“Forever linked in my mind”: the two movies Kathryn Bigelow called life-changing
No filmmaker sets out with the intention of altering the landscape of the entire industry, but it ended up coming naturally to Kathryn Bigelow when she went about setting out her stall as a trailblazer and pioneer.
While attitudes have changed over time, when Bigelow was first breaking through in the 1980s, nobody particularly associated female directors with hard-hitting, action-packed genre fare. Talent always rises to the top regardless of any perceived limitations, though, and it didn’t take her long to make a mark.
Debuting with biker thriller The Loveless in 1981, Bigelow followed it up with four consecutive cult classics in vampire horror Near Dark, obsessive police procedural Blue Steel, action spectacular Point Break, and dystopian sci-fi Strange Days.
She’d then make history twice over when K-19: The Widowmaker saw her become the first woman to helm a movie with a $100million budget before The Hurt Locker enshrined her in history as the first female filmmaker to win the Academy Award for ‘Best Director’. Upending the status quo is part and parcel of her career, but it was a pairing of two classics that initially opened her eyes to the power of cinema.
Martin Scorsese’s street-level masterpiece Mean Streets and Sam Peckinpah’s bloodthirsty The Wild Bunch don’t have much in common on a surface level. However, Bigelow recalled a double bill of the two that she caught in the 1970s as “a life-changing experience”.
“I thought they were just extraordinary. Peckinpah for his muscularity, his immediacy, his sheer genius in his storytelling and characters. I was knocked out,” she told Rotten Tomatoes. “And then, Robert De Niro, his kind of twitchy reverence to this wonderfully insane underworld. Somehow, the two will always be forever linked in my mind.”
At the time, Bigelow had only recently shifted her focus from art to filmmaking, but the fact she “found those two films extraordinary” had a huge bearing on the way she approached cinema. “They opened up a kind of unimaginable landscape for me,” she said. “That kind of great irreverence, and intensity, and strength of purpose in those characters.”
A pair of incredible features from heavyweight talents operating at the top of their game, what Scorsese and Peckinpah lack in terms of stylistic, aesthetic, and thematic similarities, they more than make up for in influence. They’ve each inspired countless filmmakers in a number of different ways, and it was almost a spiritual awakening for Bigelow to see Mean Streets and The Wild Bunch back-to-back.
She may have hewed closer to the latter than the former during her rise up the ladder by focusing on vibrant action and no small amount of blood-soaked carnage, but she emulated Scorsese eventually by winning her ‘Best Director’ Oscar just three years after The Departed had finally landed him the big one.
