When I pulled up to Kathryn Bigelow’s house in upstate New York last month, I couldn’t figure out where she was. Some years back, Bigelow moved from Los Angeles after enduring one too many fires. She has been riding horses since childhood, and whenever a fire broke out, she would rush to where she had stabled hers, load them in a trailer and drive off, trying to keep ahead of the flames. She now owns a sweeping estate, where she keeps a few bays and some other people’s horses. When I finally spotted her that day, she was walking out of a barn, her silhouette as strikingly backlit and framed as any image in one of her movies.
The first time we met was in 2009, just before “The Hurt Locker” opened. An anguished drama about an American bomb-disposal team in the Iraq war, the movie quickly racked up critics’ prizes, going on to receive nine Oscar nominations. On March 7, 2010, when Barbra Streisand took the stage at the Academy Awards to present best director, I flashed on the fact that Streisand had never been nominated in this category. “Well, the time has come,” Streisand said before calling out “Kathryn Bigelow,” who that night became the first woman to win that award. Soon after, Bigelow returned to pick up the Oscar for best picture. Suddenly, the world’s attention was on a female director, a gendered category that she’d long resisted.
THE LEAVES HAD JUST started changing color when I sat down with Bigelow, 73. She is slender and narrowly built, and has a delicate thrumming energy that brings to mind a hummingbird, if one that’s nearly six feet tall. She laughs easily, and while she listens attentively, she also maintains a reserve during interviews that feels self-protective.
It was a month nearly to the day before her newest movie, “A House of Dynamite,” would open in theaters. (It starts streaming on Netflix on Oct. 24.) It’s a tense, what-if thriller that turns on the efforts of American government and military personnel who try to stop an intercontinental ballistic missile of unknown origin from hitting the continental United States. It was especially unnerving watching the movie several months after the Trump administration had fired, then unfired some 300 employees of the National Nuclear Security Administration, the agency charged with the readiness of America’s nuclear arsenal.
Sitting in a bright, elegant room in her late-18th-century farmhouse, Bigelow explained that she was interested in, as she put it, “the inflection point between film and journalism or information.” Since “The Weight of Water” (2002), all of her movies have been informed in some fashion, with degrees of verisimilitude, by the world offscreen. She’s especially drawn to extremes, which has been true since her student film, “Set-Up” (1978), a short in which two men beat each other up while two male semioticians deconstruct the action.
Bigelow’s interest in violence, power, masculinity and film form have been evident in her work from the start. The first half of her moviemaking career was defined by bold genre films that allowed her to experiment with and, at times, push against narrative conventions. In her neo-western “Near Dark” (1987), a young man rides with a de facto family of vampires that roams for prey in an R.V. with blacked-out windows. In “Blue Steel” (1990), Jamie Lee Curtis plays a cop unknowingly involved with a serial killer, while in “Point Break” (1991), Keanu Reeves is an F.B.I. agent who goes undercover to infiltrate a gang of bank-robbing surfers. Bigelow shifted gears, though, with “The Weight of Water,” an adaptation of an Anita Shreve novel that revisits a real double murder that took place in 1873 on an island off the coast of Maine.
“A House of Dynamite” is the second movie Bigelow has made about the nuclear threat. Her first, the thriller “K-19: The Widowmaker” (2002), centered on a nuclear reactor meltdown on a Soviet submarine in 1961, a disaster “inspired by actual events.” Starring Harrison Ford and Liam Neeson, it was her most expensive and most formally conventional film, the closest to a straight Hollywood thriller she had made. Like “The Weight of Water,” it flopped. It was years before she made another feature, “The Hurt Locker.” She scaled back partly to retain control of it, shooting in Jordan on a small budget. Bigelow wanted, as she told Slant magazine in 2009, to give the audience a “boots-on-the-ground, you-are-there look” at bomb disposal, which required “a kind of presentational, reportorial, immediate, raw, visceral approach.”
BIGELOW’S INTEREST IN TELLING real stories, or, rather, her interpretations of them, has at times led to sharp criticisms of her movies, most notably “Zero Dark Thirty” (2012). Written by Mark Boal and starring Jessica Chastain as a C.I.A. analyst, the movie and its representation of the agency’s torture of Qaeda suspects became a flashpoint even before its release. Among its critics were three senators, Dianne Feinstein, Carl Levin and John McCain, who sent a letter condemning the movie to Michael Lynton, then the chairman and chief executive of Sony Pictures Entertainment. The senators called it “factually inaccurate” for suggesting that torture had directly resulted in information that led to Osama bin Laden’s location.
