What was Kathryn Bigelow’s first movie?
Kathryn Bigelow is undoubtedly one of the most important figures in American filmmaking over the last three decades. She has made a handful of truly enduring films, mostly within the thriller and action genres, and in 2009, she became the first woman to win the ‘Best Director’ Academy Award.
In truth, her career has always been a story of pushing against the inherent prejudices of Hollywood and society in general – even if she doesn’t like to acknowledge that too much. She paved the way for other women in a male-dominated industry by making movies like Point Break, though, and always steadfastly refused to see her gender as a stumbling block to her career. It makes you wonder, though: what was Kathryn Bigelow’s first movie?
Interestingly, Bigelow didn’t aspire to be a filmmaker until her mid-20s. When speaking to Interview magazine, she revealed that when she moved from her hometown of San Carlos, California, to New York City at 19, her goal was to become an artist. At the time, she watched movies for entertainment, like anyone else, but had no particular passion for entering the film industry. That changed when she began attending independent study courses at the Whitney Museum and found herself shooting material for artist Vito Acconci’s shows. Something clicked, and her journey as a filmmaker began.
“As I was filming them for him, a light bulb came on,” explained Bigelow. “Somehow, I commandeered a camera, got a crew of friends together, and shot something”. This “something” was a 20-minute short film about the idea of violence in cinema being seductive. Before long, Bigelow received a scholarship from Columbia University, where she learned about film from masters like Miloš Forman and Peter Wollen. Soon after graduation, she co-wrote and co-directed her first feature film with producer Monty Montgomery.
The product of Bigelow and Montgomery’s collaboration was 1981’s The Loveless, an outlaw biker drama starring a young Willem Dafoe in the lead role. According to Bigelow, the film’s influences are as varied as Douglas Sirk, Kenneth Anger, Edward Hopper, and Walker Evans, and she utilised the resources of the Museum of Modern Art’s Film Study Centre to put the movie together. The shoot took only 25 days, and its title changed twice before it finally hit screens – beginning life as US 17 before becoming Breakdown and finally ending up as The Loveless.
The film didn’t do much commercial business, which sometimes means it gets slightly forgotten in Bigelow’s filmography. However, it gave her an all-important foot in the door and provided much-needed experience she would parlay in 1987’s Near Dark, her breakthrough film. Over the next two decades, Bigelow’s commercial fortunes would go up and down with hits like Blue Steel and Point Break and flops like Strange Days and K-19: The Widowmaker. However, in 2008, she released the movie that took her all the way to the Academy Awards…
So, which movie won Kathryn Bigelow an Oscar?
In 2008, Bigelow rebounded in a big way from more than a decade of films which underperformed at the box office or were misunderstood by critics and audiences. Her Iraq War drama The Hurt Locker mightn’t have brought in huge box office numbers, but it was a searing, thrilling, and stomach-churning film that critics ate up.
The film made a star of Jeremy Renner and is now widely seen as one of the most influential movies of the 2000s. The Hurt Locker was nominated for nine Academy Awards and won six, including ‘Best Picture’, ‘Best Original Screenplay’ for Mark Boal, and ‘Best Director’ for Bigelow. She was only the fourth woman in history to be nominated in that category – and the first to win.
Fascinatingly, though, Bigelow didn’t mention the fact she’d made history in her acceptance speech. This is because she bristles at being known as a “woman” or “feminist” filmmaker. This goes all the way back to the start of her career. After all, in 1990, she said, “It’s irrelevant who or what directed a movie; the important thing is that you either respond to it or you don’t”.
