I would imagine this was a tough shoot. Tell us about the shooting schedule. I was very fascinated with how you set up the film and how you shoot it. Was it storyboarded? It felt so spur of the moment.
Kathryn Bigelow: Well we shot it in 44 days and we shot a million feet of film which is a 200 to 1 ratio so it was a pretty, umm, we came back with a lot of footage. I did tend to board and once the script was done, boarded it out. But that was before we even scouted location, and so then once you get to location, once you get a sense of the geography, and the geography is as you know, certainly from the script, and from the movie, is really key to understanding the audience, understanding the conflict, where you are in relation to the bomb for instance, and also one of our both combined objectives was to really humanize those soldiers so at the same time you want to kind of go jump from the micro to the macro. Seeing the soldier in context, but never lose sight of an emotional connection with it. So all of those factors, the location, boards, but then you kind of begin to let go of the boards and then you find a style that seems very reportorial because it began as a piece of reporting that was Mark’s embed in 2004 with the bomb squad and wanting to protect that reportorial nature, geography, and humanize the soldier so it’s… You know, some of it is kind of really dogmatic, you know, where you say we are going to be here to here to here, it’s sort of fluid and instinctual.

Was this a different approach that you took with this film compared to the other film’s you made?

Kathryn Bigelow: I think that each one comes from the story itself and basically it is sort of dictated content to form, rather than form to content, and that’s why again the reportorial nature of it I wanted to protect, so I wanted to kinda have an immediate “you are there,” boots on the ground, look at it. So that consequently, you want to have the camera be somewhat live, dexterous, fluid, and unpredictable. And that’s really the, I think, key principal of life on the ground as a soldier in that particular conflict, the randomness and the chaos of it. And you want to underscore that without... Then it’s a question of balance and instinct, and I suppose craft. You don’t want to hit it too hard, too soft, but it was beautifully calibrated in the script, I mean, the specificity. To bring that to life.

I was wondering about the way that a lot of war movies are normally made with big explosions and big orange things and load noises and everything, and your film , the sound of bullets sounded different, there are little hissing noises followed by small pops, the explosions look different. I was wondering about how you chose to do that and made that happen differently than those other movies.

Kathryn Bigelow: Well it, certainly the choice of how to shoot an explosion, how an explosion should look is maybe something you can spoke to based on what the bomb techs…

MB: Well I think that, and a sort of a lot of aesthetic choices that Kathryn made, just saying this as an observer of her process, were based on trying to be realistic. And that is really what it was about. Trying to accurately replicate what an explosion looks like. They don’t usually look like big orange pools of fire unless you are blowing up gasoline which is what they use for special effects like in Transformers, to make one of those big explosions in the background; they blow up, like I think, a thousand pounds of gasoline. But in a military wartime, no one’s going around, blowing up gasoline (KB and him laugh). They blow up explosives. So she worked with her special effects guys to make it...

Kathryn Bigelow: (overlapping) As realistic as possible.

Mark Boal: To make it real. And the special effects guys all had experience, actually just coincidentally, that’s why we hired them, working with military to do training stuff and the sound guy who made the sounds of those bullets had served, his name was Paul N.J. Ottosson, he was a brilliant sound designer and he did the sound effects for Spider-Man, and stuff like that, but before he was a sound designer, he was a sniper in the Scandinavian–

Kathryn Bigelow: (overlapping) Swedish…Swedish Army.

Mark Boal: Oh, I’m sorry, the Swedish Army. So we would, you know, she and he would have these pretty long discussions about the set, you know, what a bullet sounds like, and he had his point of view from when he had been firing them and she had her point of view from having her going to Kuwait.

Kathryn Bigelow: Right, that was a 50-caliber, the one that you were talking about that has almost kind of a, that is over a mile away that you are hearing it. And from the difference between hearing it when the trigger is pulled up close or hearing it a mile away…so perspective was really key, and that goes back to the geography. Always maintain a realistic sense of geography, especially for a piece like this.

I think it was really realistic too with the 360° camera angle, because as a military person, I know that they are constantly, they have to look every single direction, and I think your camera angles were amazing in that way, because it really gave the viewer the sense that they were there.

Kathryn Bigelow: Thank-you. Yeah, that was really important I think to have a set…that is really predominately why we went to the Middle East, to have a set that wasn’t just twelve…you know, we got a hundred feet of set, that’s as much as you can shoot, therefore that way you can’t shoot, it looks like a hotel room or whatever. But this way you could go anywhere, no angle was incorrect.

