Welcome back to A History of Film Festivals in 100 Movies - This is Episode 9.
The Hurt Locker - by Kathryn Bigelow, and the Seattle International Film Festival - which runs In Theaters May 9–19 (yes going on RIGHT NOW), Streaming May 20–27.
A big winner at SIFF in 2009, The Hurt Locker had an incredible run at the Oscars, which you will hear more about later.
The Seattle International Film Festival (aka SIFF) has become one of the top 5 film festivals in the United States, annually presenting over 250 films across the city, and will be celebrating its 50th Anniversary this year.
Bigelow’s Early Life
Kathryn Bigelow was born in San Carlos, California, the only child of Gertrude Kathryn, a librarian, and Ronald Elliot Bigelow, a paint factory manager.
In her early years, Bigelow was a student of painting. She enrolled at the San Francisco Art Institute in the fall of 1970 and received her Bachelor of Fine Arts in December 1972. For a time, Bigelow lived as a poor artist, staying with painter Julian Schnabel in performance artist Vito Acconci's loft. Bigelow teamed up with Philip Glass on a real-estate venture in which they renovated distressed apartments downtown and sold them for a profit.
Bigelow entered the graduate film program at Columbia University, where she studied theory and criticism and earned her master's degree. She also taught at the California Institute of the Arts. In 1978, she made a short film, The Set-Up which found favor with director Miloš Forman, then teaching at Columbia University.
Origins of SIFF
The SIFF began in 1976 at a then independent cinema, Moore Egyptian Theater, under the direction of managers Jim Duncan, Dan Ireland, and Darryl Macdonald. The first SIFF featured Hedda, with Glenda Jackson, Louis Malle's Black Moon, and Luis Buñuel's Phantom of Liberty. The Rocky Horror Picture Show was the unnamed secret "sneak” preview. The Third Festival in 1978 was the first under the direction of Rajeeve Gupta. It doubled the number of films and increased the audience by 50% over the Second Festival. Alien – Ridley Scott (1979) had its World premiere at SIFF.
When founders Dan Ireland and Darryl Macdonald of the Moore Egyptian lost their lease, they founded the Egyptian theater in a former Masonic Temple on Seattle's Capitol Hill. The Egyptian theater remains a prime festival venue to this day,
During the 1980s, SIFF audiences developed a reputation for appreciating films that did not fit standard industry niches, such as Richard Rush's multi-layered The Stunt Man. SIFF was instrumental in the entry of Dutch films into the United States market, including the first major American debut for director Paul Verhoeven. 1980 they did a retrospective showing several of his Dutch films. I will include a link to that archive page in the show notes, should you be interested in learning more about his early work.
Her First Feature
Originally titled Breakdown, The Loveless is a 1981 American outlaw biker drama film written and directed by Kathryn Bigelow and Monty Montgomery, the feature film directorial debut of both directors. It is an independent film and stars Willem Dafoe and musician Robert Gordon, who also did the music for the film. The movie has been compared to The Wild One.
In 2019, a restored version was produced, with many extras, which you can still find on DVD. See a promo for the collectible package here.
In Seattle, the festival was growing
Known for its oath of silence and hard-core regulars, SIFF introduces Secret Fest to feature films that cannot be publicly screened. Audience members are literally sworn to secrecy not to reveal what they have seen They’re required to sign an Oath of Silence that even states that SIFF can pursue legal action if the oath is breached.
In 1985, SIFF introduced the Golden Space Needle Award, which would be given to the festival's most popular film. Ballots are cast by audience members at the end of each movie.
1985 Golden Space Needle Award for Best Short: 'Frankenweenie'
Visionary filmmaker Tim Burton directed this short for Walt Disney and, although Disney saw little commercial potential for the horror-inspired short, it helped launch Burton's live-action filmmaking career.
Near Dark
In 1987, Bigelow delivered her next feature. Near Dark is an American neo-Western horror film co-written and directed by Kathryn Bigelow (in her solo directorial debut), and starring Adrian Pasdar, Jenny Wright, Bill Paxton, Lance Henriksen, and Jenette Goldstein. The plot follows a young man in a small Oklahoma town who becomes involved with a family of nomadic American vampires.
