Thanks for Four Years of Awesome
So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish
Blogged Around Philly: Farewell Edition
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I worried I was going to miss the thing entirely—"the thing" being a round-table interview with Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal, the director and screenwriter of the film The Hurt Locker. I'd left early, I'd taken the precautionary cab so as not to be made late by a half mile walk in high heels to the Four Seasons. But, my taxi was sitting at 17th and Market with no clear sign that movement would ever be possible. Eventually, finally, it moved and I made it.
If you've never been to the Four Seasons, it is worth noting that there are about seventeen people there to smile and greet you, and take your hand as you exit the car to flood your mind with pleasant Victoriana. The building itself is more Louis XIV opulence, full of gold and brocade, scurrying staff, and indoor fountains. I was ushered with the other members of the local press to sit around a small coffee table and talk shop with the two articulate and attractive filmmakers about their disquieting and good movie—about the particular dangers surrounding members of the EOD (explosive ordinance disposal) squad responsible for dismantling the bombs that threaten soldiers and civilians in Iraq. The film is terrifying and acutely precise because of the time Mark spent as an embedded journalist—nothing at all like our posh and cozy hotel room.
I would imagine this was a tough shoot. Tell us about the shooting schedule. I was very fascinated with how you set up the film and how you shoot it. Was it storyboarded? It felt so spur of the moment.
KB: Well we shot it in 44 days and we shot a million feet of film which is a 200 to 1 ratio, so we came back with a lot of footage. I did tend to board and once the script was done, boarded it out. But that was before we even scouted location, and geography is really key to understanding the audience, understanding the conflict, where you are in relation to the bomb for instance, and also one of our both combined objectives was to really humanize those soldiers so at the same time you want to kind of go jump from the micro to the macro. Seeing the soldier in context, but never lose sight of an emotional connection with it. So all of those factors, the location, boards, but then you kind of begin to let go of the boards and then you find a style that seems very reportorial because it began as a piece of reporting that was Mark's embed in 2004 with the bomb squad and wanting to protect that reportorial nature, geography, and humanize the soldier so it's sort of fluid and instinctual. You want to have the camera be somewhat live, dexterous, fluid, and unpredictable. And that's really, I think, key principle of life on the ground as a soldier in that particular conflict, the randomness and the chaos of it.
I was wondering about the way that a lot of war movies are normally made with big explosions and big orange things and load noises and everything. In your film, the bullets sounded different, there are little hissing noises followed by small pops, and the explosions look different.
MB: Well I think that, and a sort of a lot of aesthetic choices that Kathryn made, just saying this as an observer of her process, were based on trying to be realistic. And that is really what it was about. Trying to accurately replicate what an explosion looks like. They don't usually look like big orange pools of fire unless you are blowing up gasoline which is what they use for special effects like in Transformers, to make one of those big explosions in the background; they blow up, like I think, a thousand pounds of gasoline. But in a military wartime, no one's going around, blowing up gasoline. [Everyone laughs.] They blow up explosives. So she worked with her special effects guys to make it real. And the special effects guys all had experience. The sound guy who made the sounds of those bullets had served, his name was Paul N.J. Ottosson, he was a brilliant sound designer, but before he was a sound designer, he was a sniper in the...
KB: Swedish Army.
MB: So we would, you know, she and he would have these pretty long discussions about the set, you know, what a bullet sounds like, and he had his point of view from when he had been firing them and she had her point of view from having her going to Kuwait.
KB: Right, that was a 50-caliber, the one that you were talking about that has almost kind of a, that is over a mile away that you are hearing it. And from the difference between hearing it when the trigger is pulled up close or hearing it a mile away, so perspective was really key, and that goes back to the geography. Always maintain a realistic sense of geography, especially for a piece like this.
I think it was really realistic with the 360° camera angle.
KB: Thank-you. That is really predominately why we went to the Middle East, you know, so it wouldn't be we got a hundred feet of set, that's as much as you can shoot, therefore that way you can't shoot, it looks like a hotel room or whatever.
MB: Yeah, I mean as you know, that's the way they build movie sets, they build one side of it. You could never turn around, you could never do that or you would have the craft services guy flipping burgers in the background. [Everyone laughs.]
I wanted to mention casting because all of the actors were really great in it. You had some big name actors in it but they were really supporting roles. Was that to not distract from the plot?
KB: Well not only to not distract from the plot, that's a good point, but too protect and preserve the element of surprise. Many times when you have a more familiar face you go he is so-and-so, he can’t die till the end. You know, they're fine. So you kind of subconsciously, if not consciously, you tend to relax. And that's not the case. You are going to look at this conflict through the soldier's perspective; you are not allowed to relax. There is nothing that could be comforting. That is another reason we took score away, or the absence of score. I mean it is there, but is very minimally, so I mean score is repetitive, but something repetitive is actually comforting, so anything that could support and intensify the suspense.
I was reading the notes on the film and Barry Ackroyd is quoted as saying, "The trick is not to think too much about what you are doing and then you will be surprised by the performances." So do you both think that's true and what were you surprised by in the end result?
