Bigelow’s dark tale

[1]

If you thought high-octane espionage dramas and action flicks suit the likes of Quentin Tarantino, John Woo and Micheal Bay, you’re off target. Armed with an Oscar, a BAFTA and several nominations, filmmaker Kathryn Bigelow is ready to silence her critics with her upcoming film Zero Dark Thirty. She talks to The Asian Age exclusively about her film and her inspirations.

With her previous film, The Hurt Locker, a riveting drama about US Marshals stuggling to diffuse IEDs in Iraq, Kathryn became the first woman to bag an Academy Award for directing a film. “I know people expect and I just try to do better than the last one,” says the American director.
Armed with a degree in filmmaking from Columbia University, Kathryn found her niche early on. With a film like K-19: The Widowmaker, Strange Days, Point Break and a brief stint as director of Homicide, Kathryn has always dealt with sensitive issues in her films. However, she admits never to have felt threatened, “I think these problems keep me on my toes. It’s this trouble where I get my strength from. Moreover, when I decided to work on such scripts I knew it wouldn’t be easy, so I was always prepared for it.”
Kathryn believes hardcore research drives her story like no other. She shares, “For this film, the research took us more time than filming the whole movie. The facts and figures kept going back and forth. We started our home work with the incident of 9/11 and then went on to investigate the raid which involved a lot of running around,” she says, adding. “The research that we did on the battle of Tora Bora and the contacts built during that time came in handy for the next project. We felt bad because the entire research done earlier was wasted as the Abbotabad operations changed the whole story. The screenplay and script changed completely after that as we extended the plot from 9/11 to the killing of Osama Bin Laden.”
Leading lady Jessica Chastain has already bagged a Golden Globe for her portrayal of CIA officer Maya and Kathryn feels she is the one to watch out for in this flick. “I think the character is amazing and that’s the character that inspired me and she is a rock star. I was inspired when I got to know that the heart of the entire ten-year long Odyssey was a young female CIA officer.”
Unfettered by gender bias and comparisons, she feels the focus should be on cinema and not who is behind the lens, “If there’s specific resistance to women making movies, I just choose to ignore that as an obstacle for two reasons: I can’t change my gender, and I refuse to stop making movies.”