CINEMATOGRAPHER BARRY ACKROYD TALKS THE HURT LOCKER |
By Scott Macaulay

By Jason Guerrasio

Part of our Oscar 2010 coverage.

Leading up to the Oscars on March 7, we will be highlighting the nominated films that have appeared in the magazine or on the Website in the last year. Scott Macaulay interviewed The Hurt Locker cinematographer Barry Ackroyd for our Spring 2009 issue. The Hurt Locker is nominated for Best Picture, Best Director (Kathryn Bigelow), Best Actor (Jeremy Renner), Original Screenplay (Mark Boal), Best Cinematography (Ackroyd), Best Editing (Bob Murawski and Chris Innis), Best Original Score (Marco Beltrami and Buck Sanders), Best Sound Editing (Paul N.J. Ottosson) and Best Sound Mixing (Paul N.J. Ottosson and Ray Beckett).

Cinematographer Barry Ackroyd has shot almost 50 features with numerous directors, but when it comes time to discuss his work on Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker, his collaborations with two other helmers need to be referenced. The first is Ken Loach, the director Ackroyd is most associated with. The Manchester, England-born d.p. has shot many of Loach’s films, including Raining Stones, Ladybird Ladybird, Land and Freedom, the Palme d’Or-winning The Wind That Shakes the Barley, and his upcoming Looking for Eric. In these films he developed an unadorned, naturalistic camera and lighting style that gave them an almost doc-like verisimilitude. The other director is Paul Greengrass, whose movies also deliver the punch of real life but do so in different ways. Ackroyd shot Greengrass’s United 93, for which he was nominated for a BAFTA Best Cinematography Award, as well as his forthcoming Iraq-set thriller, Green Zone, which stars Matt Damon. Greengrass, who also directed the last two Bourne movies, is known for an electric, kinetic shooting and editing style that uses footage from multiple cameras mounted on all manner of rigs. Working with Bigelow on The Hurt Locker, Ackroyd drew on both approaches as he had to convey the realism of the film’s Iraq war setting while creating the material to accommodate the multiple perspectives required by Bigelow’s sophisticated approach to composition and montage.

“Kathryn and I had never worked together,” says Ackroyd. “We started out on this … Read the rest

KATHRYN BIGELOW’S HAIR… METAL

By Scott Macaulay

When I put together the clips for the “Young Person’s Guide to Kathryn Bigelow,” post below, there is one thing I left out. While scanning through her clips I did come across this music video for New Order’s “Touched by the Hand of God.” I don’t think I had ever seen it before, and I’ll confess that I initially stared at it trying to figure out if it was conceptual parody or whether New Order had had a mid-’80s hair-metal band image makeover I had somehow missed. (Correct answer: the former). Gray Miller posted this link below in the comments section, and he’s right — this should be out there for Bigelow completists.

… Read the rest

THE YOUNG PERSON’S GUIDE TO KATHRYN BIGELOW

By Scott Macaulay

A big congratulations to Kathryn Bigelow, Mark Boal, and the team behind The Hurt Locker for their well-deserved Academy Awards tonight. (I’m pretty sure it’s the first Filmmaker mag cover film to ever win Best Picture and Bigelow the first cover director to win Best Director.)

For any newcomers to Bigelow out there, here’s a quick history courtesy of YouTube. (Missing, unfortunately, is her 20-minute Columbia University student film The Set-Up. According to the New York Times‘ Manohla Dargis, it portrays “two men, including Gary Busey, fighting each other as the semioticians Sylvère Lotringer and Marshall Blonsky deconstruct the images in voice-over.”)

Bigelow’s first movie, 1982′s The Loveless, also happens to be Willem Dafoe’s proper debut. (Bigelow directed the film with her co-screenwriter, Monty Montgomery.)

A personal favorite, her vampire thriller Near Dark. Back in the day everyone was obsessed with actress Jenny Wright from this film.

Here is her Jamie Lee Curtis cop drama, Blue Steel, which, strangely, seems to be available on YouTube in a German version.

The amazing chase scene from Point Break.

The trailer for her cool and underrated Strange Days (produced by ex-husband James Cameron).

Five years passed between Strange Days and 2000′s The Weight of Water, which starred Sean Penn, Sarah Polley, and Elizabeth Hurley in an erotic-tinged mystery that flashed from present day back to 1873.

And then came K-19: The Widowmaker — Bigelow in mainstream mode with Harrison Ford.

Six more years would pass before Bigelow would premiere her next film, which is, of course, the Academy Award-winning The Hurt Locker. Read our interview with Bigelow about the film here.… Read the rest

TIME’S UP: KATHRYN BIGELOW’S THE HURT LOCKER |
By Nick Dawson

Leading up to the Oscars on March 7, we will be highlighting the nominated films that have appeared in the magazine or on the Website in the last year. Nick Dawson interviewed The Hurt Locker director Kathryn Bigelow for our Spring 2009 issue. The Hurt Locker is nominated for Best Picture, Best Director (Bigelow), Best Actor (Jeremy Renner), Original Screenplay (Mark Boal), Best Cinematography (Barry Ackroyd), Best Editing (Bob Murawski and Chris Innis), Best Original Score (Marco Beltrami and Buck Sanders), Best Sound Editing (Paul N.J. Ottosson) and Best Sound Mixing (Paul N.J. Ottosson and Ray Beckett).

Now that the end is in sight for the Iraq war, hopefully the whole cinematic idea of “Iraq War fatigue” will go along with it. The phrase has been thrown around by industry journalists as a catchall term to describe the average American’s ostensible lack of desire to watch films set against the Middle East conflict. But if there was ever a director who could turn the tide, it is Kathryn Bigelow, who has returned to features for the first time since 2002 with her new movie The Hurt Locker.

The film tells the story of army bomb disposal expert Sgt. Will James (the superb Jeremy Renner), who must survive the final 38 days of his detail in Iraq if he is to make it home to his wife and child. However, unlike the other two soldiers on his team, Sanborn (Anthony Mackie) and Eldridge (Brian Geraghty), James thrives on the intense risk and danger of having to diffuse roadside bombs and IEDs (improvised explosive devices) in the Baghdad war zone, day in and day out. His gonzo approach to his job makes him, for Sanborn and Eldridge, just as dangerous as the snipers on top of the surrounding rooftops.

Written by investigative journalist-turned-screenwriter Mark Boal, who embedded with a volunteer army bomb disposal squad in Iraq in 2004, The Hurt Locker is a riveting movie that vividly conveys what it’s like to be on the ground in Iraq. It concerns itself not with the politics of the war, but with the … Read the rest