Last month, visiting Kathryn Bigelow at her upstate New York home, I was initially puzzled by her whereabouts. Years ago, after numerous brush with wildfires, she relocated from Los Angeles. A lifelong equestrian, she recounts rushing to her stables during fires, loading her horses into a trailer, and fleeing the encroaching flames. Today, she presides over an expansive estate, home to her own horses and others. When I finally found her, she emerged from a barn, her figure dramatically silhouetted, much like a perfectly composed shot from one of her own films.
My first encounter with Bigelow was in 2009, prior to the release of “The Hurt Locker.” This intense drama, chronicling an American bomb-disposal unit in the Iraq war, quickly garnered critical acclaim and nine Oscar nominations. The evening of March 7, 2010, remains vivid: Barbra Streisand, on stage to present Best Director, highlighted the historical lack of female nominees in that category. “Well, the time has come,” Streisand announced, before naming Kathryn Bigelow. That night, Bigelow became the first woman to win the award, swiftly followed by a Best Picture Oscar. Suddenly, the global spotlight landed on the concept of a female director, a label Bigelow herself had long sought to avoid.
The autumn leaves were just beginning to turn when I spoke with the 73-year-old Bigelow. Her physique is notably slender and lean, possessing a vibrant, almost humming energy reminiscent of a hummingbird, albeit one nearly six feet tall. She has a quick laugh, and while she is a thoughtful listener, she maintains a certain guardedness during interviews, suggesting a deeply ingrained self-preservation.
“A House of Dynamite” was set to debut in theaters approximately a month after my visit (with a Netflix streaming release on October 24). This film is a gripping, speculative thriller depicting American governmental and military efforts to avert a devastating intercontinental ballistic missile strike on the U.S. homeland. The experience of watching it felt particularly unsettling, coming just months after the Trump administration’s controversial decision to initially fire, then reinstate, about 300 employees of the National Nuclear Security Administration, the very body responsible for the nation’s nuclear preparedness.
In the luminous and refined setting of her late-18th-century farmhouse, Bigelow articulated her fascination with “the intersection between film and journalism or information.” Starting with “The Weight of Water” (2002), all her cinematic works have, to varying degrees of realism, drawn inspiration from real-world events. Her attraction to extreme situations is a recurring motif, evident even in her 1978 student film, “Set-Up,” a short piece featuring two men engaged in a brawl while two semioticians analyze their actions.
Bigelow’s thematic preoccupations with violence, power, masculinity, and cinematic form have been a constant throughout her career. Her early filmmaking period was marked by audacious genre films that provided a canvas for her to explore and challenge conventional storytelling. Her 1987 neo-western, “Near Dark,” follows a young man joining a nomadic vampire family hunting victims from their blacked-out RV. In 1990’s “Blue Steel,” Jamie Lee Curtis portrays a police officer entangled with an unsuspecting serial killer. The 1991 action film “Point Break” sees Keanu Reeves as an FBI agent infiltrating a group of surfing bank robbers. Bigelow then pivoted with “The Weight of Water,” a film based on Anita Shreve’s novel, which delves into a historical double murder that occurred on a Maine island in 1873.
“A House of Dynamite” marks Bigelow’s second cinematic exploration of the nuclear threat. Her initial foray into this theme was the 2002 thriller “K-19: The Widowmaker,” which depicted a nuclear reactor meltdown aboard a Soviet submarine in 1961, a harrowing incident inspired by actual historical events. This film, starring Harrison Ford and Liam Neeson, was her most ambitious and traditional in form, coming closest to a conventional Hollywood thriller. However, much like “The Weight of Water,” it was not a commercial success. It would be several years before she directed another feature, “The Hurt Locker.” She deliberately chose a smaller scale for this project, filming in Jordan on a modest budget, partly to maintain creative control. As she explained in a 2009 interview, Bigelow aimed to offer audiences a “boots-on-the-ground, you-are-there look” at bomb disposal, which required “a kind of presentational, reportorial, immediate, raw, visceral approach.”
Clockwise from top left, scenes from “Point Break,” “The Hurt Locker,” “K-19: The Widowmaker,” and “Zero Dark Thirty.”
Bigelow’s dedication to crafting narratives inspired by real events—or, more accurately, her distinct interpretations of them—has occasionally drawn intense criticism. This was most evident with her 2012 film, “Zero Dark Thirty.” Co-written by Mark Boal and featuring Jessica Chastain as a CIA analyst, the film’s portrayal of the agency’s interrogation tactics against Al-Qaeda suspects ignited a fierce debate even before its official release. Three prominent senators publicly condemned the movie, writing a letter to then-Sony Pictures Entertainment chairman and CEO Michael Lynton. They asserted that the film was “factually inaccurate” in its implication that torture directly yielded intelligence crucial to locating Osama bin Laden.
