She is the only woman to have ever won an Academy Award for Best Director. In fact, when she won, her film also won Best Picture and garnered a total of six Oscars that year. In March of 2010, Katheryn Bigelow walked up to the stage at the Kodak Theater in Los Angeles and received her Best Director statue from Barbra Streisand for her film, The Hurt Locker. The film also took Best Picture that year winning out over such stellar efforts as The Blind Side, District 9 and Avatar, which was directed by her ex-husband, James Cameron.
That had never been done before. And, it hasn’t be done since. In fact, she was only the fourth woman in film history to ever even be nominated for Best Director. And, she was only the second American woman ever to receive a nomination.
“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. It’s irrelevant who or what directed a movie, the important thing is that you either respond to it or you don’t. There should be more women directing; I think there’s just not the awareness that it’s really possible. It is.”
Bigelow, 65, was born in 1951 in San Carlos, California. She was the only child of a librarian and the manager of a paint factory. Her early years were absorbed by many things, especially painting. She was such a talented painter that she went on to study at the San Francisco Art Institute where she took a degree in Fine Arts. She fondly remembers that abstract expressionism was her canvas and her vision. It was soon after that young Katheryn discovered movies and the art of filmmaking.
“Whereas painting is a more rarefied art form, with a limited audience, I recognized film as this extraordinary social tool that could reach tremendous numbers of people.”
She headed off to New York and Columbia University where she immediately enrolled in an advanced film program where she learned theory and technique. She received her Masters Degree while at Columbia. The first chance she got to direct a fill length feature film came in 1982 and was a biker type of a film called The Loveless which starred an already rather accomplished Willem Defoe. After that, she directed Near Dark in 1987 and, from there, she was poised to make a serious impression on Hollywood with a trio of action films.
The trilogy began in 1990 with Blue Steel which starred Jamie Lee Curtis, who was a rookie cop being stalked, and looking to be killed, by a psychopath. Following the success of that, she began to seriously hit her stride a year later with Point Break in 1991. The action thriller showcased a young Patrick Swayze and a young Keanu Reeves as rivals. Swayze was a clever bank robber and Reeves was the federal agent hot on his trail. While Point Break wasn’t overwhelming loved by the critics, it was, indeed, her most successful film in terms of box office revenue. The final film in the trilogy was 1995’s Strange Days which was written and produced by her ex-husband James Cameron The film didn’t fare well at the box office and did little for Katheryn’s reputation as many thought it was mainly the product of Cameron. She and Cameron were married from 1989-1991.
“I suppose I like to think of myself as a film-maker. It’s irrelevant who or what directed a movie; the important thing is that you either respond to it or you don’t.”
She did two more films, The Weight of Water (2000) and K:19-The Widowmaker (2002) before her shot at fame came in 2008 when she decided to direct The Hurt Locker. She had originally planned on taking Erik Larson’s novel, The Devil in the White City, and turn it into a film but ex Cameron urged her to take on The Hurt Locker project after reading the script. Katheryn had given the script to Cameron as she was interested in his opinion and his take on it as a potential film.
She began the film, shooting in Jordan in the 100 plus degree heat of the desert. The film takes place in post war Iraq and didn’t make it to American theaters until the summer of 2009 but did qualify for the Academy Award presentation for March of 2010. The Hurt Locker swept six categories including Best Screenplay, Best Picture and, of course, Best Director.
Her followup film was Zero Dark Thirty which, once again, put her in rather exclusive air. For that film, she became the only woman to win the New York Critics Circle Award for Best Director twice and became the first female director ever to be awarded Best Director by The National Board of Review Awards. Next up for Katheryn will be a film that takes place in 1967 and centers around the brutal riots that took place in Detroit during that year.
“I began to exercise a lot of cinematic muscle with the precepts I had learned in the New York art world. Film was intriguing. I began to think of art as elitist; film was not. I’d love to just think of myself as a filmmaker, and I wait for the day when the modifier can be a moot point.”
PHOTO CREDITS: The Associated Press / The Everett Collection / Contrasto / Reuters
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