Kevin Lally on Film

I first met Kathryn Bigelow in 1987, 23 years before she would become the first woman to win an Oscar as best director for The Hurt Locker, also named best picture. I was a big fan of her second feature, Near Dark, a unique blend of the vampire and western genres that was moody, violent and completely entertaining. Our interview went well—I only hoped that she hadn’t noticed that my pen had leaked all over my shirt pocket.

A few months later, I was on vacation in London. While riding in a cab to my hotel, I heard Bigelow’s voice inside my carry-on bag. After a few minutes of befuddlement, I realized the tape recorder with my interview had somehow hit play. Now here comes the eerie part: Waiting in the lobby of the Portobello Hotel, I heard an effusive shout of “Kevin!” Lo and behold, standing before me was Kathryn Bigelow. How very, very odd to have these two events coincide. I was flattered she remembered me. Maybe she hadn’t noticed the ink stain—or maybe it had made an impression.

There’s a sad postscript to this story. Fifteen years later, I interviewed Ms. Bigelow over the phone for her submarine thriller K-19: The Widowmaker. The session was going fine until I asked her about working with an all-male cast and she became highly irritated. Did I frame the question poorly? Was this the umpteenth time she’d been asked the same query? I’ll never know for sure, but the spell was broken.

Bigelow followed Near Dark with a string of visceral action films that have earned her a huge cult: Blue Steel, Strange Days, Point Break. But she surpassed herself with the gripping Hurt Locker. Here’s a look back at where it all began.

If Hollywood cast directors the way it casts performers, Kathryn Bigelow would be busy preparing the next Terms of Endearment or perhaps Fast Times at Ridgemont High II. But this tall, striking, soft-spoken former art student would rather be making The Wild Bunch or The Terminator, thank you. Or something like Near Dark, a gritty but sensual tale of modern-day vampires in Oklahoma which marks her solo directing debut, after co-directing 1982’s The Loveless with Monty Montgomery.

Bigelow takes pride in the fact that Near Dark—which boasts graphic bloodletting and hair-raising action along with seductive visuals—bears no resemblance to the traditional image of “a women’s film.” “For me, the notion of a woman’s aesthetic is limiting,” she argues. “To say that women have special vision kind of makes them impotent. The important thing is a common voice, a common eye—an eye that is not based on one’s sexuality. Somebody should be hired not because they’re a woman or a man but because their strength or their focus or their bent is in a certain direction. I think it’s important for women to do action pictures. Sam Peckinpah, Jim Cameron—those are my role models.”

While evoking action films of the past, Near Dark stakes out new territory with its loose approach to the movies’ hoary vampire mythology. Here, garlic and crosses have no discernible effect, and the film’s ragtag family of quasi-vampires can even function during the day if they stay indoors or remain shrouded from head to toe.

“It was fun to rethink and rework the myth—it’s time,” Bigelow says. “I thought it would be interesting to have characters that you pass all the time on the street. When people have fangs and are all done up, immediately you distance yourself: Okay, it’s supernatural, it’s horror, a ghost movie, whatever. But I think the more real they are, the more psychologically terrifying they become… We took everything that’s gothic away and made a hybrid, melded the vampire myth with a western. I really don’t see the film as in the horror genre, even though it trades on it. It’s an amalgamation of a lot of different strains. We also liked the notion of setting it in the American heartland, not an urban situation. Urban already means danger. But the American Midwest is a very comforting, comfortable ground—you don’t think of a situation like this happening there.”

Near Dark, which Bigelow co-wrote with Eric Red (The Hitcher), has several other threads running through it. Couched within the thrills and horror is a poignant romance between Caleb (Adrian Pasdar), an innocent farmboy, and Mae (Jenny Wright), the haunted teenage girl who draws him into her cutthroat clan. And with Caleb’s father (Tim Thomerson) hot on the trail of this bloodthirsty pack, the film becomes, in Bigelow’s words, “a story of two warring families, of fathers fighting for sons and keeping the family structure intact.” Along the way, Near Dark recalls everything from High Noon to Bonnie and Clyde to Badlands, and even Aliens, since Bigelow hired a trio of actors she admired from that film—Lance Henriksen, Bill Paxton and Jenette Goldstein—to play tough, rambunctious bloodsuckers.