Bigelow recalls being “mystified” by the intense backlash to the film. She points out that Senators McCain and Feinstein, among others, departed the screening early, missing a key scene where a ruthless CIA operative, portrayed by Jason Clarke, extracts information by offering a prisoner food and a cigarette—an act she describes as “a generous gesture, as opposed to a harm.” The outrage over the torture scenes, she believes, was also fueled by her stark and uncompromising depiction of violence. Furthermore, the film doesn’t offer the expected cinematic retribution for the CIA analysts’ actions, nor does it feature a “Sorkin-esque” moral condemnation of torture. Jessica Chastain’s persistently glamorous appearance throughout the film also seemed to contribute to the controversy.
“A House of Dynamite” is, in some respects, a less contentious film, perhaps because it tackles a stark reality that, for many unfamiliar with Cold War-era “duck-and-cover” drills, remains an abstract concept. Bigelow expressed her hope that the film could “initiate, or help initiate, a conversation about reducing the nuclear stockpile.”
This film is her first full-length feature since “Detroit” (2017), a drama that explored the racial tensions following a 1967 police raid on a bar in the city. While “Detroit” was, as expected, skillfully directed, its emphasis on authenticity and violence felt disconnected from the historical context and the experiences of the Black individuals targeted in the assaults. Film critic K. Austin Collins, writing for The Ringer, incisively identified a core flaw: “How do you make a movie about a political act as overwhelming as a citywide riot that never wonders whether the rioters — in this case, the Black population of Detroit — have a political imagination?”
In the eight years following “Detroit,” Bigelow’s presence seemed to recede at times. Several factors contributed to this, including the global pandemic and two major labor strikes in 2023 that brought the film industry to a standstill for six months, a disruption from which it is still recovering. Her name would surface occasionally in industry news, linked to various projects; a 2022 documentary series about the pandemic eventually moved forward, but an adaptation of David Koepp’s novel “Aurora” did not. At one point, Bigelow mentioned to her agent her growing preoccupation with the nuclear stockpile, which led to a late 2023 meeting with writer Noah Oppenheim. Their collaboration was swift, and by the following summer, “A House of Dynamite” was in production.
While “A House of Dynamite” has generally been well-received, it hasn’t generated the same level of buzz or controversy as Bigelow’s previous films. Part of the challenge lies with the current state of the movie industry, which remains in a prolonged crisis. Audiences have largely lost the habit of going to theaters, making it difficult to attract them for original, adult-oriented films that aren’t part of a major franchise. Another factor is Netflix, which financed “A House of Dynamite” (marking Bigelow’s first studio-backed film) and opted for a brief two-week theatrical run before its streaming debut. While filmmakers appreciate Netflix’s substantial financial resources, the platform’s movies often lack a lasting cultural impact, fading from public consciousness quite rapidly.
I inquired about the personal significance of her Oscar wins. I already knew their profound meaning for myself and countless other women. She expressed pride and gratitude, though her responses verged on the conventional. Bigelow is clearly not one to boast and appears uncomfortable discussing herself; I suspect I made her feel awkward. I understand. The Oscars, while glamorous symbols of esteem awarded by the Academy to its members and a select few, have their absurdities. They have historically veiled the industry’s darker aspects, though in recent decades, their luster has been diminished by mounting critiques of its pervasive sexism and racism. Nevertheless, these awards can confer tangible advantages, including increased visibility and access to larger budgets, essentially offering directors grander “train sets” to work with.
Yet, for many of us, the deeper significance lies in the awards’ symbolism: what they communicate about who is permitted to direct films, the scope and nature of those films, and whose achievements are deemed worthy of celebration. For too long, casual Oscar viewers might not have even realized that women have consistently directed fiction films throughout cinematic history, even contributing to the very invention of the art form itself. Bigelow, despite becoming a beacon of female accomplishment, has consistently expressed a reluctance to be categorized as a “female director.”
“It ghettoizes women,” she responded when I sympathetically brought up the subject. “You’re not just a writer,” Bigelow pointed out, “you’re a woman writer, right?”
Since “The Hurt Locker,” only two other women have claimed the Best Director Oscar: Chloé Zhao, who won in 2021 for her Best Picture-winning drama “Nomadland,” and Jane Campion, honored for “The Power of the Dog” the subsequent year. These wins, like Bigelow’s, reflect a broader, ongoing transformation within the film industry regarding women’s roles. This change is not sudden or coincidental; it’s the culmination of decades of women actively challenging sexism, exposing abuse, and advocating for leadership positions in mainstream cinema. Like Bigelow from the outset, many have also forged paths as independent filmmakers. Bigelow’s personal act of independence has been her consistent refusal to conform to preconceived notions about what women can achieve or what types of films they should make. Her current preference for films that engage with real-world issues, I believe, is intrinsically linked to the historical impact she herself has created.