Quint chats with The Hurt Locker's Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal about explosions, snipers and much more!!!
Ahoy, squirts! Quint here to present an interview I did with Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal, director and writer of THE HURT LOCKER. I saw this film when it played SXSW (also where I did this interview) and loved it. It’s the rare war film that balances honesty with a real cinematic experience. The flick isn’t preachy, it isn’t a strong statement movie, it’s a slice of life in the Middle East.
The fact that we follow a bomb squad gives it that WAGES OF FEAR tension that suddenly changes it from the typical (and unsuccessful) modern day war movies, as both Bigelow and Boal are quick to point out below.
The conversation got off to a bit of a rocky start, I think… not bad, but a tad awkward. I’m a big fan of Bigelow’s vampire flick NEAR DARK and thought I’d kick things off with that, but as you’ll see below she very nice about it, but it didn’t get the conversation started like I hoped it would. But I think it smoothes out when we really get started.
Hope you dig the chat!
Quint: Thank you guys for talking with me. I really liked the movie and I’m a huge fan of NEAR DARK.
Kathryn Bigelow: Oh, good.
Quint: I remember seeing it for the first time on cable as a young teen. It was very striking, just different from everything else from the era. I’m sure you probably get a lot of NEAR DARK love from people in my generation…
Quint: I didn’t really know too much about Hurt Locker before seeing it last night. I just knew that you were involved and that was about it. I knew I was seeing it at the festival, so I didn’t want to start digging up trailers and clips and reviews and all of that stuff, so it was a real surprise to me. I love these kinds of movies and it really seemed to have a similarity to stuff like SORCERER or WAGES OF FEAR in that you just wrack up the tension and you kind of combine that with the character building…
Kathryn Bigelow: Characters defined through action.
Quint: Exactly. If you have characters you like around stuff that will blow them up, then suddenly the tension really does work, you know? It’s kind of the Hitchcock thing where you learn about characters and then you show the bomb under the table. Was that anything you thought of in those movies?
Kathryn Bigelow: WAGES OF FEAR is just near and dear to probably all of our hearts, probably not a direct reference in this. This was more, I think, conceived and designed as a combat film and also classic war dramas. If there were any touchstones, it would be more along those lines, but really in all honesty, I think that one of our mandates was to keep it as authentic and realistic and in that sense it’s as original as… Because it’s a really under-reported war and I think a day in the life of a bomb tech in Baghdad, I think most people… certainly I knew little to nothing about as a result to how the media has treated it in this particular conflict, as opposed to Vietnam, where there was a lot of saturation, also a lot of mortality, but here it’s simply because a) how the media has treated it and also it’s just too dangerous. As a film, I think it shows, it’s a 360 degree threat parameter, so that being said, I think it is it’s own kind of animal, something as a result of firs-hand observation.
Quint: Mark, I would assume you probably felt a deep responsibility yourself to portray this realistically or at least write it realistically because you got to know a lot of these people as a reporter covering the war.
Mark Boal: That’s true, although it’s a movie and it’s entertainment and I hope people approach it that way and approach it as… to me, the greatest compliment is “I was on the edge of my seat” and then the second greatest compliment is “I didn’t know it was really like that,” so I was very concerned with being accurate and authentic and faithful to real life within the contexts of a movie, which is not a documentary. If we got the screwdriver wrong or… that’s because the other screwdriver didn’t look as exciting as the screwdriver we used and so it’s kind of like a hybrid in that way.
Quint: You will get that through a lot more by wrapping it in real entertainment. If you made it dry, then people wouldn’t have gotten the message and it wouldn’t have spread as far at least.
Mark Boal: That’s probably true, yeah.
Kathryn Bigelow: Yeah, but it’s always combining like facts and accessibility, you know, kind of like truth and access and seeing where that balance and that interface is. That’s where I think the script is pretty successful.
Quint: You also go out of your way to show… even some of the more non exciting aspects, like showing the real sniper fight and just how that is where it’s not a video game where you are just exchanging shots that go right in the head. I love that aspect of it. I love the waiting and the tension.
