The Hurt Locker

Pop quiz: in the 81 years of the Academy Awards, how many women have been nominated for the best director Oscar? Answer: three; namely Lena Wertmüller (Seven Beauties, 1975), Jane Campion (The Piano, 1993) and Sofia Coppola (Lost in Translation, 2003). On 3 February Kathryn Bigelow will certainly make that four, and she's the odds-on favourite to actually take home a golden phallic symbol come March. And deservedly so: The Hurt Locker, which has swept critics awards across the US, articulates the Iraq War in a way that's never been this thrilling.

"It's extraordinary to look at a day in the life of a Baghdad bomb tech," says Bigelow, 57, chipper on the phone from LA. "There's no margin for error: no ‘I almost cut the right wire,'" she continues. "These individuals arguably have the most dangerous job in the world, and they volunteered for it."

Bigelow's incendiary yet contemplative action drama is her first feature since 2002's Harrison Ford nuke-sub thriller, K-19: The Widowmaker. Prior to that, she made a string of odd genre movies: an unusually affecting vampire film, Near Dark (1987); the surfer-narc mano a mano, Point Break (1991); the Ralph Fiennes millennial thriller, Strange Days (1995). Her work over the past six years has been less visible, mostly television and shorts.

"That's the cost of wanting to make something with total creative control," Bigelow says, with time-tested serenity. "Filmmaking is not for the faint of heart." The Hurt Locker, produced via indie fund-raiser Nicolas Chartier (Crash), afforded Bigelow final cut and the ability to cast two excellent non-A-listers, Jeremy Renner and Anthony Mackie, in key roles as a daredevil defuser and a by-the-book sergeant.

"For me, it always starts with the character," Bigelow offers, uneasy with being pegged as a genre specialist. "I need to work from the inside out. Seriously, what would incite you or I to wake up one day and think, Hmm, bomb defusing is a vocation I'd like to pursue? And what's the price of that heroism? They call it the lonely walk – the walk in the heavy suit toward the suspicious object. You're by yourself. The war has stopped for you. It's probably a very existential moment."

Bigelow met with soldiers in Kuwait and elsewhere to understand that moment, also leaning heavily on journalist Mark Boal's screenplay, the product of a 2004 embedding with an army bomb squad. Rooted in its characters' stoic sense of professionalism and shot in and around Amman, Jordan, The Hurt Locker is refreshingly free of politics – indeed, the filmmaker considers it the first Iraq War movie that's actually about the ground situation itself. "I do consider myself a political person," she says, "but we've lost sight of the troops that are fighting over there. There's now a perception among them that this is a job – a good one, even – and not the Vietnam-era draft mentality of old."

She has a sensibility that recalls Howard Hawks films like Only Angels Have Wings and Rio Bravo, which focus on characters quietly working through jeopardy with a minimum of fuss. "Courage is not the absence of fear," Bigelow continues, "but maintaining a sense of humour in the face of fear." That's as far as she wants to explain it; we move on to the logistics of a summer shoot in the Middle East and the immersion of her actors in four-camera disarmament sequences, take after take. (Bigelow, once married to James Cameron, can talk shop with the best of them.)

Inevitably, the question does arise; the one that's tailed Bigelow throughout her career making pictures associated with men's tastes. Actor Renner, by phone, is direct in his defence: "I always get a little tense when people bring it up. Just because she has long, shaved legs means she can't direct a great movie?"

"I've been fortunate and tenacious," Bigelow admits on the gender issue, but can't claim to have encountered any significant resistance. "It would be impossible for me to not be who I am, and do what I do." She laughs, well practiced at this pause. "I simply don't bifurcate the job description." Joshua Rothkopf