Born in San Carlos, California, Bigelow studied painting at the San Francisco Art Institute and subsequently joined the Whitney Independent Study Program, which offers studio space to young artists and a dialogue with leading professionals in their field. Bigelow’s work evolved toward three-dimensional installations, and collaboration with a group of artists working under the banner “Art and Language.” She began her first short film, Set-Up, with a National Endowment of the Arts grant and completed it as a graduate student in Columbia University’s film school. Her first feature, The Loveless, a moody ’50s biker drama starring Willem Dafoe, was well-received but little-seen. But director Walter Hill liked it and helped Bigelow obtain a development deal at Universal Pictures. Eventually, Bigelow connected with Red, and their screenplay for Near Dark got a green light from The Hitcher producer Edward S. Feldman over the course of one weekend.

Though Bigelow comes from a visually oriented background—which is reflected in Near Dark’s handsome, evocative look—she emphasizes, “Basically, I’m interested in telling a good story. But when I’m writing I see it—I feel like I’m recording the images to a certain extent. The Loveless was, I think, more consciously visual, because there was less to rely on other than a good cast. But here, I consciously tried to let the story be paramount. I boarded the whole picture, I knew every shot I wanted, but the focus constantly was story and character. If I could keep all that intact, I knew you would come away with something that would at least be engaging, and the visuals would just fall into place.”

Bigelow says she’s fascinated by the film medium’s blend of imagery and movement. “Visual films that are just sort of static don’t work. The more visceral and kinetic you can make it, the better—it should be one long adrenaline drive. An audience needs to be slapped, or wants to be—it’s a really interesting ritual.”

And what about Bigelow’s interest in violence? Where does that come from? “I don’t know. I’ve been asking myself that for a long time. I’m attracted to it, but not in a vicarious sense—violence for the sake of violence. I’m interested in it because it produces a strong, potent emotion—that’s what excites me.”

Bigelow viewed the special effects and stunts in Near Dark as “a big, fun, wonderful challenge… It’s a matter of surrounding yourself with people whose work evidences exactly what you’re looking for. For instance, on makeup effects I found Gordon Smith. I saw Platoon about three months before it opened and thought it had the best makeup effects I’d ever seen. I got him working right away, because I needed people to [give off] smoke, and I was working with minors. Because of the whole Twilight Zone incident, your hands are really tied. Formerly, for instance, in Aliens, if you wanted people to smoke, you’d use something called AB smoke—vinegar and a toxic chemical that produce smoke when they come in contact with each other. That’s something you can’t use around minors. Also, until Gordon devised it, I couldn’t find an existing smoking apparatus that somebody could wear without being always attached to something. I wanted a freestanding individual that smoked—without a toxic chemical. That didn’t exist. But you know the end result you want and you just get there.”

In directing big action set-pieces like Near Dark’s exciting motel shootout, Bigelow warns, “You have to be very, very careful and make sure that no one is working at cross purposes. You have to be very clear and keep everything calm and ordered. Especially on this film—we had fire, effects, major stunts, and we had kids.”

Bigelow praises her Aliens trio. “Lance, Bill and Jenette are extraordinary actors. It was like inheriting an ensemble—the bonding was already completed and it was just infectious. [Casting them] wasn’t unconscious but it wasn’t conscious either—they were just perfect for the characters and it was just a tremendous added advantage that they had worked together before.”

As for her young leads, Pasdar and Wright, Bigelow says, “Adrian saves a group of lethal, psychopathic killers, yet you still feels he’s innocent. He plays a nice, clean, no-hidden-agenda character, and that’s not easy. And you retain sympathy for Jenny even though she is a character who kills. Yet when she kills, she’s absolutely convincing. But I don’t see them as killers—they’re feeding. All of them are at the mercy of the situation. They just happen to have turned it into a kind of erotic, pleasurable, ritualistic experience.”

Near Dark is currently streaming on The Criterion Channel as part of its ’80s Horror collection.