Kathryn Bigelow: And also the distances. I think people… I certainly have never seen it in a film before, which is what those 50 calibers are capable of, I mean that kind of distance… Everything is always kind of telescoped in a way that doesn’t seem as truly impossible... I mean shooting somebody a mile and a half away…
Quint: And how it’s not crystal clear when you are looking through the scope and it’s blurry.
Kathryn Bigelow: And they are moving and you are moving, yeah exactly.
Quint: It’s not as simple as point and shoot. I don’t know why, but I have a very interest in sniping stories and stuff and I’ve watched stuff on Discovery Channel with war stories where it is such an elite group that can actually do it and be able to calibrate the wind and calibrate…
Kathryn Bigelow: And their breathing. If you have seen footage of these guys doing what they are doing, they have to almost slow their heart down.
Quint: Their very heartbeat will…
Kathryn Bigelow: Will affect it, exactly.
Quint: That’s great. That was a part of the movie that I didn’t expect. When it came to the bomb stuff, I was like “OK, I can see where this is going,” and I thought that that was going to be the main focus, but you vary it up. You have your lead pretty much going undercover when he’s searching for the boy’s father, street gunfights, the sniper stuff, the mercenaries... You kept me on my toes I guess is what I’m trying to say.
Mark Boal: That’s probably hard to do since you probably have big toes since you have seen so many movies.
Quint: I do. My toes are huge! (laughs) But yeah even though you said that you very much wrote it for a film-going audience and took real experiences and made it more entertaining, was there anything specific from your experiences over there that you brought over?
Mark Boal: I didn’t mean by that that we kind of juiced it, it’s just more of a compression of stuff in terms of timelines and stuff like that.
Quint: So, pretty much everything in the movie you saw?
Mark Boal: It’s pretty much authentic in terms of the situations that either I saw or that I heard about. That is really what the bombs look like. That is really how they go about disarming them, for the most part. There are some things that we left out. You obviously want to protect the troops there in harm’s way and not show too much, but that’s pretty much the deal, especially at that time period.
It’s a little different now since the war has changed a little bit, but at that time, that’s pretty much what they did and they would pretty much drive around finding bombs in garbage bags and in the middle of the road and tied to trees and buried in things.
Kathryn Bigelow: That’s why I think that type of warfare is kind of prototypical. It’s not air to ground or ground to ground.
Quint: It’s not like John Wayne fighting the Japanese.
Kathryn Bigelow: In the Vietnam era, the journalists were able to stay behind the front line, because you actually knew where the front line was. There is no line in this conflict and that was what I think what was so extraordinary to me when he came back and was telling this story about literally everything is a threat. Everything. To try to convey that…
Quint: You showed that with even the body bombs and stuff… I had heard of that and you see it in some Vietnam films where they rig bodies, but how they actually had the body on the slab, I thought that was a great scene at that arms warehouse or where ever that is.
Kathryn Bigelow: Yeah, the bomb factory.
Quint: Mark, how did you find making the transition? I’m sure it’s probably the number one question you are always asked, so I hope it’s not too boring.
Kathryn Bigelow: No, it’s a good one.
Mark Boal: Which transition?
Kathryn Bigelow: From journalist to screenwriter.
Quint: Yeah, was the writing any different in terms of your process?
Mark Boal: Well, it’s a pretty steep learning curve, but fortunately I had good teachers in Kathryn and before that Paul Haggis. I enjoyed it. It’s nice and it’s a shitload of work, to be honest. But it’s thrilling to have as your first screenplay Paul Haggis as the guy you are sitting next to writing with and to have as your second Kathryn Bigelow, it’s like you just went to graduate school and elementary school and preschool all at once and either your head is going to explode or you are going to come out of their knowing a little bit more than you do…
Quint: Sink or swim.
Mark Boal: Yeah, sink or swim, but it was cool. I love journalism and I love being able to import some of the things that make journalism great into movies and I love to try to… The whole thing with journalism, obviously as you know, is authenticity and accuracy and all of that so, to me, what I wish for more of in movies that I see is more of that. I wish there was more realism. I wish we were more into that. I like fantasies as much as the next guy, but what I really like is when I can believe in something, so that’s kind of cool.