Future husband James Cameron suggested that she use the ensemble cast from his recent hit, Aliens (the sequel to Alien), and Lance Henriksen, Bill Paxton, and Jenette Goldstein all appear in Bigelow's film. Fun fact - A cinema seen in the background early in the film has Aliens on its marquee AND Cameron played the man who flips off one of the characters in Near Dark.
With this film, she began her lifelong fascination with manipulating movie conventions and genre. That same year, she directed a music video for the New Order song "Touched by the Hand of God". The video is a spoof of glam metal imagery.
Near Dark was released on October 2, 1987, in 262 theaters, grossing $3.4 million, below its $5 million budget.
Bigelow has since attributed the film's lack of box office success to its close proximity to The Lost Boys, which was released two months prior to Near Dark, opening on a comparatively wider 1,542 screens, as well as hers being an independent film, whereas The Lost Boys was a "vampire movie made by Warner Bros. that had a tremendous amount of muscle behind it, distribution and marketing muscle behind it.
Part of a late 1980s revival of serious vampire depictions on the big screen, it received mostly positive reviews for its mix of the Western, biker, and vampire movie genres. On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, Near Dark holds an 83% approval rating based on 75 critic reviews with an average rating of 7.4/10.
The consensus reads:
"Near Dark is at once a creepy vampire film, a thrilling western, and a poignant family tale, with humor and scares in abundance."
A remake of the film was announced in October 2006 as a co-production between film companies Rogue Pictures and Platinum Dunes, with Samuel Bayer attached to direct. In December 2008, Platinum Dunes put the movie on hold due to similarities in conception with Twilight (2008), a film that also contained a romance between human and vampire characters.
Back at SIFF, the 1989 Golden Space Needle Award for Best Short: 'Tin Toy'
John Lasseter directed this computer-animated short film released by the then- little known company Pixar. Tin Toy would go on to win an Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film, it inspired the company's successful Toy Story franchise.
In 1990, Cinema Seattle launched a membership program, and by the mid-’90s, SIFF had established itself as a year-round exhibitor, hosting special screenings, the inaugural Women in Cinema Festival, and film discussion series.
The Next 5 Movies
1990, Bigelow kicked off a string of titles, with mixed results. Her next effort Blue Steel starred Jamie Lee Curtis as a rookie police officer who is stalked by a psychopathic killer, played by Ron Silver. As with Near Dark, Eric Red co-wrote the screenplay. The film, originally bankrolled for $10 million.
Bigelow followed Blue Steel with the cult classic Point Break (1991), which starred Keanu Reeves as an FBI agent who poses as a surfer to catch the "Ex-Presidents", a team of surfing armed robbers led by Patrick Swayze who wear Reagan, Nixon, LBJ and Jimmy Carter masks when they hold up banks. For a time, Point Break was Bigelow's most profitable 'studio' film, taking approximately $80 million at the global box office during the year of its release, and yet it remains one of her lowest-rated films.
Bigelow's 1995 film Strange Days was written and produced by her ex-husband James Cameron. Despite some positive reviews, the film was a commercial failure.
Bigelow's 2000 film The Weight of Water is a portrait of two women trapped in suffocating relationships.
And in 2002, she directed K-19: The Widowmaker, starring Harrison Ford and Liam Neeson, about a group of men aboard the Soviet Union's first nuclear-powered submarine. The film fared poorly at the box office and received mixed reactions by critics.
SIFF Expands
In 2006, SIFF helped to launch the SuperFly Filmmaking Experience, which brings youth together from diverse backgrounds to work collaboratively on film projects that promote awareness of indigenous issues and mutual understanding of each other's cultures. Fifty youth from across the United States came to Seattle then traveled to a local Pacific Northwest reservation to create 4 films in 36 hours.
The Hurt Locker
Two short years later, Bigelow would make her biggest splash, AND join SIFF for a big prize.
