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Conversations With Filmmakers Series
Kathryn Bigelow: Interviews
With her gripping film The Hurt Locker , Kathryn Bigelow (b. 1951) made history in 2010 by becoming the first woman to win an Oscar for Best Director. Since then she has also filmed history with her movie, Zero Dark Thirty , which is about the mission to kill Osama Bin Laden.
She is one of Hollywood’s brightest stars, but her roots go back four decades to the very non-Hollywood, avant-garde art world of New York City in the 1970s. Her first feature The Loveless reflected those academic origins, but such subsequent films such as the vampire-Western Near Dark , the female vigilante movie Blue Steel , and the surfer-crime thriller Point Break demonstrated her determination to apply her aesthetic sensibilities to popular, genre filmmaking.
The first volume of Bigelow’s interviews ever published, Peter Keough’s collection covers her early success with Near Dark ; the frustrations and disappointments she endured with films such as Strange Days and The Widowmaker ; and her triumph with The Hurt Locker . In conversations ranging from the casual to the analytical, Bigelow explains how her evolving ambitions and aesthetics sprang from her earliest aspirations to be a painter and conceptual artist in New York in the 1970s and then expanded to embrace Hollywood filmmaking when she was exposed to such renowned directors as John Ford, Howard Hawks, Don Siegel, Sam Peckinpah, and George Roy Hill.
She is one of Hollywood’s brightest stars, but her roots go back four decades to the very non-Hollywood, avant-garde art world of New York City in the 1970s. Her first feature The Loveless reflected those academic origins, but such subsequent films such as the vampire-Western Near Dark , the female vigilante movie Blue Steel , and the surfer-crime thriller Point Break demonstrated her determination to apply her aesthetic sensibilities to popular, genre filmmaking.
The first volume of Bigelow’s interviews ever published, Peter Keough’s collection covers her early success with Near Dark ; the frustrations and disappointments she endured with films such as Strange Days and The Widowmaker ; and her triumph with The Hurt Locker . In conversations ranging from the casual to the analytical, Bigelow explains how her evolving ambitions and aesthetics sprang from her earliest aspirations to be a painter and conceptual artist in New York in the 1970s and then expanded to embrace Hollywood filmmaking when she was exposed to such renowned directors as John Ford, Howard Hawks, Don Siegel, Sam Peckinpah, and George Roy Hill.
282 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2013
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
January 8, 2017
I liked it. She has interesting ideas about moviemaking and it was cool learning about her background as a painter and film student.
Also, it's fascinating reading her give similar but different answers in regards to being a female filmmaker/action director throughout the years. She's been making movies since 1977 and some of the questions she got were as if she was a unicorn or an alien from another, which must be annoying after a while. She has a good sense of humor which comes across the interviews as well.
Well worth reading if you're a film fan.
Also, it's fascinating reading her give similar but different answers in regards to being a female filmmaker/action director throughout the years. She's been making movies since 1977 and some of the questions she got were as if she was a unicorn or an alien from another, which must be annoying after a while. She has a good sense of humor which comes across the interviews as well.
Well worth reading if you're a film fan.
August 17, 2015
This is a deeply disappointing book. It mostly cobbles together the typical 2 page interviews of daily papers (which in at least half they keep asking the same dumb question: "what's a woman doing directing action films?".
I don't know why she wouldn't be given the deep, probing interviews of so many other directors in this great series... oh, wait, yeah, I do.
I don't know why she wouldn't be given the deep, probing interviews of so many other directors in this great series... oh, wait, yeah, I do.
August 13, 2013
Pretty good compilation of interviews. Since I've spent the past six months reading many Bigelow interviews for an academic essay, it was nice to read this collection and come across quite a few I hadn't read before.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews