The Hurt Locker: Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal

Marshall, Kingsley ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2518-7305 (2013) The Hurt Locker: Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal. In: Kathryn Bigelow: Conversations. University of Mississippi Press, Mississippi, USA. ISBN 978-1617037740

Abstract / Summary

'The Hurt Locker', Kathryn Bigelow’s war film centered around a three-man U.S. Explosive Ordnance Disposal team, swept the Academy Awards in 2010. The movied collected six Oscars from nine nominations, including Best Director for Bigelow, Best Original Screenplay for its writer, Mark Boal, awards for Sound Editing and Sound Mixing, as well as Best Picture at the ceremony.

Bigelow’s first feature since 'K-19' in 2002 was a close collaboration with Boal, whose screenplay was seeded in his profile of elite bomb technician Jeffrey Sarver, entitled “The Man in the Bomb Suit”, first published in 'Playboy' magazine.

The resultant film was some distance from the adrenaline of Bigelow’s breakthrough features Blue Steel or Point Break, with a tone closer to the war portrayed in David Simon’s television series 'Generation Kill' for HBO, in that it focused not on the wider context of conflicts, but those who fight them. Like Simon’s account of the conflict in the Gulf, both projects were seeded in the observation of embedded journalism. The origins of 'Generation Kill' were seeded in the book by Rolling Stone’s Evan Wright, who rode with a U.S. Marine recon unit at the start of the second Iraq invasion in 2001, while Mark Boal’s script for 'The Hurt Locker' came about through his experiences as a reporter embedded with a bomb disposal team in Baghdad.

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