The compromise Kathryn Bigelow refused to make to fund her movie: “I said no”
Kathryn Bigelow is one of the most critically awarded female directors of all time, something that feels incredibly bizarre given that in this day and age, only three women have won an Academy Award for ‘Best Director’.
However, Bigelow was the first to do it, with the likes of Jane Campion and Chloe Zhao eventually following in her footsteps, which came after the success of her 2008 film The Hurt Locker. The film swept at the awards that year, also winning for ‘Best Picture’ and racking up an impressive collections of awards at the Golden Globes and Baftas.
Despite building a considerable cult following through films like Point Break, Zero Dark Thirty and Strange Days, the director spoke about her early challenges in the industry and struggle to assert her authority and maintain creative integrity.
Bigelow had a varied career before finding her way as a director, originally starting out as a painter in San Francisco before making a switch and studying film at the prestigious Columbia University. But her directorial career didn’t begin until she made a short film called The Set Up, which demonstrated Bigelow’s early fascination with examining masculinity and violence, often unravelling these facades to reveal a much softer core, showing the multi-faceted nature of these characters and the restrictive nature of gender norms.
After this, the director worked with Willem Dafoe on The Loveless and created New Dark in 1987 before embarking on her next feature, Blue Steel, in 1990. The film stars Jamie Lee Curtis in the lead role and follows a rookie NYC police officer called Megan Turner who foils an armed robbery on her first day and then becomes involved in a long cat and mouse game with a witness who becomes obsessed with her.
The film was crucial in developing her cinematic palette, becoming preoccupied with themes relating to corruption, gender and patriarchal violence, something that she deftly explores through the perspective of a female police officer, an idea that was initially rejected by financiers and producers.
When discussing the early process of production and bringing the idea to life, Bigelow explained the difficulties in creating a film that focussed on a woman in the armed forces. When describing this, the director said, “What was interesting to me was kind of a heretical, irreverent look at a particular moment in time. You have this woman who’s a police officer. And believe it or not, that was very difficult to get made because the police officer was a woman. I was asked to make her a man, and then we could get financing. I said no, the whole point of making this was that she was a woman. It seems so strange today to think of that as being an obstacle, but it was a big obstacle”.
Film studios have famously made suggestions to directors that do not line up with the creative direction or purpose of a project, losing sight of what makes it special in the first place and attempting to make it as safe and commercially viable as possible. Thankfully, Bigelow stayed true to her vision and didn’t compromise on her ideas, leading to a story that reflects the qualities that make her work most unique.
