Kathryn Bigelow (in white) on the parched Jordanian set of “The Hurt Locker.” (AP)
Kathryn Bigelow sounds less like a director and more like a hero from a 1930s pulp novel. She has climbed Mount Kilimanjaro in freezing temperatures. She once went diving in Fiji, lost her weight belt and nearly died. She is an expert rider of horses. She once stopped a bank robbery with nothing more than a hard stare.
Sorry, no. That last one was probably The Shadow.
But there’s no denying that Bigelow is Hollywood’s biggest badass.
Back in the 1970s when Bigelow was a young artist living in New York City, she made ends meet — not by waiting tables or working a cushy retail job, but by doing construction. (Oddly, she toiled alongside composer Philip Glass, whose specialty was plumbing.)
“She was very good with her hands, but everybody had to be in those days or else you didn’t eat,” says noted conceptual artist Lawrence Weiner, with whom Bigelow worked in the 1970s. “She didn’t like [construction], but she did it.”
“She was living rough in places, like all of us were,” Weiner says.
“She lived down by the waterfront [by the South Street Seaport] and on Greene Street for a while.”
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Even when she became a successful movie director, she never became a diva and demanded the good life. Conditions on the set of “The Hurt Locker,” filmed in the sweltering desert outside Amman, Jordan, were somewhat grim. And that’s being charitable. Temperatures reaching 115 degrees. Sandstorms. Windstorms. Flies everywhere. Nobody on-set got an air-conditioned trailer or a private bathroom. Instead, they took breaks in Bedouin tents pitched on the scorching sand.
The hardship paid off. Critics praised “The Hurt Locker” for its rawness and realism, and the movie went on to win big at Sunday’s Oscars, taking home statues for Best Picture, Best Screenplay and Best Director.
And Bigelow’s achievements don’t end there. She also snagged an Oscar-winning boyfriend 21 years her junior. Her current beau is 37-year-old Mark Boal, a journalist and “The Hurt Locker” screenwriter whom Bigelow first met while working on the short-lived 2005 cop series “The Inside.”
Growing up near San Francisco, Bigelow was a bit of a tomboy. She liked riding horses and being outside — pastimes she continues to enjoy today. She often spends a couple of hours a day hiking through the hills near her Beverly Hills mansion, and if you saw the 58-year-old’s arms on Sunday (yes, she’s 58!), you can guess she works out religiously.
Bigelow’s mother was a librarian, her father a paint-factory manager. From a young age, the only child was fascinated by art. She used to reproduce parts of paintings, including those by Raphael, in her garage.
“My dad’s dream was being a cartoonist, but he never achieved it, and it kind of broke my heart,” she has said. “I think part of my interest in art had to do with his yearning for something he could never have.”
She studied at the San Francisco Art Institute before moving on to Columbia to earn a master’s degree in film criticism.
She lived in New York from 1971 to 1983, and quickly fell into the downtown arts crowd. The future director was also big in the lefty political scene.
“She was very involved in the politics of the ’70s and trying to figure out a better world,” Weiner says.
Bigelow was a painter at the time. She says she has since given it up, but she admits her fine-arts training informs her cinematic work.
“You can’t unknow what you know,” she has said. “Whether or not it’s background or foreground, it’s still there, subconsciously.”
“Kathryn knows exactly what she wants,” says Lori Petty, who appeared in Bigelow’s 1991 surfer heist thriller “Point Break.” (Bigelow fought the studio to cast Keanu Reeves in the main role as a surfer cop — and turned him into a star.) “Because she’s a painter, she knows what the light is going to look like and what’s in the frame. She can see it in her mind before she does it, and that’s a real gift.”
Bigelow says she was first inspired to make movies after seeing Sam Peckinpah’s 1969 Western “The Wild Bunch” at a New York theater. It was the opposite of a chick flick, and it forecast the kinds of movies she would helm over the next two decades —
masculine and violent movies usually made by men. Bigelow says her attraction to typically male-dominated material is no mystery.
“I respond to movies that get in your face. I like high-impact movies,” she told MIT’s student paper, The Tech. “I don’t want to be pacified or made comfortable. I like stuff that gets your adrenaline going.”
Her first film, a 1978 short, was unsettling for two reasons: It involved two men beating each other bloody in a dark alley while a voice-over spoke about the seductiveness of cinema violence. And it starred Gary Busey.
She ultimately landed in Hollywood doing writing work, but it wasn’t until 1987 that her career really took off. Her vampire film “Near Dark” became a cult hit.
She followed that up with other genre films, taking a brief detour to marry James Cameron in 1989. They divorced in 1991, but not before she could appear in the unfortunate music video he shot for Bill Paxton’s band Martini Ranch. (Look for it on YouTube.) Bigelow, naturally, played a tough, gun-wielding cowboy.
Much has been made of Bigelow being the first woman to win a Best Director Oscar, but she has always been downright resistant to addressing the gender issue.
“She never played the victim. She never played the female artist,” Weiner says.
“She really just played being a struggling filmmaker.”
“There’s really no difference between what I do and what a male filmmaker might do,” Bigelow told “60 Minutes.”
That’s true, but gender may have helped on Sunday, as some academy voters found the first-woman-to-win narrative compelling.
Whether her Oscar-night victory will open more doors for women remains unclear.
David Schwartz, chief curator at the Museum of the Moving Image, says there aren’t many women directors in Hollywood to start with, so there “isn’t an enormous glass ceiling. It’s hard to see the studios all of a sudden looking for more women directors.”
Bigelow, whom friends describe as shy, is probably glad that all the Oscar politicking is done so she can move on to new projects.
Next up, she’ll direct a pilot for HBO called “The Miraculous Year” about a self-destructive Broadway composer. After that, it’s back to putting herself in harm’s way with “Triple Frontier,” an action movie that will take her to the rougher parts of South America.
“There’s a lot of drugs, crime and all manner of bad things,” Bigelow told The Wrap. “So it seemed like a good place to set the film.” film.”You go, girl.