpah and Scorsese’s Mean Streets – Bigelow’s views on filmmaking were completely transformed. She said, “I found those two films just extraordinary, and they opened up a kind of unimaginable landscape for me. That kind of great irreverence, and intensity, and strength of purpose in those characters.”
It was The Wild Bunch that Bigelow was “knocked out” by, a film that remains one of Peckinpah’s most acclaimed works. The movie follows a group of outlaws plotting one last heist, and it quickly descends into pure chaos and extreme violence. Despite the immense controversy surrounding the film, it still became one of the highest-grossing releases of the year upon its release.
The levels of violence that Peckinpah placed in his film were shocking for the time – only recently had cinematic censorship laws been eased. Before then, explicit violence was basically prohibited, with the 1960s seeing the Hays Code gradually lose its power. The Wild Bunch was released in 1969, making way for an era that depicted more bloodshed and brutality than ever before.
Bigelow praised Peckinpah for “his muscularity, his immediacy, his sheer genius in his storytelling and characters.” The influence of The Wild Bunch is more than apparent in Bigelow’s work, which has helped to establish her as one of the action genre’s most successful filmmakers.
