“It’s definitely a style of filmmaking I respond to,” [Kathryn 'Hurt Locker'] Bigelow says over shots of espresso (what else?) in Beverly Hills. “It just seems to be a really engaging use of the medium. Cinema has the capacity to be so physiological. Prose can be reflective. I’m not sure cinema can be as reflective as that, but it can definitely propel you into an event and cause your heart to race.” She pauses, laughing. “If that’s the desired response.”

You get the feeling that for Bigelow, it’s the only response. Pinning her down on influences is tough, but eventually she’ll cop to a love for the movies of Sam Peckinpah (She’s hosting a screening of “The Wild Bunch” in January) and Don Siegel (“Dirty Harry”), whose work, she says, possesses a “muscularity that comes with formidable and surprising intelligence.”

“Those movies sweep you away, and you’re incapable of resisting,” she enthuses. “They’re entertaining and substantive. That’s always what I’m trying to do too.”

…

The going hasn’t always been easy. Bigelow has made just seven feature films in her career, and her last movie, the $100-million-budgeted submarine action thriller “K-19: The Widowmaker,” grossed only $65 million worldwide. Bigelow bristles at the widely held perception that “K-19″ cooled her career. She paid the bills by shooting commercials A Pirelli spot with Uma Thurman, makes for a thrilling eight minutes) but spent most of her time working on projects with Boal.

“I’ve always developed my own pieces, and people don’t realize how time-consuming that is,” says Bigelow, who first worked with Boal on the short-lived 2003 Fox TV series “The Inside.” “With ‘The Hurt Locker,’ we started working on the script in 2005, raised the money in 2006, shot it in 2007 and then cut it. You turn around and five years have passed.”

Bigelow sees “The Hurt Locker” as the “Holy Grail of filmmaking,” an entertaining genre movie that opens a window into a current event. Five years ago, Boal told Bigelow that he was going to Baghdad to be “embedded” with a bomb squad and suggested that his reporting might make for the kind of intense movie suited to Bigelow’s skill set. Both believed the war had been under-reported. Both believed a character-based action movie might give people of all political stripes a palpable understanding of life on the front lines.

“This conflict has been so politicized,” Bigelow says. “I thought maybe this would be a way for people to meet at the point where one man in a 100-pound bomb suit is walking toward a suspicious amount of wires in a rubble pile and trying to operate very quickly to avoid his coordinates being called in for a sniper attack. To me, that brings this conflict into sharp focus.”

It also is bringing in a sudden new award cachet, with honors already coming in from AFI, the L.A. Film Critics Assn. and the New York Film Critics Circle. Bigelow and Boal have become strong Oscar contenders as well.

… Bigelow told him to keep the story as close to his reporting as possible. Given that a day in the life of a bomb technician comes fully equipped with inherent danger, Bigelow figured her job as a filmmaker was simply to get out of the way and present the story.

“You definitely don’t have to amplify it,” she says. “I remember being on the set, watching Jeremy [Renner, who plays the team leader of the movie's Explosive Ordinance Disposal unit] fishing through some rubble, picking up those wires. And I’m looking at it on a monitor and glancing over at him 25 feet away — and I’m anxious for him.

“There’s just something physiological that happens when you imagine the potential of what he’s working with,” Bigelow says. “Yet, we’re creating it as a film. But just realizing that, you know as a filmmaker you can step aside and simply reveal the drama.”

From The Envelope by Glenn Whipp