Fear has a bad reputation, but I think that's ill-deserved.  Fear is clarifying. It forces you to put important things first and discount the trivial.  When Mark Boal, the writer, came back from a reporting trip to Iraq, he told me stories about men in the Army who disarm bombs in the heat of combat - obviously, an elite job with a high mortality rate.  When he mentioned that they are extremely vulnerable and use little more than a pair of pliers to disarm a bomb that can kill for 300 meters, I was shocked.  When I learned that these men volunteer for this dangerous work, and often grow so fond of it that they can imagine doing nothing else, I knew I had found my next film. - Kathryn Bigelow

Writing
The Hurt Locker is based on accounts of Mark Boal, a freelance journalist who was embedded with an American bomb squad in the war in Iraq. Director Kathryn Bigelow was familiar with Boal's work before his experiences, having turned one of his Playboy articles into the short-lived television series The Inside. When Boal was embedded with the squad, he went with the members 10 to 15 times a day to watch their tasks, keeping in touch with Bigelow about his experiences. Boal combined his experiences into a fictional retelling of real events.
He said of the film's goal, "The idea is that it's the first movie about the Iraq War that purports to show the experience of the soldiers. We wanted to show the kinds of things that soldiers go through that you can't see on CNN, and I don't mean that in a censorship-conspiracy way. I just mean the news doesn't actually put photographers in with units that are this elite."

Casting
The film's three main stars are Jeremy Renner, Anthony Mackie, and Brian Geraghty. Renner plays Sergeant First Class William James, a composite character with qualities based on individuals that screenwriter Mark Boal knew when embedded with the bomb squad.
Mackie plays Sergeant J.T. Sanborn and describes his experience filming in Jordan in the summer, "It was so desperately hot, and we were so easily agitated. But that movie was like doing a play. We really looked out for each other, and it was a great experience. It made me believe in film."
Geraghty played Specialist Owen Eldrige. Secondary roles include Christopher Sayegh as Beckham, Christian Camargo as Colonel Cambridge, Guy Pearce as Staff Sergeant Matt Thompson, David Morse as Colonel Reed, and Evangeline Lilly as Connie James. Bigelow discovered several hundred thousand refugees of Iraq when filming in Amman. She cast refugees who had theatrical backgrounds, such as Suhail Aldabbach, who plays a forced suicide bomber at the film's end. Other tertiary roles include Nabil Koni, Fesal Sadoun, Imad Dadudi, Hasan Darwish, Wasfi Amour, Nibras Quassem, and Nader Tarawneh.

Filming
Members of the key filmmaking crew include producer Tony Mark, director of photography Barry Ackroyd, film editors Chris Innis and Bob Murawski, production designer Karl Júlíusson, production sound mixer Ray Beckett, and costume designer George Little. The film's real explosions and special effects were designed by Richard Stutsman and his team. Filming began in July 2007 in Amman, Jordan.
According to producer Tony Mark, the blood, sweat and heat captured on-camera in the production was mirrored behind the scenes. "It's a tough, tough movie about a tough, tough subject," Mark said in an interview, "There was a palpable tension throughout on the set. It was just like the onscreen story of three guys who fight with each other, but when the time comes to do the work, they come together to get the job done."
Filming began in July 2007 in Jordan and Kuwait.
Producer Greg Shapiro spoke about security concerns of filming in Jordan, "It was interesting telling people we were going to make the movie in Jordan because the first question everybody asked was about the security situation here." Often four or more camera crews filmed simultaneously, which resulted in nearly 200 hours of footage. Although the filmmakers scouted for locations in Morocco, director Kathryn Bigelow sought greater authenticity and decided to film in Jordan because of its proximity to Iraq. Some of the locations were less than three miles from the Iraqi border.
Producer Tony Mark recalled armorer David Fencl finishing a 12-hour day and staying up all night to create proper ammunition for a sniper rifle when the real ammo didn't clear Jordanian customs in time for the scheduled shoot.
On this film shoot, there were few of the normal Hollywood perks; nobody on the set got an air-conditioned trailer or a private bathroom.
Jeremy Renner, who trained with real EOD teams before shooting the film, says that great pains were taken to ensure the film's authenticity. According to Renner, shooting the film in the Middle East contributed to this. "There were two-by-fours with nails being dropped from two-story buildings that hit me in the helmet, and they were throwing rocks.... We got shot at a few times while we were filming," Renner said. "When you see it, you're gonna feel like you've been in war."
"You can't fake that amount of heat," Mackie says, adding, "When you are on set and all of the extras are Iraqi refugees, it really informs the movie that you're making. When you start hearing the stories from a true perspective ... of people who were actually there, it gives you a clear viewpoint of where you are as an artist and the story you would like to tell. It was a great experience to be there."

