The producers of Sunday night’s Academy Awards show obviously were counting on Kathryn Bigelow to win best director for The Hurt Locker when they booked Barbra Streisand to open the envelope. Streisand, a showbiz icon as an actress and a singer, is also the director of three features, and she has been a long-time, vocal critic of how the Hollywood boys’ club marginalizes women filmmakers. Bigelow, whose eight features can hold their own against any action helmer’s, was only the fourth woman to be nominated for best director. Oscar knew it had a potentially historic moment on its hands, and made the most of it. As did Streisand: Upon opening the envelope, she touched her heart and breathed, “Well, the time has come,” before announcing Bigelow’s name. (I imagine she would have looked quite different if “James Cameron” had been in there.)
But if anyone was expecting Bigelow to wax emotional about the sacrifices of the women who had gone before her, as Halle Berry did in 2002 when she became the first African American to win best actress, they were sorely disappointed. That’s not how Bigelow rolls. “I try to distance myself from gender distinctions,” she told me when I interviewed her in 2002. “They seem arcane to me. I suppose it [being a woman director] is seen as a novelty, but it’s also a ghettoization.”
Bigelow is a director, no adjective required. She’s 58 but looks nearly 20 years younger (and is currently dating Mark Boal, 36, who also won an Oscar on Sunday night, for writing The Hurt Locker). She’s six feet tall and unafraid to wear heels. She scuba-dives, mountain-bikes and practises yoga. She speaks in a soft, lilting voice, and her sentences are beautifully composed, full of complex clauses, with nary a split infinitive. And her films, though varying widely in subject and tone, are all infused with some serious macha.
The Loveless (1982), starring Willem Dafoe, is about bikers ripping up a small southern U.S. town. In Near Dark (1987), she hipped up the western genre by making her cowboys, played by then-newcomers Bill Paxton, Lance Henriksen, Adrian Pasdar and James LeGros, into vampires, and shot it in 40 nights straight. She gave Jamie Lee Curtis a really big gun and a fetish for shooting it in Blue Steel (1990), and she cast Keanu Reeves as an Federal Bureau of Investigation agent who infiltrates a gang of surfing, skydiving bank robbers led by Patrick Swayze in Point Break (1991). In 1995’s Strange Days – written by her ex-husband, James Cameron (they met in 1986 and divorced in 1991) – she cast Angela Bassett and Ralph Fiennes as ex-cops experimenting with avatars long before Avatar.
I first met Bigelow on the Nova Scotia set of The Weight of Water (2002), about a researcher (Catherine McCormack) who is pulled into a 100-year-old murder mystery; Sean Penn and Sarah Polley also starred. I also spent time with her while she was editing 2002’s K-19: The Widowmaker, starring Harrison Ford and Liam Neeson, based on the true story of a Soviet nuclear submarine rocked by a near-meltdown off the coast of Iceland in 1961. With a budget of $90-million, it was the costliest movie ever made – and the first time Ford had ever been directed – by a woman.