Kathryn Bigelow: As a filmmaker, being given an opportunity to work on something both topical and relevant and that’s where the world of film, certainly for me, and taking a topical journalistic approach is… I mean, if the medium could really be relevant I think that’s it’s present sweet spot.
Quint: You kind of hit the nail on the head with this one, because you always hear that “It’s not a traditional war” and in your mind you have an idea of what that is, but seeing what is depicted in your film really puts your preconceived notions of what’s going on over there…
Kathryn Bigelow: That’s the interesting thing.
Quint: This really makes it tangible.
Kathryn Bigelow: There was this article in THE NEW YORK TIMES were, at that point there were four thousand deaths and only six photographs of people killed in action that had ever been published, so in other words all I am saying is there’s this incredible inequity in terms of information. Don’t you agree?
Mark Boal: I do, but I don’t want it to sound like we are making a public service announcement. Obviously if you see the movie, you know, but if you are trying to flip through the internet and trying to figure out whether you want to watch something or not, I’d like people to understand that this is an “edge of your seat” movie, ideally. If I can be a salesman for a second, you know what I mean?
Quint: You can take the message or not and you can still enjoy the movie.
Mark Boal: You can still eat your popcorn is my point. You don’t have to bring your homework book with you.
Quint: Well, then let’s talk about the explosions!
Mark Boal: Alright! Now we’re talking! (laughs) Blow some shit up!
Quint: Another thing that I dug about the movie is that the explosions are almost the co-stars of the movie, like each one was varied and different and I was just wondering how you determined…
Kathryn Bigelow: Lot of particulate matter. I mean, (Mark) saw these detonations over there and in fact, tell them what the bomb guys would say about Hollywood films.
Mark Boal: Well, I would watch TV at night sometimes and they would go “There’s another HME.” I’d go, “What’s that?” “Hollywood Movie Explosion.”
What it means is that big ball of flame is basically vaporized gasoline which is how the special effects guys make those things, they just take a shitload of gasoline and light it on fire and it makes a big fireball. But an actual artillery round or C4 military explosive, when they blow them up in a combat situation, like in Bagdhad, it’s not gasoline. They aren’t blowing up gasoline, they are blowing up what’s called “High order explosives” and it just looks different. It looks like it does in (this) movie.
I was like “Really? Movie explosions aren’t realistic?” and then the next day you see a real bomb go off and you’re like “Oh yeah, they’re not.”
The guy that was our special effects guy, Richard Stutsman, who is a pretty high end special effects guy and he’s done a lot of really big movies, but one of the other things he does is he consults with the military as a side thing. He builds IED’s and stuff for them to train on and he’s part of a whole thing at Fort Irwin where they have their IED program out there. So, when Kathryn said to him “Not a movie explosions, a real explosion,” he knew what we were talking about.
Kathryn Bigelow: He was so sick and tired of seeing those movie explosions…
Mark Boal: He had worked with the military. He knows all of those guys.
Quint: So, he must have known how to recreate it.
Mark Boal: And he knew how to do it without actually killing anybody, because I was always like “Can’t we just use real C4?” and he would be like “No, Mark.”
Quint: “We can hire somebody who’s sick or something…”
Mark Boal: We were getting some of our supplies from the Jordanian military, basic equipment, they were like “Can we give you the C4?” and he was like “No, I can’t. We have to use this black powder…” They were like “Black powder? Like for a musket?” and he’s like “Yeah, we use it for movies.” It was very confusing to them, like “Why not just use C4?” They were like “We have the best C4!” “Can’t use that, sorry…”
Quint: When you are saying this, I imagine a guy in a suit with a briefcase full of plastic explosives.
Mark Boal: It’s like a military guy in a warehouse… with stacks of C4.