Cinematography
For the film, Bigelow sought to immerse audiences "into something that was raw, immediate and visceral".
The director was impressed with cinematographer Barry Ackroyd's work on United 93 and The Wind That Shakes the Barley and invited him to perform the camera work for The Hurt Locker. While the film was independently produced and filmed on a low budget, Bigelow used multiple S16mm cameras to capture multiple perspectives, saying, "That's how we experience reality, by looking at the microcosm and the macrocosm simultaneously. The eye sees differently than the lens, but with multiple focal lengths and a muscular editorial style, the lens can give you that microcosm/macrocosm perspective, and that contributes to the feeling of total immersion."

Awards
Starting with its initial screening at the 2008 Venice International Film Festival, The Hurt Locker has earned an impressive list of awards and honors. It has also earned its place on more Top 10 lists than any other film of 2009. It was nominated in nine categories at the 82nd Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actor, and for three Golden Globe awards. Kathryn Bigelow was awarded the 2009 Directors Guild of America Award for Outstanding Achievement in Feature Film for the film, the first time a female director has ever won. The film won six awards at the BAFTAs held on February 21 2010, including Best Film and Best Director for Bigelow.
The film swept most critics groups awards for best director and best picture including Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Boston and Las Vegas film critics associations. The Hurt Locker also became only the fourth film to win all three major U.S. critics group prizes (NY, LA and NSFC) joining Goodfellas, Schindler's List and L.A. Confidential.
The Washington DC Area Film Critics award for Best Director was given to Kathryn Bigelow, the first time the honor has gone to a woman. The five awards from the Boston Society of Film Critics was the most given out by that organization to a single film in the group's entire thirty-year history.
According to the film-ranking website They Shoot Pictures, Don't They, The Hurt Locker is the 13th most acclaimed film of the 21st Century.
In February 2010, the film's producer Nicolas Chartier emailed a group of Academy Award voters in an attempt to sway them to vote for The Hurt Locker instead of "a $500M film" (referring to Avatar) for the Best Picture award. He later issued a public apology saying that it was "out of line and not in the spirit of the celebration of cinema that this acknowledgment is." The Academy later banned him from attending the award ceremony as punishment.
The film won six Oscars at the 82nd Academy Awards, including Best Film Editing, Best Sound Editing, Best Sound Mixing, Best Original Screenplay, Best Director, and Best Picture.

