Adapting from a Real Life Event: Part FIVE - The Hurt Locker (Kathryn Bigelow, 2008)

Kathryn Bigelow

Bigelow is the First and ONLY female Director to win the Best Director Award at the Oscars.

Link Below: Bigelow's acceptance speech

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-DPBOTlSWk












At the Academy Awards, The Hurt Locker won 6 awards out the 9 it was nominated for:

• Best Director 
• Best Picture
• Best Original Screenplay
• Best Sound Editing
• Best Sound Mixing
• Best Film Editing

The Hurt Locker (Kathryn Bigelow, 2008)

Independently produced and directed by Bigelow, this small $15 million budget film went onto the be classed as one of the best modern-day adaptations of a real-life story.

The screenplay was written by Mark Boal (who won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay). Boal was a freelance writer and an Embedded Journalist (news report attached to a military unit during combat) in 2004 in Iraq. He was with the US Army EOD Team.

The three main stars of the film are:

1. Jeremy Renner (Sergeant First Class William James)
2. Anthony Mackie (Sergeant J. T. Sanborn)
3. Brian Geraghty (Specialist Owen Eldridge)

Adaptation

BOAL 

Film's Goal: "The idea is that it's the first movie about the Iraq War that purports to show the experience of the soldiers. We wanted to show the kinds of things that soldiers go through that you can't see on CNN, and I don't mean that in a censorship-conspiracy way. I just mean the news doesn't actually put photographers in with units that are this elite."

BIGELOW 

was engrossed in exploring: "the psychology behind the type of soldier who volunteers for this particular conflict and then, because of [their] aptitude, is chosen and given the opportunity to go into bomb disarmament and goes toward what everybody else is running from."

stressed that authenticity was important and wanted to "put the audience into the Humvee, into a boots-on-the-ground experience."