Bigelow says now that she was “mystified” by the more vociferous reactions to the movie. She also said that McCain and Feinstein left after the first 20 minutes and missed the part in which a brutal C.I.A. operative played by Jason Clarke receives information after giving a prisoner food and a cigarette, a moment based on “a generous gesture, as opposed to a harm,” she said. If the torture scenes outraged many, I think it’s also partly because of Bigelow’s unflinching eye for violence. It doesn’t help that the C.I.A. analysts aren’t punished for their actions, as audiences expect from screen villains, that no one delivers a Sorkin-esque speech about the immorality of torture and that Chastain looks impossibly glamorous throughout.
“A House of Dynamite” is a safer movie in part because it addresses a freaky truth that, I imagine, is an abstraction for many who didn’t grow up with duck-and-cover drills. “I’d love to initiate, or help initiate, a conversation about reducing the nuclear stockpile,” Bigelow said.
It’s her first feature since “Detroit” (2017), a drama about racial unrest in that city after a 1967 police raid on a bar. “Detroit” is predictably well-directed but her interest in authenticity and in violence felt too untethered to history and the very Black bodies under assault. Writing in The Ringer, the critic K. Austin Collins cut right to a central failing: “How do you make a movie about a political act as overwhelming as a citywide riot that never wonders whether the rioters — in this case, the Black population of Detroit — have a political imagination?”
In the eight years since “Detroit,” Bigelow at times seemed to disappear. There were, of course, some extenuating issues, including the pandemic as well as two labor strikes in 2023 that shut down the movie industry for half a year and from which the business has yet to fully recover. Her name occasionally showed up in the trades attached to projects, including a 2022 documentary series on the pandemic that went forward and an adaptation of David Koepp’s novel “Aurora” that didn’t. At one point, Bigelow told her agent that she was thinking about the nuclear stockpile, which led to a meeting in late 2023 with the writer Noah Oppenheim. They worked fast and by the next summer, she was shooting “A House of Dynamite.”
It has largely been well-received, but it hasn’t stirred up the excitement (or controversy) that Bigelow’s earlier work has. One hurdle is the movie industry, which remains in a state of ongoing paralytic crisis. People no longer are in the filmgoing habit, for one, and it’s tough seducing them into theaters for a nonevent, adult movie that isn’t part of a franchise. Another problem is Netflix, which gave “A House of Dynamite” a limited theatrical release for two weeks in advance of the streaming date. (Netflix bankrolled it, making it her first studio-financed movie.) Moviemakers like working with Netflix because of its extremely deep pockets, but its movies have little to no sustained cultural afterlife and disappear quickly.
I ASKED BIGELOW what winning the Oscars had meant to her. I knew what it had meant to me and many other women. She said that she was proud and grateful, and edged into boilerplate. Bigelow isn’t a braggart and doesn’t seem to like talking about herself; I think I embarrassed her. I get it. The Oscars are glamorous tokens of esteem that the members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences bestow on themselves and select others. The award ceremonies are absurd, yes, and they have helped obscure the industry’s uglier sides, though in the past few decades that glamour has been chipped away by criticisms about the industry’s sexism and racism. But the Oscars can bring material benefits, including greater recognition and the kind of bigger budgets that give directors larger train sets to play with.
More important, though — at least to many of us — is the symbolism of the awards, what they say about who is allowed to make movies and what kind and how big, and who is worthy of being celebrated and who is not. For a long time, viewers tuning into the Oscars who weren’t cinephiles may not have known that women even directed fiction films, that they have done so throughout the history of motion pictures and indeed helped invent the art as we know it. Bigelow has always been reluctant to talk about being a female director, a reticence that she’s expressed repeatedly even as she steadily became an exemplar of female achievement.
“It ghettoizes women,” she said when I broached the topic and said I sympathized with her. “Yeah, you’re not a writer,” Bigelow told me, “you’re a woman writer, right?”
In the years since “The Hurt Locker,” only one other woman has walked off with best director: Chloé Zhao, who won in 2021 for her drama “Nomadland,” also a best picture winner. Like Bigelow’s Oscars, Zhao’s were a part of a larger, continuing cultural shift toward women in the industry. This shift didn’t happen overnight or by accident. It happened over decades of women pushing against sexism, calling out abuse, fighting for the right to take on decision-making roles in the mainstream and, like Bigelow did from the start, becoming independent filmmakers. One way that she has exerted her independence is by refusing to adhere to ideas about what women can do and what kind of movies they make. And if Bigelow now prefers to make movies about the world, I have to think it’s partly because she too has made history.
Manohla Dargis is the chief film critic for The Times.
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