Kathryn Bigelow        Director, Producer
"Kathryn Bigelow is an audaciously talented filmmaker determined to push the envelope for women directors." (Variety)  In the course of her career, Bigelow has distinguished herself as one of Hollywood's most innovative filmmakers.
In 1985 Bigelow directed and co-wrote the stirring cult classic, Near Dark, produced by Steven-Charles Jaffe.  This film was critically laude as a "poetic Horror film."  As always, Bigelow's visual style garnered positive reactions from the press who described it as "dreamy, passionate and terrifying, a hallucinatory vision of the American nightworld that becomes both seductive and devastating."  Following the release of this film, the Museum of Modern Art honored Bigelow with a career retrospective.
In 1991, Bigelow directed the action thriller Point Break, which starred Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze.  A Largo Entertainment Pictures presentation, executive produced by James Cameron, Point Break explored the dangerous extremes of a psychological struggle between two young men.  Regarding Bigelow's work on the film The Chicago Tribune commended her astonishing filmmaking sensibilities and described her as "A uniquely talented, uniquely powerful filmmaker…Bigelow has tapped in to something primal and strong.  She is a sensualist in the most sensual of mediums."
When Strange Days was released in 1995, Roger Ebert called it a "technical tour de force."  In this film, Bigelow explored the unsettling prospects of computer-generated virtual reality and the impending new millennium.  Strange Days received rave reviews and was highly praised for its energy and unique, intense visuals.  Janet Maslin, in The New York Times, stated that "the furiously talented" Bigelow was "Operating at full throttle, using material ablaze with eerie promise, she turns Strange Days into a troubling but undeniably breathless joyride."  Starring Ralph Fiennes, Angela Bassett and Juliette Lewis, Strange Days was co-written by James Cameron and released by Twentieth Century Fox.
Based on the best-selling Anita Shreve novel, Bigelow directed The Weight of Water starring Sean Penn, Sarah Polley, Catherine McCormack and Elizabeth Hurley.  The Weight of Water's world premiere was a gala screening at the 25^th annual Toronto International Film Festival in 2000 and drew praise from critics and filmmakers alike.  Variety described the film as being "Bigelow's richest, most ambitious and personal work to date; imbued with suspense, benefiting from Bigelow's penchant for creating a visual sense of menace and an atmosphere of fear."
On the release of K-19: The Widowmaker, the New York Times declared Bigelow "one of the most gifted…directors working in movies today."  Starring Harrison Ford, Liam Neeson and Peter Saarsgard, it was one of the more critically well-received films of the summer of 2002.  The film tells the true story of a heroic Soviet navel crew who risked their lives to prevent a near nuclear disaster aboard their submarine.  Critics praised Bigelow as "an expert technician who never steps wrong" (Roger Ebert) and K-19 as "a story about bravery, patriotism and honor, no matter what flag you fly" (CNN).
Bigelow went where no other filmmaker has gone before, making Soviet soldiers from the Cold War era the heroes of a major American production.  For Bigelow, there was a larger purpose to telling this important forgotten chapter of history.  "…At times I allow myself to hope that K-19 will also have another role to play, that it can help to throw open the narrow ideological window through which we, as Americans, have viewed a particular past and culture.  In those moments I'm thinking back over the many disquieting things I saw in Russia, and most of all the people I met there:  Our former enemies whose great courage we may now, finally, after all these years, be prepared to acknowledge."
In the summer of 2008 Bigelow completed her most recent and uncompromising film to date, THE HURT LOCKER. Starring Jeremy Renner, Anthony Mackie and Brian Geraghty, THE HURT LOCKER chronicles an elite squad of bomb techs in a sweltering Baghdad.  Written by journalist and screenwriter Mark  Boal, based on his embed with an Explosive Ordinance Disposal (EOD) team in Iraq in 2004, this eye witness account examines not only the psychology of a volunteer army, but the warrior who is drawn to combat like a moth to a flame.  THE HURT LOCKER was shot all on location in Amman, Jordan.
In her Director's statement for THE HURT LOCKER's world premiere at the Venice Film Festival, 2008, Bigelow states: "Fear has a bad reputation, but I think that's ill-deserved. Fear is clarifying. It forces you to put important things first and discount the trivial.  When Mark Boal, the writer, came back from a reporting trip to Iraq, he told me stories about men in the Army who disarm bombs in the heat of combat - obviously, an elite job with a high mortality rate. When he mentioned that they are extremely vulnerable and use little more than a pair of pliers to disarm a bomb that can kill for 300 meters, I was shocked. When I learned that these men volunteer for this dangerous work, and often grow so fond of it that they can imagine doing nothing else, I knew I had found my next film".

Mark Boal                  Writer, Producer
Mark Boal is a journalist, screenwriter, and producer. He was born and raised in New York City. After graduating with honors in philosophy from Oberlin College, he began a career as an investigative reporter and writer of long form non-fiction.  An acclaimed series for the Village Voice on the rise of surveillance in America lead to a position writing a weekly column, The Monitor, when he was twenty-five. He subsequently covered politics, technology, crime, youth culture and drug culture in  stories for national publications such as Rolling Stone, Brill's Content, Mother Jones, The New York Observer, and Playboy. He is currently Writer-at-Large for Playboy.
In 2003, his article "Jailbait," about an undercover drug agent was adapted for FOX television's "The Inside." In 2003, he wrote Death and Dishonor, the true story of a military veteran who goes searching for his missing son, which later became the basis for Paul Haggis's follow up to Crash, In the Valley of Elah, released by Warner Bros in 2007. Boal colloborated with Paul Haggis on the script and shares a co-story credit on the film, deemed "a deeply reflective, highly powerful work," by the Hollywood Reporter.
In 2004, Boal embarked on an embed with an elite bomb squad unit operating in Baghdad, during which he lived with the troops and accompanied them on daily missions to disarm IEDs. That first-hand observation became the inspiration for his script THE HURT LOCKER, which he developed with Kathryn Bigelow soon after returning from Iraq.

THE ART OF ORIGINAL FILMMAKING

HOME