The Hurt Locker is a 2008 American war thriller film written by Mark Boal. It stars Jeremy Renner, Anthony Mackie, and Guy Pearce. The film follows an Iraq War Explosive Ordnance Disposal team who are targeted by insurgents and shows their psychological reactions to the stress of combat. Boal drew on his experience during embedded access to write the screenplay.
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 for two weeks in 2004. Bigelow was familiar with Boal's work, having adapted one of his Playboy articles as the short-lived television series The Inside in 2002. When Boal was embedded with the squad, he accompanied its members 10 to 15 times a day to watch their tasks and stayed in touch with Bigelow about his experiences.
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."
Bigelow was fascinated with exploring "the psychology behind the type of soldier who volunteers for this particular conflict and then, because of [their] aptitude, is chosen and given the opportunity to go into bomb disarmament and goes toward what everybody else is running from.”
The small-budget film was independently produced and directed by Bigelow. For the main characters, Bigelow made a point of casting relatively unknown actors: "it underscored the tension because with the lack of familiarity also comes a sense of unpredictability." she said.
Renner's character, Staff Sergeant William James, is a composite character, with qualities based on individuals whom screenwriter Boal knew when embedded with the bomb squad. Bigelow cast Renner based on his work in Dahmer, a film about Jeffrey Dahmer, the notorious serial killer whose victims were boys. To prepare for the film, Renner spent a week living and training at Fort Irwin, a U.S. military reservation in the Mojave Desert in California. He was taught to use C4 explosives, learned how to render safe improvised explosive devices, and how to wear a bomb suit.
Principal photography began in July 2007 in Jordan and temperatures averaged 120 °F (49 °C) over the 44 days of shooting. They often had four or more camera crews filming, which resulted in nearly 200 hours of footage.
Renner remembered, "I got food bugs. Then I got food poisoning: lost 15 lbs in three days". In addition to the burden of the heat, the bomb suit he had to wear all day weighed 80–100 lbs.
In a scene in which his character carries a dead Iraqi boy, Renner fell down some stairs and twisted his ankle, which delayed filming because he could not walk. At that point, "people wanted to quit. All the departments were struggling to get their job done, none of them were communicating". A week later, filming resumed.
The film was shot in Jordan, within miles of the Iraqi border, to achieve Bigelow's goal of authenticity. Iraqi refugees were used for extras and the cast worked in the intense heat of the Middle East.
The film premiered at the Venice Film Festival in Italy during 2008. After being shown at the Toronto International Film Festival, it was picked up for distribution in the United States by Summit Entertainment for $1.5 million The movie would go on to play many festivals, winning a number of awards.
It would also play at the Seattle International Festival, and Bigelow would win the Best Director Prize.
The film was released in the United States on June 26, 2009, but received a more widespread theatrical release on July 24, 2009.
The film's final gross was $17,017,811 in the United States and Canada, and $32,212,961 in other countries, bringing its worldwide total to $49,230,772. It was a success against its budget of $15 million.
Starting with its initial screening at the 2008 Venice International Film Festival, The Hurt Locker earned many awards and honors. It also ranked on more film critics' top 10 lists than any other film of 2009.
The film was nominated for nine Oscars at the 82nd Academy Awards in 2010, and what a night it would be. Two former lovers, James Cameron and Kathryn Bigelow who had been married from 1989 to 1991, were both the favorites to win the Oscar for Best Director and Best Picture. Up to this point, the award season for 2009 films has been split between James Cameron’s Avatar and Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker, two very different films, with very different budgets. Would the Academy award Avatar for all of its technical and financial success or would The Hurt Locker would become the lowest-grossing film of all time to win the Best Picture Oscar?
The production of Avatar officially cost somewhere between $237 million or the highest estimate being $310 million. The Hurt Locker, on the other hand, had an official budget between $11 million and $15 million. Avatar’s return of over $2.2 billion compared to The Hurt Locker’s return of $27 million shows that even though both films were profitable, The Hurt Locker only earned 1.2% of the money that Avatar earned.
