Kathryn Bigelow's Shot at Oscar History

This story was originally published on Feb. 28, 2010. It was updated on July 9, 2010.

Kathryn Bigelow is a film director who made a movie almost no one went to see, about a subject - the Iraq war - the Hollywood studios were afraid of. And yet her film, "The Hurt Locker," beat out the biggest grossing movie of all time, "Avatar," for best picture at the Oscars. And she became the first woman ever to win for best director.

Bigelow, who has been making movies for more than 30 years, became known for her high-intensity action films, but none of them received as much critical acclaim as "The Hurt Locker."

As "60 Minutes" reported earlier this year, we met Bigelow after the Oscar nominations were announced but before the envelopes were opened.

Photo Essay: Kathryn Bigelow
Photo Essay: "The Hurt Locker"
Web Extra: Why This Film?
Web Extra: Outgunning The Guys
Web Extra: Friendly Competition
Web Extra: Getting Into Character
Web Extra: A Kathryn Bigelow Film

Critics say that Bigelow's "The Hurt Locker" is the best war movie made in years, and there was an irony in the fact that it was up against James Cameron's movie, "Avatar."

"How sweet is this to be head to head with your ex husband? Incredible that the two films were made by people who were married to each other," Stahl asked.

"You couldn't have scripted it," Bigelow replied, laughing.

"There's this whole thing that's going on where people love to, they love to create a headline: 'Battle of the exes,' you know, 'War of the roses.' We were married two decades ago for a brief period of time and we've been friends and collaborators since," Cameron said.

As we talked about this with Bigelow at a ranch where she escapes from the hoopla of Hollywood, she said she and Cameron are now such good friends they swapped scripts and early versions of each other's movies.

"When he saw 'Hurt Locker,' did he say, 'You ought to do this, you ought to do that'?" Stahl asked.

"He said 'cut negative,'" Bigelow said. "Cut negative means you're done editing."

"Cut negative means it's perfect?" Stahl asked.

"It was a big compliment," Bigelow explained.

And her little movie ended up with just as many Oscar nominations at Cameron's blockbuster, nine for both.

"I was stunned, shocked, thrilled beyond belief," Bigelow said.

Nominations include best actor, best screenplay, best picture and best director.

In "The Hurt Locker" - a riveting two hours filled with fear and violence - Bigelow shows how terrifying it is for a bomb squad in Iraq.

By using wobbly hand-held cameras, Bigelow heightens the tension and the sense of immediacy: she wants the audience to feel like the fourth member of the bomb squad.

"The ground just erupts, out of nowhere. I mean, it's just an incredibly harrowing, dangerous, volatile environment," she told Stahl.

She sees the film both as anti-war, and as a tribute to the soldiers who sign up to do this kind of work.

"These are men and women who volunteer, who are there by choice, who are walking toward what you and I and perhaps the rest of the world would run from. And they arguably have the most dangerous job in the world, yet they're there by choice," she explained.

"They don't know where to look. They don't know," Stahl remarked.

"You don't know where to look. It's an invisible enemy. And you don't know if the man on the third floor balcony is shaking out a rug or calling in a sniper strike," Bigelow said.

But beneath all the action is a film about the psyche of soldiers under siege. Bigelow opens the movie with a quote: "The rush of battle is often a potent and lethal addiction, for war is a drug."

"But it's also a sense of meaning and purpose that nothing else in your life can replicate, except the battlefield," Bigelow explained.

Her main character, Sergeant Will James, can only function when his life is in danger. He's a go-it-alone cowboy who breaks the rules and terrifies his squad members with reckless behavior.

He's fearless. As he looks for bombs, and when he defuses one, he then has to deal with the usual secondaries.

"It never stops in this movie. Really. It's one intense moment, right after the next," Stahl remarked. "Without let up."

"Without let up," Bigelow agreed.

"She likes to watch, and she captures. She's a painter," Jeremy Renner, who plays Sgt. James, told Stahl.

"I don't know anybody who has seen this movie who says, 'I can't believe a woman directed this movie.' The violence, the 'machoness,'" Stahl remarked.

"What does having a set of ovaries have to do with directing a film? It's through her eyes that she sees. Not through her mammaries or anything else that defines her as a woman, right?" Renner said.

"This muscular, somewhat violent world that she's attracted to - do you understand what she's drawn to there?" Stahl asked.

"I think the idea of war and conflict fascinates her. And so it's something that's out there in the world that she's trying to understand. I think she also takes pride in the fact that she can outgun the guys, you know. That just in pure technique, just pure game, she's got more game than most of the male directors out there," James Cameron replied.

Bigelow is 58, and "The Hurt Locker" is her eighth movie. And if she has a signature, it's exactly that: a concentration on tough guys like Harrison Ford and Liam Neeson in "K-19: The Widowmaker," and on dare devils like Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze in "Point Break," a movie about an FBI agent who goes after a ring of bank robbers.

