Kathryn Ann Bigelow is an American film director, film producer, screenwriter and television
director.
Her films include Near Dark, Point Break, Strange Days, The Weight of Water, K-19: The
Widowmaker, The Hurt Locker, and Zero Dark Thirty.
The Hurt Locker won the 2009 Academy Award for Best Picture, won the BAFTA Award for
Best Film, and was nominated for the 2009 Golden Globe Award for Best Drama.
With The Hurt Locker, Bigelow became the first woman to win the Academy Award for Best Director,
the Directors Guild of America Award for Outstanding Directing, the BAFTA Award for Best Direction,
and the Critics' Choice Movie Award for Best Director.
She also became the first woman to win the Saturn Award for Best Director in 1995 for
Strange Days.
In April 2010, Bigelow was named to the Time 100 list of most influential people of the
year.
Early life and education Bigelow was born in San Carlos, California,
the only child of Gertrude Kathryn, a librarian, and Ronald Elliot Bigelow, a paint factory
manager.
Her mother was of Norwegian descent.
Bigelow's early creative endeavors were as a student of painting.
She enrolled at San Francisco Art Institute in the fall of 1970 and received her Bachelor
of Fine Arts in December 1972.
While enrolled at SFAI, she was accepted into the Whitney Museum of American Art's Independent
Study Program in New York City.
Bigelow's early work benefited from her apprenticeships with Vito Acconci, Richard Serra, and Lawrence
Weiner.
Also in her early days in Manhattan, Bigelow teamed up with Philip Glass on a real-estate
venture in which the pair personally renovated distressed apartments downtown then sold them
for a profit.
Bigelow entered the graduate film program at Columbia University, where she studied
theory and criticism and earned her master's degree.
Her professors included Vito Acconci, Sylvère Lotringer and Susan Sontag, and she worked
with the Art & Language collective and noted conceptualist Lawrence Weiner.
She also taught at the California Institute of the Arts.
While working with Art and Language, Bigelow began a short film, The Set-Up, which found
favor with director Miloš Forman, then teaching at Columbia University, and which Bigelow
later submitted as part of her MFA at Columbia.
Directing career Bigelow's short "The Set-Up," is a 20-minute
deconstruction of violence in film.
The film portrays "two men fighting each other as the semioticians Sylvère Lotringer and
Marshall Blonsky deconstruct the images in voice-over."
Bigelow asked her actors to actually beat and bludgeon each other throughout the film's
all-night shoot.
Her first full-length feature was The Loveless, a biker film which she co-directed with Monty
Montgomery and featured Willem Dafoe in his first starring role.
Next, she directed Near Dark, which she co-scripted with Eric Red.
In the same year, she directed a music video for the New Order song "Touched by the Hand
of God"; the video is a spoof of glam metal imagery.
Bigelow's subsequent trilogy of action films — Blue Steel, Point Break, and Strange Days
— merged her philosophically minded manipulation of pace with the market demands of mainstream
film-making.
In the process, Bigelow became recognizable as both a Hollywood brand and an auteur.
All three films rethink the conventions of action cinema while exploring gendered and
racial politics.
Eric Red was also co-writer on Bigelow's 1990 film, Blue Steel.
Blue Steel starred Jamie Lee Curtis as a rookie police officer who is stalked by a psychopathic
killer, played by Ron Silver.
Bigelow followed Blue Steel with Point Break, which starred Keanu Reeves as an FBI agent
who poses as a surfer to catch the "Ex-Presidents", a team of surfing armed robbers led by Patrick
Swayze who wear Reagan, Nixon, LBJ and Jimmy Carter masks when they hold up banks.
Point Break was Kathryn Bigelow's most profitable 'studio' film, taking approximately $100 million
at the American box-office during the year of its release, and yet it remains one of
her least well-received films, both in terms of commercial reviews and academic analysis.
This is perhaps due to the fact that it most successfully conforms to its action genre
and abandons much of the stylistic substance and subtext of Bigelow's other work.
In 1993, she directed an episode of the TV series Wild Palms.
Bigelow's 1995 film Strange Days was written and produced by her ex-husband James Cameron.
