Where to begin with Kathryn Bigelow

Trained as a painter and hailing from the elite art scene of 1970s New York, Kathryn Bigelow instead became a Hollywood maverick who embraced populist genre cinema. If her 1980s and early 1990s titles focused on the intoxicating allure of screen violence, or the threat of it, complete with seductive images and edgy attitudes, her later 21st-century films tackle social, historic and political topics in closer to realist terms. This switch, this reinvention, gives her filmography a bisected quality. The throughline lies in a consistent ability to craft gripping stories and heart-pounding, action-orientated sequences across genres and subject matter.

On being a woman in a male-dominated industry, Bigelow once said, paraphrasing poet Getrude Stein, “A filmmaker is a filmmaker is a filmmaker,” and “Action is action.” But then she also said: “A woman can handle something perceived as masculine, but then you have to ask yourself, why is it perceived as masculine?” 

Clearly not one to be pinned down, she has repeatedly dismissed the notion there is anything particularly gendered about the job of director, her overall artistic vision or preoccupation with violence. She didn’t mention the historic nature of her best director Oscar (for The Hurt Locker) when stood at the podium in 2010 as the first woman ever to win the award. If this stance can seem aloof, frustrating even, the films themselves are rich in critiques of masculinity and do explore feminist angles and concerns. They’re just not overtly didactic.

Without Point Break there would be no bomb on the bus (Speed, 1994), no Neo (The Matrix, 1999), no John Wick (2014). Bigelow was convinced, despite studio opposition, that Keanu Reeves could be moulded into a new type of American action hero. So on that score alone Point Break is significant in the development of Reeves’ star persona and career direction. On other fronts, it’s tremendous and elegant technical filmmaking packed with unforgettable imagery and endlessly quotable dialogue.

Point Break is also one of Bigelow’s typically subversive takes on generic tropes and spectacle, placing its sacred and profane contrasts behind both a gonzo, cowabunga spirit and a crime fantasy plot. The antihero is a charismatic surfer-dude who expounds on spirituality in between robbing banks in a Ronald Reagan mask to fund his thrill-seeking, layabout lifestyle on Malibu beaches. The hero in turn is a puppyish hothead who spouts off about law and order while generally causing more harm than good. Johnny Utah (Reeves) is willingly seduced by Patrick Swayze’s Bodhi and at points in the film they switch roles, and we switch allegiances: as the men take turns as the protagonist and the antagonist, we in the audience are as much taken in by Bohdi as Johnny is. 

Point Break is mesmerisingly high-octane, strapping together muscular blockbuster frolics and highfalutin philosophy. With its hilariously reckless lawman and soulful crook, anti-corporate living ideals versus cold hard capitalist needs, Bigelow and her crew orchestrated a singular slice of American mayhem set under the California sun.

Before Edward and Bella, before Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel, there was farm boy Caleb and vampire Mae. Bigelow’s Arizona-set horror film Near Dark (1987) stripped away the overly familiar gothic elements of vampirism and its accompanying iconography (no fangs), replacing them with those of the cowboy flick. In doing so, Bigelow fashioned a work that is erotically charged (rarely has the night itself felt so seductive on the screen), achingly romantic and impressively savage.

Next up, check out the psychosexual thriller Blue Steel (1990), in which Jamie Lee Curtis’s rookie copper is targeted by a Wall Street psycho (Ron Silver) armed with a stolen gun. Aspects of S&M play are embedded next to obvious Hollywood actioner leanings, Bigelow a dab hand at implanting transgressive themes into potboiler material.

She pulled off this trick again with the scopophilia-themed Strange Days (1995), the Y2K tech-noir dystopia penned by James Cameron and Jay Cocks. In its use of social themes (race riots and corrupt law enforcement), we can see here seeds of her future direction of travel. Gone is the OTT brutality coloured as thrilling. Indeed, Strange Days earned critical opprobrium for its queasy POV-filmed rape scene. Throughout her career, Bigelow has been met with the same question: why are your films so violent? She has argued that women think about violence a lot because they’re so often the victims of it. She wasn’t being glib; she was stating a fact. The rape scene is stomach-churning for a reason. Power and power structures are a recurring thread in her films, in various guises, and Strange Days offers shrewd comment on the excesses of cinema as a technology offering vicarious thrills. Her films do not trade in nihilism.

If Strange Days planted seeds, nautical thriller K-19: The Widowmaker (2002) is the transitional moment. Headlined by Harrison Ford and Liam Neeson, it’s set in the 1960s and details a truly perilous but long-suppressed moment in mid-20th century history, in which a destabilised Russian nuclear sub was on the brink of accidentally launching World War III. Its new embrace of realism paved the way for the adrenaline-fuelled nightmare tragedy of post-war Iraq in The Hurt Locker (2008), the obsessive and vengeance-seeking manhunt for Osama bin Laden in Zero Dark Thirty (2012) and the recounting of a 1960s race riot in Detroit (2017). Increasingly, she staged scenes with extensive use of handheld camera from all manner of angles and distances, mimicking news reportage or live sports coverage, complemented by montage designed to wring every ounce of nerve-shredding tension from a scene – a creative rewiring of her thinking on both action and drama.

In between her two distinct epochs, there is the curious case of The Weight of Water (2000) – a literary adaptation and her most experimental picture within the commercial realm. There are two timelines: one a modern day Chabrol-like tale of the darkness and dissatisfaction lurking beneath well-to-do bourgeois lives, the other a true-crime melodrama set in 1870s New Hampshire. Generally written off and ignored, this is her take on the ‘women’s picture’ and, as you’ll expect having gone through her filmography by now, more dark and probing than a feminist rally cry. We get a Lizzie Borden-style double murder, simmering female anger and a mix of love rivalry, sexual repression, lust, desire and shame igniting calamity.

A languidly paced biker melodrama starring a vampiric-looking Willem Dafoe, Bigelow’s film debut The Loveless (1981) – co-written and co-directed with Monty Montgomery – screams of her art school background. It’s heavily inspired by the paintings of Edward Hopper and the homoerotic Americana of Kenneth Anger films such as Scorpio Rising (1963). Here, though, in embryonic form, we may glean the director’s interests in genre hybridity, outsider figures and the past.

Point Break is back in cinemas in a 4K restoration from 8 November.

Art of Action plays in cinemas across the UK and online on BFI Player from October to December 2024.