Amy's Robot

What it was like to make The Hurt Locker

Now that it's awards season, The Hurt Locker is going to be all over the press again for the next couple of months. It's already won the Boston and LA Critics awards (best film and best director) and will probably be all over the Golden Globes nominations that come out tomorrow.

Reuters has a great piece on the origins and production of the movie--starting with screenwriter Mark Boal, who was an embedded journalist with an Iraq bomb squad in 2004, through getting funding, deciding to film in Jordan (it was a lot cheaper than Morocco) and finding a crew willing to work there, and writing scenes on the fly during the shoot, based on what was going on in their locations.

But the best details are about the incredibly difficult conditions they worked in. The star, Jeremy Renner, was wearing that crazy armored spacesuit in July in Jordan, and they couldn't use the suit's built-in air conditioner because it made too much noise.

Hey, at least it was a 44-day film shoot, and not an 15-month tour.

The article also points out that the cinematographer was Barry Ackroyd, who also shot United 93. Neither movie is a documentary, but both had a really appealing and appropriate documentary-like feel that was largely created through how they were filmed. Ackroyd gets a little too jerky with the handheld camera now and then, but overall I like his style a lot. He's also the cinematographer for Green Zone, a fictional Iraq movie with Matt Damon coming out next year. (It's directed by Paul Greengrass, who also did United 93 and the last two Bourne movies, which used way too much of the jerky handheld, in my opinion.)

Green Zone was shot in Spain and Morocco, so hopefully Ackroyd didn't keep passing out with heat stroke like he did during Hurt Locker.

So after all that, the movie only brought in about $12 million domestically. And I thought it was one of the indie hits of the year. By comparison, Precious has made $36 million so far. Hurt Locker will probably get re-released early next year if it gets a Best Picture nomination, so it should eventually make a lot more.

Another little note: I somehow missed that Kathryn Bigelow used to be married to James Cameron. Their marriage was from 1989-1991, right after he split up with Linda Hamilton, but, interestingly, before they collaborated on Strange Days. I think she's got about a thousand times better chance at winning a Best Director Oscar this year for Hurt Locker than James Cameron does for Avatar--and she'd be the first woman ever to win.

Here's the Hurt Locker trailer, and the Green Zone trailer.

categories: Movies
posted by amy at 1:34 PM | #