Bigelow joins best director boys' club

The 58-year-old, who is the first woman to win the Best Director Oscar, has demonstrated repeatedly that in the male-dominated world of Hollywood she is more than capable of holding her own.

“It's the moment of a lifetime,” a stunned Bigelow said as she accepted the award at the glittering Oscars ceremony, dedicating it to U.S. troops fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“I would not be standing here if it was not for Mark Boal who risked his life for the words on the page and wrote such a courageous screenplay,” Bigelow said, clearly moved by her win.

Bigelow's ex-husband James Cameron has said his former spouse revels in proving that “she can out-gun the guys”.

“I think she takes pride in the fact... that just in terms of pure technique, pure game, she's got more game than most of the male directors out there,” Cameron said in a recent interview.

Bigelow says she was first attracted to movies as an artistic medium after watching Sam Peckinpah's infamously bloody Western The Wild Bunch while studying as a painter in New York in the 1970s.

“I'm drawn to provocative characters that find themselves in extreme situations,” Bigelow told CBS television in a recent interview. “And I think I'm drawn to that consistently.”

Honouring Bigelow at last year's Dallas International Film Festival, director Michael Cain cited her “virtuoso command of physical action”.

“She has a gift for giving characters real emotional depth,” Cain said.

Born in California in 1951, Bigelow studied film at Columbia University before later teaching at the California Institute of the Arts.

Her first short film The Set Up offered a prelude of the themes that have been found throughout her career: a 20-minute depiction of two men brawling.

Bigelow made her feature film debut with 1982's The Loveless, a biker movie starring the then little-known Willem Dafoe, but had to wait five years for her follow-up, the genre-blurring vampire movie Near Dark.

The action movie Blue Steel starring Jamie Lee Curtis as a New York policewoman on the trail of a serial killer was followed in 1991 by Bigelow's breakthrough commercial success, Point Break.

The film, starring Keanu Reeves as an FBI agent forced to infiltrate a gang of bank-robbing surfers led by Patrick Swayze, went on to earn more than US$83 million worldwide and has become a cult classic.

Bigelow's next three films, the 1995 thriller Strange Days, 2000's The Weight of Water and 2002's Cold War thriller K-19: The Widowmaker were commercial catastrophes, with each faring poorly at the box office.

The latter was dubbed “K-19: The Career Tanker” by critics after it netted only $US65 million despite costing around $US100 million and featuring stars such as Harrison Ford and Liam Neeson.

Familiar Territory

In fact Bigelow had not made another film until she returned to helm The Hurt Locker, which saw her return to the familiar territory of characters struggling to adapt in the most extreme conditions.

Filmed in Jordan, Bigelow said she had intended the film to be a visceral, boots-on-the-ground experience for the audience, pointedly refraining from making any kind of overt statement about the Iraq war.

“It's really a story of courage and heroism,” she has said. “These men have practically the most dangerous job in the world.

“That's an inherently dramatic subject that as a filmmaker you kind of want to step out of the way and let it reveal itself.

“It definitely requires a certain amount of courage and heroism that is perhaps unthinkable to most people, and yet there are those people that when everybody's running in one direction, will walk with great determination in the opposite direction in order to fulfil that particular mission.”

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