Despite some positive reviews, the film was a commercial failure.
Furthermore, many attributed the creative vision to James Cameron, diminishing Bigelow's
perceived influence on the film.
She directed episodes of Homicide: Life on the Street in 1997 and 1998.
Based on Anita Shreve's novel of the same name, Bigelow's 2000 film The Weight of Water
is a portrait of two women trapped in suffocating relationships.
In 2002 she directed K-19: The Widowmaker, starring Harrison Ford and Liam Neeson, about
a group of men aboard the Soviet Union's first nuclear-powered submarine.
The film fared poorly at the box office and was received with mixed reactions by critics,
gaining an aggregate score of 58 on Metacritic.
Bigelow next directed The Hurt Locker, which was first shown at the Venice Film Festival
in September 2008, was the Closing Night selection for Maryland Film Festival in May 2009, and
theatrically released in the US in June 2009.
It qualified for the 2010 Oscars as it did not premiere in an Oscar-qualifying run in
Los Angeles until mid-2009.
Set in post-invasion Iraq, the film received "universal acclaim" and a 97% "fresh" rating
from the critics aggregated by Rotten Tomatoes.
The film stars Jeremy Renner, Brian Geraghty and Anthony Mackie, with cameos by Guy Pearce,
David Morse and Ralph Fiennes.
She won the Directors Guild of America award for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in
Motion Pictures and also received a Golden Globe nomination for her direction.
In 2010, she won the award for Best Director and The Hurt Locker won Best Picture at the
63rd British Academy Film Awards.
She became the first woman to receive an Academy Award for Best Director for The Hurt Locker.
She was the fourth woman in history to be nominated for the honor, and only the second
American woman.
Bigelow's next film was Zero Dark Thirty, a dramatization of American efforts to find
Osama bin Laden.
Zero Dark Thirty was acclaimed by film critics but it has also attracted controversy and
strong criticism for its allegedly pro-torture stance.
Bigelow won the New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Director for the film, making
her the first woman to win the award twice.
She had already won previously for directing The Hurt Locker.
She also won the National Board of Review Award for Best Director for Zero Dark Thirty,
making her the first woman to win that award.
Other work In the early 1980s, Bigelow modeled for a
Gap advertisement.
Her acting credits include Lizzie Borden's 1983 film Born in Flames as a feminist newspaper
editor, and as the leader of a cowgirl gang in the 1988 music video of Martini Ranch's
"Reach", which was directed by her ex-husband, James Cameron.
Personal life Bigelow was married to fellow director James
Cameron from 1989 to 1991.
She and Cameron were both nominated for Best Director at the 2010 82nd Academy Awards,
which Bigelow won.
Filmography Television
Wild Palms: "Rising Sons" miniseries Homicide: Life on the Street: "Fallen Heroes"
Parts 1 & 2 Homicide: Life on the Street: "Lines of Fire"
Karen Sisco: "He Was a Friend of Mine" See also
List of female film and television directors References
External links Kathryn Bigelow at the Internet Movie Database
June 2009 Interview with The A.V.
Club Q&A with Kathryn Bigelow in Men's Journal
Kathryn Bigelow on Rotten Tomatoes Literature on Kathryn Bigelow
Davidson, Amy, "The Oscar for Torture?", blog, The New Yorker, January 2013.
"The problems people have with Zero Dark Thirty are about directorial choices, and it is more
than reasonable that Kathryn Bigelow be judged on them."
Mayer, Jane, "Zero Conscience in Zero Dark Thirty", blog, The New Yorker, December 2012.
Denby, David, "Bigelow’s Fact and Fiction", review, The New Yorker, December 2012.
Brockes, Emma, "Kathryn Bigelow: under fire", The Guardian, January 11, 2013.
"[S]ome say her new thriller, Zero Dark Thirty ... endorses torture".
Child, Ben, "Zero Dark Thirty premiere sparks anti-torture protest", The Guardian, January
9, 2013.
"Hooded protesters target Washington DC premiere .... Bigelow said that [ZDT] had started a
'remarkable national conversation'."