In the end, Bigelow was the victor. The Hurt Locker won six Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay for Boal. The Best Director award went to Bigelow (the first woman to win this award), beating her ex-husband James Cameron
Universally praised by critics, The Hurt Locker was named the tenth "Best Film of the 21st Century So Far" in 2017 by The New York Times chief film critics.
Kathryn Bigelow was awarded the Directors Guild of America Award for Outstanding Achievement in Feature Film for the film.
Back in Seattle
Shortly after the 2011 festival, SIFF moved its operations to the SIFF Film Center on the Seattle Center campus. The Film Center includes a 90-seat multi-use theater, multi-media classroom, exhibition spaces, archives, and offices for SIFF and the Film School. In October 2011, SIFF Cinema moved from McCaw Hall to its current location in the Uptown Theater. SIFF utilizes all three of the Uptown's three screens for year-round programming. SIFF currently has year-round programming for four screens in Seattle.
The follow-up feature for Bigelow in 2012 would be another hit with critics, and even more so with audiences, grossing over 135 million internationally.
Zero Dark Thirty
An American historical drama thriller film directed and co-produced by Kathryn Bigelow and written and co-produced by Mark Boal. The film dramatizes the nearly decade-long international manhunt for Osama bin Laden, leader of the terrorist network Al-Qaeda, after the September 11 attacks. This search led to the discovery of his compound in Pakistan and the U.S. military raid where bin Laden was killed on May 2, 2011.
According to Metacritic the film appeared on 95 critics' top ten lists of 2012, 17 of which placed the film at No. 1.
In May 2014, celebrating its 40th anniversary, the festival continued its now established tradition of showing over 250 features, and 150 shorts, from over 80 countries, over the course of 25 days, in 12 venues…Their audience had surpassed 150,000 people. In 2014, they had the honor of presenting Boyhood, by Richard Linklater, that would go on to earn 5 Academy nominations, including Best Director and Best Picture, and the acclaimed documentary, The Case Against 8, which had recently won the director prize at Sundance and the audience award at sxsw.
Other than a brief snag during the Covid period, Seattle would continue to be one of the top film festivals in the country, spanning more days, and showing more films than any other.
In 2024, the Festival celebrates in 50th Anniversary, with 20 different sections, including:
Sundance’s 2024 Documentary Grand Jury Prize winner Porcelain War, an archival screening of Wim Wenders’ beloved Wings of Desire (1987), and the 2023 Venice Film Festival’s Golden Lion winner Green Border. And they’ve done an amazing job at developing their archives. In Theaters May 9–19 | Streaming May 20–27
What’s Next for Kathryn Bigelow?
It was reported last month that she had dropped out of directing an adaptation of the apocalyptic David Koepp novel “Aurora” for Netflix as new film chief Dan Lin was starting his role. But one of Lin’s first green lights will reportedly be a different Bigelow film.
According to a report in Puck, “The Hurt Locker” director Bigelow has been tapped to direct a thriller about the White House’s real-time response efforts to an incoming ballistic missile attack on American soil. The script for the film is written by Noah Oppenheim, and the project is expected to be formally announced when Netflix hosts its Upfronts presentation to advertisers next week.
The project is set to be officially announced to the public this month.
The news of Bigelow’s film comes at an interesting time given one recent release from this year: Civil War. The A24 dystopian war drama film also featured political themes and the nation’s capital as a major actor. Civil War set box office records and became a big financial win for A24, showing that political dramas of this nature can be met with success. Though Bigelow’s film does not sound like an identical plot by any means, its similarity will likely draw comparisons to Civil War. It seems like there is an increasing interest in exploring the White House and the political drama. Good timing, in an election year.
And that is a wrap for this edition of A History of Film Festivals in 100 Movies - Episode 9 - The Hurt Locker - by Kathryn Bigelow, and the Seattle International Film Festival.
We hope you get a chance to visit SIFF, and if not during the fest, remember they are streaming May 20–27. Most films are geo-blocked to viewers within the U.S. Check here for the status and restrictions.
And for our paying subscribers, we’ll be sending you a bonus pod on Kathryn Bigelow later in the week, with more insights, interviews and clips.
Thanks for listening, and until next time, you take care.
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