Kathryn Bigelow is a unique case. The only female director to have won six Oscars for the same film, including best director (which she won in 2010, the same year that James Cameron, her boyfriend 20 years ago, was expected to take the prize for Avatar), she is also – most notably – one of the only female directors to dare to show the most violent of realities in her films. She tackles contemporary subjects head-on, drawing out cinematographic substance that is often troubling, without sacrificing entertainment value. Since The Hurt Locker, her first collaboration with screenwriter and journalist Mark Boal, each of her films has entered into the American cinematic canon. After the Iraq war, she told the story of the manhunt for Osama Bin Laden led by the CIA in Zero Dark Thirty (2012). With her new movie Detroit, she has turned to racial conflict for subject matter.
In the early 1980s, Bigelow was a thirty-something contemporary artist, mixing in the same circles as Andy Warhol and Susan Sontag. But something didn’t feel right: she had more to say, and moreover a need to say it to the world. She started out by filming a still-unknown William Dafoe in a story of arty, rough, sexy bikers and became increasingly involved in action movies: in 1991, Point Break put her on the map as a filmmaker to watch. This was followed by three feature movies that didn’t make waves, until some 18 years later, when the accolades started rolling in.
Kathryn Bigelow is audacious, tenacious, stubborn and powerful. Landing in Hollywood, she quickly filled the gap left by John Huston, Michael Cimino and Oliver stone, producing films that appealed to a wide audience with engaging politics that managed to both spark controversy and remain entertaining enough to fill movie theaters. In 2012, Zero Dark Thirty’s torture scenes both shocked and raised questions. Showing torture doesn’t mean to justify it, is her firm answer to the controversy it provoked. Five years later, Bigelow, a 65-year-old white woman, has returned to a dark part of American history that has been forgotten for the past 50 years. Detroit speaks of the 1967 racial riots in the precarious Motor Town, and focuses on the covered-up Algiers Motel scandal. After a police raid, ten African-Americans and two young white women were held prisoner, beaten and terrorized. Three of them were shot in cold blood. Fifty years later, as America still suffocates under increasing and ongoing racial tensions, Bigelow is creating ripples with her complex, sublime and overwhelming movie, her first as an activist.
For our interview in Los Angeles, there were strict instructions. She knows she is a queen in Hollywood, and she knows that she is the only one of her kind. As a result, she has long refused interviews that don’t comply with her terms. We are only to talk of politics and cinema – nothing else. Any journalist that has tried to stray into more personal topics has quickly hit a brick wall. Her movies talk for her. Bigelow is beautiful, tall and elegant: her hair is perfectly coiffed, though she apologizes for her light cotton blouse and jeans, confessing that she only changed out of her old t-shirt at the last minute for an outfit more suited for our meeting. On a very hot day in Beverly Hills, she remained cool with not a drop of moisture beading on her brow.
KB, as they call her, was born in North California into a good family. She expresses herself very precisely, her attention constantly fixed on her film and its ‘mission’. “I made this movie in order to provoke reactions,” she begins, “The Algier Motel story touched me deeply, it is a very important but unknown story, and I felt it needed telling, because a movie can open spaces for dialogue, it can create freedom of speech. In South Africa, there’s a lot of talk about reconciliation, but here in America that is not the case.”
To create such an extraordinary, intense, two-hour cinematic experience, of which 45 claustrophobic minutes depict a rare violence with impressive virtuosity, Bigelow spent months developing a script for the terrifying story before taking it to conference rooms, and eventually onto a set and into an editing suite. “I met with all the surviving protagonists that I could. As I talked with them, I really felt as though their life had been irrevocably changed. It was this sadness that carried me through the film’s production.” Perhaps her strong belief in the political power of cinema is rooted in her adolescence, which unfolded during the Vietnam war: “I remember protesting against the war and then it stopping all of a sudden. As a result I was under the impression that a voice of opposition was always available to us, and that it was up to us to make use of it. The role of an artist, their social function, is to campaign for change. The blend of art and politics is incredibly powerful. This movie is an invitation to talk, so as to inspire others to take the issue further.
Kathryn Bigelow also counts on others, and doesn’t hide it. On stage at the Oscars, where she received her award in 2010, she spent almost her whole speech thanking her teams. To capture her passion for cinema, the woman who left graphic art for Hollywood in the early 1980s, refers again to a collective: “I love art, I will always like painting… But these art forms exist in a secluded world. What is exciting about movies is that they transcend class boundaries. They offer a collective experience that can transport you, highlight issues and even force the viewer to reflect. That is the beauty of cinema – this capacity to penetrate the subconscious.”
Though she claims never to analyze her own film before it is released (“During production I focus on the logistics and practical aspects. Over-analysis risks losing the immediacy and spontaneity of the piece”), Bigelow is no fool. A white woman directing a movie on a tragic episode in Black history at a time of great tension regarding ‘cultural appropriation’ and the legitimacy of White accounts of African-American suffering, is sure to spark controversy. She knows this and expects it: “I am very conscious that I am a white director making a movie about a black issue. Am I the right person for the job? Not at all. The Detroit project came about at the time of the acquittal of the police officer who killed Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. I was very angry that this country seemed so quiet when it came to racial issues. The Hurt Locker already had great controversial potential. The involvement with Iraq was also extremely contested – the country and the world was divided…”
In terms of form, Bigelow seems to have found her method of tackling inflammatory issues. Remarkably, whilst Detroit, much like The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, has been regarded as a masterclass in cinematography, she remains humble. When asked to name her biggest success; an overhaul of the paradox between the beauty of the images and the horror that unfolds on screen, she nods, pausing: “That’s a good question… I wonder if the images are beautiful…” following up with an answer that almost comes across as a question: “We used a very naturalistic patina. I didn’t want stylized images – it would have been problematic for the film. The question is how can you neutralize an image? I don’t know the answer. Every visual object has an intention, an attitude. This movie has a rigorous, unglamorous style. This rigor, for me, is honest. But though Detroit may not be stylized, it isn’t a documentary either – you have to make aesthetic choices along the way: where to place the camera, which shots to use for a montage, you can use slow-motion, change the lighting… But we wanted to give the image as realistic an air as possible. The aim was to tell this story in the cleanest, clearest possible way, to remove myself and let it play out naturally. Of course, my touch is everywhere, but there is an intentional distance.” Refusing to interpret her own cinema, Bigelow admits that she targeted a “very direct” experience, “as if everything was running on real time, and as if we were really there with them.”
After 35 years in Hollywood and ten films, Kathryn Bigelow seems to have found the meaning to her art: to infiltrate entertainment in order to wake up consciences. It is ultimately a way of returning art to its primary function, or refusing to allow cinema to become an entertainment machine detached from reality and from its problems: “This story could happen today. It is happening today. Sadly, it highlights the severity of the situation in America and the long way we still have to go. My making of the film and your writing of this article – it’s not enough. We can’t change things without a prerequisite understanding and awareness.” Her ambition is great enough to pull the rest of the world up with her: “I think knowledge is power.” Those will be her final words.
