Fade to Black: Kathryn Bigelow

Director Kathryn Bigelow (left) and DP Barry Ackroyd (right) on location in Jordan.

Kathryn Bigelow''s new film is a gritty Iraq war drama called The Hurt Locker, which tells the story of three members of the U.S. Army''s elite Explosive Ordinance Disposal (EOD) team on the streets of Baghdad. After doing research for the piece, Bigelow knew exactly the look she was going for. She wanted grit, grain, realism, constant camera movement, and almost fetishistic attention to detail that would pass muster with the military types whose counsel she sought while making the film. The movie, after all, was written by Mark Boal after he had spent time embedded with a real EOD team, and it is largely based on declassified documents about the operations of EOD squads in Iraq. What Bigelow needed, however, was a partner to paint the visuals she envisioned.

That''s when she remembered the impact that Paul Greengrass'' Sept. 11 film, Flight 93, had on her. Bigelow decided that film''s DP, Barry Ackroyd, was the man to help her achieve a similar style and visual flare for The Hurt Locker.

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“Barry is one of the great visual poets of this industry,” Bigelow says. “After looking at Flight 93 and doing some homework, I realized they staged those sequences from beginning to end, rather than breaking them up, and that was very similar to my thinking about how to stage the bomb disarmament protocols in this film. I didn''t want them broken up. I wanted to create a 300-meter containment field [and film the sequences] understanding the mechanics of the geography and the logistics of bomb disarmament. I wanted to turn the shoot into the same protocol they really use in those situations, rather than try to build it fragment by fragment. I wanted four [camera] units always in motion, but not choreographed—much like shooting a cheetah in the wild, where you have that surprise and the camera is hunting for information and logic and reason and control, just like the subject it is filming. This was a process very familiar to Barry.”

Together, during a 44-day shoot in Jordan, Bigelow and Ackroyd used four handheld (Super 16, a mix of Fuji and Kodak stock) film cameras to capture the frenzy, sweat, and claustrophobic nature of the bomb teams approaching and interacting with roadside ordinance. They also strove to capture the heat of the desert and the cramped feeling of the streets of Baghdad, including the use of Iraq refugees and shooting a key scene in a Palestinian refugee camp. Bigelow recalls the film''s color timer, Stephen Nakamura of Company 3, Santa Monica, Calif., declaring during the digital intermediate phase that the slight degradation of the image and grain quality achieved by Ackroyd “created a beautiful, textured look when combined with the light we got in the Middle East. He told me we could never have achieved that kind of look with a digital camera.”

Her team shot more than a million feet of film in that short time, with Bigelow admitting the logistics were sometimes overwhelming and that she had only limited access to dailies, since the reams of film her team shot were processed in London. Still, Bigelow praises the performances she got from her lead actors and the Iraqi bit players whom, she says, added realism to the piece. She also got surprisingly realistic performances from the ordinance her practical effects team (led by supervisor Richard Stutsman) blew up repeatedly during the shoot.

“The bomb techs who served in Baghdad [whom she consulted] look at explosions in Hollywood movies with criticism, because they say they don''t always look real,” she says. “After talking to them, we realized we had to base the explosions on the matter inside the ordinance itself. You have to take into consideration how that specific particulate matter would explode out of that particular kind of shell. We put a lot of effort into that.”