MB: The style that they developed, cinematically, is pretty radical. I mean, the way they did that, it doesn't happen that way very often. Usually it is all very, very planned out because there is budget, and you don't want to go over, it is like, this is what we are going to do, you are going to put the coffee cup here and you are going to shoot this way and then in five minutes we are going to shoot this way and then five minutes later we are going to shoot this way and then we are going to move the coffee cup away and shoot the orange juice glass, we are not—
KB: It's hell for the crew. Great for Barry, great for me, great for, I think, the film. But for instance I don't work with marks, so if I was shooting you and everybody was stationary, there would be a mark on the ground so I know what your focal point is so you are always in focus. That's not there. You would be moving and the focus puller doesn't know where the actor's going to go and so, in a way it was like shooting National Geographic photography, like shooting an animal in the wild and again, it's underscoring that degree of unpredictability. Like the actor would come around the side of the Humvee and there would be a camera for one take, but the camera is in motion as well. Second take that camera's not there. Third take, every time it is in a different place. It really caused both cast and crew to kind of inverse completely and go through the process of bomb disarmament as opposed to act in front of a lens.
So you are in a foreign country and it is like a hundred and twenty thousand degrees, was there any moment when an actor or even anyone on the crew thought "I can't do this," or that this is insurmountable, since you can't really plan and there are all of these surprises; was there anything just sort of overwhelming?
MB: So it is a bit of a slight of hand in terms of making it look spontaneous. Actually, it takes a fair amount of preparation. Barry is very gung-ho and he was really into just being really spontaneous, and he actually hurt himself a couple times, because he was so into the scene and he has his camera up here and he's running and in the Guy Pearce scene, Guy's running and Barry's running after him, and he fell. It was really, a couple cameras fell because of the stuff that they were doing was really kind of all out, but that's why you hire Barry Ackroyd.
In retrospect, what was the biggest challenge of bringing this film to fruition and following up to that, what challenge most exceeded your expectations that you had when you started the film?
KB: Well I think that everything about the film was a challenge, but a gratifying one. One of the biggest aspects that I guess I kind of anticipated, but not to the extreme that kind of unfolded before me was the heat, as you mentioned. We were shooting in the summer in Jordan and the bomb suit is not an art department creation. It was a real bomb suit made out of Kevlar and ceramic plates. It weighs about a hundred pounds. So you add that to whatever the punishing temperature was of the day, maybe a hundred and ten degrees and my real concern was Jeremy, making sure that he was comfortable and conscious. But those kinds of challenges were offset by some of the great bonuses. For instance, in Amman at the time we were shooting, about 750,000 refugees from the war, many of whom were actors, so utilizing them in a shoot as speaking parts as well as background extras.
I was wondering if you got any response from the people in the military now, the veterans, or the politicians?
KB: Well I don't know about politicians.
MB: I think that the main group that we made the movie for is people like movie-goers. That is who we made the movie for, the American, for anybody that wants to see a good movie.
KB: And a lot of the EODs had seen it.
And what has been their reaction?
KB: Phenomenal, we showed it the other night to an organization called EOD Memorial Foundation and it is a great organization that raises scholarships for children and helps family whose parent was a casualty. That was really gratifying. And they said that every other sector of the military has had their movie, they've had Navy SEALS, they've had Air Force Pilots, they've had you name it, but they have never had their film and they kind of do what they do with a fair amount of anonymity, Many EOD techs come up to me after screenings, not just that one, and they say, 'I've been telling people for years what I do and nobody understands, nobody has a clue.'
About the military, I read that you originally wanted to shoot in Kuwait and in relation with the army base there, but that didn't happen. How do you think changed the way the movie works or what kind of changes did the military want that you were not OK with?
MB: Well first thing is when you get to Kuwait, it is great to want to shoot in Kuwait, and we really did, but...
KB: It was 135 degrees. It was a non-starter.
MB: It was so hot in Kuwait.
KB: You could have only shot at night.
MB: It is like, it was 135 degrees, you are literally outside of the van and after about five minutes you are ready to pass out. That's not how you shot that kind of movie that is all outdoor, exterior shots.
KB: And you have to shoot for 12 hours a day to make your schedule.
MB: It was like forget it, just forget it. There is a reason why no one shoots movies in the middle of the desert.
KB: Everyone would become dehydrated (laughs). The only restriction there was elemental. Then we took off to Jordan, and it was great because it has got an elevation of about twenty-five hundred feet so instead of being 135, it felt kind of that low desert heat. Average temperature 110.
MB: Once we got back to Jordan we were like, 'Oh my god, this is like being in North Dakota.'
In the scene when James and Sanborn are trying to shoot the enemy combats that are on the small house up the hill, it just, it got so hot and dusty, and then there were all those flies. Did you bring in flies or...
MB: The flies are ordered from L.A.
KB: We had a fly wrangler and a cat wrangler!
How did making this film impact your perspective on US Foreign policy and how did it impact your view on the nature of war?
KB: Well I think it certainly; I probably entered the project thinking war is hell and certainly left the project thinking war was hell. It gave me an appreciation and an admiration, there are men and women out there risking their lives and and looking at incredibly heroic individuals, but also looking at the price of heroism.
A lot of the films you do have characters who are kind of like these adrenaline junkies, so I was wondering if you, yourself, were attracted to that in someway?
KB: No.
MB: She likes to knit.
Check out Phillyist's review of The Hurt Locker!
Image Credit: Internet Movie Poster Awards
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