"I'm drawn to provocative characters that find themselves in extreme situations. And I think I'm drawn to that consistently," Bigelow told Stahl

She's been drawn to it ever since the early 70s when she was in New York studying painting and one night went to the movies with some friends.

The film was Sam Peckinpah's "The Wild Bunch," a Western known as much for its body count as its art.

"It was visceral," she remembered.

"Very violent, it could be very bloody," Stahl remarked.

"Very, very visceral, very, you know, and you were just enraptured by this material," Bigelow said.

Enraptured, because she realized that unlike painting, film could make you physically feel what the characters in the film were feeling. According to Bigelow, one of her professors described it as "scopophilia"

"Scopophilia, which is the desire to watch and identify with what you're watching," she told Stahl.

"Is that when you said, 'It has to be film. I have to make movies'?" Stahl asked.

"It was like suddenly I had woken up from a drought and there was water in front of me, and I was just, I couldn't get enough," Bigelow recalled.

Watch "The Hurt Locker" and you do feel what the characters feel: as in a sniper scene where the unit is pinned down, all day long, out in the desert.

The audience feels the fear, the heat and the thirst.

Bigelow shot the movie almost entirely in Jordan, part of it in a Palestinian refugee camp.

And she used displaced Iraqis as characters and extras. With a measly $11 million budget, the actors and crew had to take their breaks in Bedouin tents - no air conditioning, for anyone.

"I think what was in our head was to survive any given day. I mean, you're in the Middle East, you're in the summer. You've got sand storms, wind storms, probably an average of 115 to 120 degree heat. Your lead actor is in a 100-pound bomb suit," Bigelow recalled.

The cast had other challenges, since Bigelow often shot takes with four cameras rolling simultaneously, never telling the actors where the cameras were. Anthony Mackie plays Sergeant J.T. Sanborn.

"I'd never shot a movie like that before, so it was always…," Mackey explained.

"You always knew where the camera was," Stahl remarked.

"Always," Mackie recalled.

"And had to worry about it. And this," Stahl said.

"What was my good side? Where my light was coming from? How should I talk to you? That's how you make movies," Mackey said.

But he acknowledged this was different.

"This was almost like a documentary," Stahl remarked.

Bigelow held a screening of the film for some real bomb-squad veterans. They agreed with her about the addiction of war - that the adrenaline rush in what they do creates a craving for more.

Jim O'Neill, who heads a foundation that helps bomb squad techs, told about one tech who got wounded. "Lost a leg - got blown up. Has lost a leg from the knee down, and he's over there in Afghanistan," he told Stahl.

The tech is back. "Wearing the bomb suit with a prosthetic," O'Neill explained. "That's the personality. I mean it's incredible, incredible."

Brad Somerville worked on a bomb squad in Baghdad. "After you've been there for a long period of time doing this over and over and going down range and you come home, there's an empty feeling inside," he said.

They think Bigelow nailed it when she showed how difficult it was for Sgt. James to go home. He couldn't relate to his wife, and couldn't even function when he went to the grocery store to buy a box of cereal.

"The image... the one that I took away the most was at the very end... was him walking through the grocery store. And that was the one that got me 'cause it was 'WOW, it's not happening anymore, and I'm back here and it's not real. It's all back there.' And I can remember seeing him walking down the aisles and his mind going, 'What do I do now?'" Somerville said.

In a clip, Sgt. James talked to his son: "The older you get, the fewer things you really love. By the time you get to my age, maybe it's only one or two things. With me, I think it's one."

Bigelow ends her movie with Sgt. James leaving his son and going back to the war.

"It was crushing to think he needed that rush, that adrenaline fix, so badly, he couldn't stay home and take care of his son," Stahl remarked.

"You know, that comes at a terrible, terrible price for him. And he knows it. But is incapable of doing anything different," Bigelow said.

"Frankly I thought Kathryn was going to get this. So I'm kind of winging it. And she richly deserves it," her ex-husband James Cameron said at the Golden Globes.

Cameron won the Golden Globes for Avatar, the only big award Bigelow didn't win. And before the Oscars, he predicted she'd win there to.

Asked about a potential best director win for Bigelow, Cameron said, "I think it's an irresistible story to finally be able to award the very first directing Oscar to a woman and Kathryn, you know, I mean, I'm sure she'll be very ambivalent about this because she'll be of a mind that, wait a minute, I want to win for the work. I don't want to win because I'm a woman. But I think it's irresistible at the moment of voting, that story."

Bigelow will not like hearing that; she hates being considered a "female" director.

"There's really no difference between what I do and what a male filmmaker might do. I mean we all try to make our days, we all try to give the best performances we can, we try to make our budget, we try to make the best movie we possibly can. So in that sense it's very similar. On the other hand, I think the journey for women, no matter what venue it is - politics, business, film - it's a long journey," she said.

"The Hurt Locker" ended up winning six Oscars, including best picture and best director. Kathryn Bigelow's collaborator, Mark Boal, a journalist who wrote the script after embedding with a bomb squad in Iraq, won for best screenplay.

Produced by Tom Anderson