For directing The Hurt Locker, Bigelow became the first woman to win the Academy Award for Best Director, the Directors Guild of America Award for Outstanding Directing, and the BAFTA Award for Best Direction.
33 Facts About Kathryn Bigelow
2.
Kathryn Bigelow was the first woman to win the Saturn Award for Best Director, with Strange Days.
3.
Kathryn Bigelow attended Sunny Hills High School in Fullerton, California.
4.
Kathryn Bigelow enrolled at San Francisco Art Institute in the fall of 1970 and received her Bachelor of Fine Arts in December 1972.
5.
Kathryn Bigelow had a minor role in Richard Serra's video Prisoner's Dilemma.
6.
Kathryn Bigelow teamed up with Philip Glass on a real-estate venture in which they renovated distressed apartments downtown and sold them for a profit.
7.
Kathryn Bigelow entered the graduate film program at Columbia University, where she studied theory and criticism and earned her master's degree.
8.
Kathryn Bigelow taught at the California Institute of the Arts.
9.
Kathryn Bigelow's short The Set-Up is a 20-minute deconstruction of violence in film.
10.
Kathryn Bigelow followed Blue Steel with the cult classic Point Break, which starred Keanu Reeves as an FBI agent who poses as a surfer to catch the "Ex-Presidents", a team of surfing armed robbers led by Patrick Swayze who wear Reagan, Nixon, LBJ and Jimmy Carter masks when they hold up banks.
11.
Furthermore, many attributed the creative vision to Cameron, diminishing Kathryn Bigelow's perceived influence on the film.
12.
Kathryn Bigelow directed three episodes of Homicide: Life on the Street in 1997 and 1998.
13.
Kathryn Bigelow next directed The Hurt Locker, which was first shown at the Venice Film Festival in September 2008, was the Closing Night selection for Maryland Film Festival in May 2009, and theatrically released in the US in June 2009.
14.
Kathryn Bigelow won the Directors Guild of America award for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Motion Pictures and received a Golden Globe nomination for her direction.
15.
Kathryn Bigelow became the first woman to receive an Academy Award for Best Director for The Hurt Locker.
16.
Kathryn Bigelow was the fourth woman in history to be nominated for the honor, and only the second American woman.
17.
Kathryn Bigelow won the New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Director for the film, making her the first woman to win the award twice.
18.
Kathryn Bigelow had already won previously for directing The Hurt Locker.
19.
Kathryn Bigelow was the first woman to receive the National Board of Review Award for Best Director.
20.
Kathryn Bigelow collaborated with Mark Boal for the third time on the film Detroit, set during the 1967 Detroit riots.
21.
Kathryn Bigelow served as executive producer of Triple Frontier, a film that she was originally going to direct.
22.
Kathryn Bigelow gave up directing duties to J C Chandor to focus on projects.
23.
In 2022, Kathryn Bigelow was nominated by the Directors Guild of America for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Commercials for Apple's "Hollywood In Your Pocket".
24.
In 2014, Kathryn Bigelow announced plans to direct two movies: an adaptation of Anand Giridharadas's non-fiction book The True American: Murder and Mercy in Texas starring Tom Hardy and a feature based on the life of Bowe Bergdahl written by Mark Boal.
25.
Kathryn Bigelow has a shifting relationship with Hollywood and its conventional film standards and techniques.
26.
Kathryn Bigelow has had success with conventional Hollywood cinema techniques as well as creating her own unique style that pushes against mainstream conventions.
27.
The film was conceived as a Western but the genre was so unpopular at the time that Kathryn Bigelow had to adjust her script and invert the genre conventions.
28.
Kathryn Bigelow still used the violent staples of the genre including sieges, shoot-outs, and horseback chases.
29.
Kathryn Bigelow herself saw it screened in Greenwich Village with a horror genre crowd.
30.
Similarly to Near Dark, Kathryn Bigelow inverts the typical action genre conventions by placing a female protagonist at the center.
31.
In Point Break, while filming the skydiving scene, Kathryn Bigelow was on the airplane with a parachute on, as she filmed Patrick Swayze throw himself into the sky.
32.
Kathryn Bigelow's acting credits include Lizzie Borden's 1983 film Born in Flames as a feminist newspaper editor, and as the leader of a cowgirl gang in the 1988 music video of Martini Ranch's "Reach", which was directed by James Cameron.
33.
Kathryn Bigelow was married to director James Cameron from 1989 to 1991.