Quint: Did you have to work the actors closely with the pyrotechnic guys and the stunt guys and all of that stuff? I would imagine safety had to be…
Kathryn Bigelow: Yeah, safety was number one, but they all did a kind of boot camp at various bases, predominantly Fort Irwin. Anthony (Mackie) spent a little bit of time at Fort Brag and so they did their boot camp and spent time with EOD techs, learning from them and then on set with pyrotechnic guys just to try to get a sense of what the explosions are going to be like, what the protocol would be. And then, of course, learning how to shoot the Barrett (sniper rifle), which you shoot with the real guns and then go to blanks when you are on camera.
Mark Boal: That’s a real Barrett!
Kathryn Bigelow: It’s real, but the shell…
Quint: I’d imagine they have a different kick.
Kathryn Bigelow: That one has a kick no matter what you use. (laughs) That was pretty serious.
Mark Boal: It’s loud as all hell, too.
Quint: What’s next for both of you guys?
Kathryn Bigelow: I’m working on a few things, but right now selling the movie.
Mark Boal: Promoting this thing!
Quint: You are still a little while out, right? It doesn’t come out until June?
Mark Boal: The end of June and then (rolling out) early July.
Quint: So these are the early days. You’ve got months of this to look forward to!
Mark Boal: We are kind of like the Little Engine That Could. The movie is independently made. I don’t know how much you know about it or care about that stuff, but it was kind of financed pretty much on a wing and a prayer and we just got distribution from Summit, the studio, and we sold it in Toronto, but up until then it was like “Hey man, how much money do you have left on your Visa?” It’s actually pretty thrilling to be at this place where you are like “It’s actually going to come out, you’re sitting across from Ain’t It Cool News, it’s like a real fucking movie!” (laughs)
Kathryn Bigelow: The good news with that is that we had complete creative control and I have final cut. There was not interference whatever.
Mark Boal: That’s actually the secret as to if it’s any good, she had full control.
Quint: Going through the studio, you couldn’t have shot a movie that we have been talking about, that balances the combat with character.
Kathryn Bigelow: Never. I mean, we shot five kilometers from the Iraqi border. Barry Ackroyd, the world’s greatest cinematographer, and I kept wanting to just drive across the border. “Let’s just shoot in Iraq,” but the security guys kept saying “There are too many snipers, I can’t guarantee… You can go shoot there, but I can’t guarantee that you will come back.” You could throw a stone like five kilometers, but my point is the idea of taking a production to the middle east, let alone with no creative interference and final cut, it’s a great way to work.
Quint: When Summit picked it up, they didn’t ask for any changes or anything? I know that sometimes happens.
Kathryn Bigelow: No, it’s absolutely unadulterated.
Quint: “This is the movie, take it or leave it.”
Kathryn Bigelow: Kind of, but in a nice way. Patrick Waxberger just loves the movie. I’ve known him for a while, so I was hopeful that they would like it and they loved it.
Mark Boal: They have been really great about understanding that it can work in an art type context, but also in a commercial type context.
Quint: That it can play in multiplexes.
Kathryn Bigelow: Exactly.
Mark Boal: They did understand that and feel that way and they are feeling that way more and more.
Kathryn Bigelow: It has gotten a really tremendous response…
Mark Boal: It’s you guys with the press that have actually, to be honest, been the most influential in terms of getting people to say “Shit, we could make some money on this,” which is what you want, because then they support it.
Quint: And then they actually put some money into the ads.
Kathryn Bigelow: It’s like a self fulfilling prophecy.
Mark Boal: It’s a “Chicken or the egg” type of thing.
Quint: Cool. Thank you guys so much for taking the time to talk with me!
See, once it got going I think it’s actually a really good little chat, covering lots of ground. Pretty crazy to hear about how close they were to the real warzone and I loved the Jordanian army guys trying to push real C4 on to the special effects coordinator.
Seriously, this is a damn intense flick. Give HURT LOCKER a view when it comes out. It’s the kind of movie that doesn’t force you to turn your mind off to enjoy it, but it also doesn’t feel like you’re in a classroom as the projector is whirring.