Mark Boal: Yeah, I mean as you know, the way they build movie sets, they build one side of it. You could never turn around, you could never do that or you would have the craft services guy flipping burgers in the background (KB and MB laughs). So we didn’t have that.

I wanted to mention casting because all of the actors were really great in it. You had some big name actors in it but they were really supporting roles. Did you do this intentionally during the casting process to make the EOD squad more unknown to not distract from the plot?

Kathryn Bigelow: Well not only to distract from the plot, that’s a good point, but too protect and preserve the element of surprise. Many times when you have a more familiar face you go he is so-and-so, he can’t die till the end. You know, they’re fine. So you kind of subconsciously, if not consciously, you tend to relax. And that’s not the case. You are going to look at this conflict through the soldier’s perspective; you are not allowed to relax. There is nothing that could be comforting. That is another reason we took score away, or the absence of score. I mean it is there, but is very minimally, so I mean score is repetitive, but something repetitive is actually comforting, so anything that could support and intensify the suspense and the element of surprise, but also another thing, I do tend to like to work with unknown actors, or certainly, these are hardly unnecessarily unknown, but they are kind of breakout talents I would call them I guess. They are just so extraordinary, and I think that lack of familiarity creates a real, I don’t know, you are seeing them for the first time.

I was reading the notes on the film and Barry Ackroyd is quoted as saying, “That the trick is not to think too much about what you are doing and then you will be surprised by the performances.” So do you both think that’s true and what were you surprised by in the end result?

Kathryn Bigelow: Well I think, I don’t want to think for Mark, but I think we both certainly talked about this movie for months and months and months while he was writing it.

Mark Boal: Yeah, Barry had a very specific thing that he wanted to do, which he could do because he was the DP –

Kathryn Bigelow: (overlapping) Right.

MB: And he wanted to feel like he was covering it for the first time.

Kathryn Bigelow: He almost didn’t want to know, which was fabulous.

Mark Boal: But, I think if we had tried that, it would have been a little...everybody would be wondering what the hell we were doing.

Kathryn Bigelow: Chaotic (laughs). “Oh no!”

Mark Boal: “I don’t know, let’s try something.” That doesn’t work.

Kathryn Bigelow: “Bomb suit? Who needs the bomb suit? Oh, that’s right, you do.”

Mark Boal: But he actually, to be serious for a second, he and Kathryn, the style that they developed, cinematically, is pretty radical. I mean, the way they did that, it doesn’t happen that way very often. Usually it is all very, very planned out because there is budget, and you don’t want to go over, it is like, “This is what we are going to do, you are going to put the coffee cup here and you are going to shoot this way and then in five minutes we are going to shoot this way and then five minutes later we are going to shoot this way and then we are going to move the coffee cup away and shoot the orange juice glass, we are not –

Kathryn Bigelow: (overlapping) It’s hell for the crew. Great for Barry, great for me, great for, I think, the film, but like for instance I don’t work with marks, in other words if I was shooting you and everybody was stationary, there would be a mark on the ground so I know what your focal point is so you are always in focus. That’s not there. You would be moving and the focus puller, not only did Barry not know, but of course the focus puller doesn’t know where the actor’s going to go and so there was constantly, in a way it was like shooting National Geographic photography, like shooting an animal in the wild and again, it’s underscoring that degree of unpredictability. The unfamiliar face, the sort of a lack of a mechanical shooting style, it was very organic and fluid, and everything is in motion, like the actor would come around the side of the Humvee and there would be a camera for one take, but the camera is in motion as well. Second take that camera’s not there. Third take, every time it is in a different place. It really caused both cast and crew to kind of inverse completely and go through the process of bomb disarmament as opposed to act in front of a lens.

So you are in a foreign country and it is like a hundred and twenty thousand degrees, was there any moment when an actor or even anyone on the crew thought “I can’t do this,” or that this is insurmountable, since you can’t really plan and there are all of these surprises, was there anything just sort of overwhelming.

Mark Boal: You know, I think it was a way to say that we had planned chaos –

Kathryn Bigelow: Planned chaos.

Mark Boal: It was planned.

Kathryn Bigelow: Absolutely. Within an inch of its life so all of it’s really mechanically designed to look un-designed.

MB: In fact, I used to say to the DP, “We want to shoot this documentary style, like a documentary,” and he goes, “That’s a style.” But, that doesn’t mean that we are all going to know what we are doing.

Kathryn Bigelow: Right. Exactly.

Mark Boal: So it is a bit of a slight of hand in terms of making it look spontaneous. Actually, it takes a fair amount of preparation. Barry is very gung-ho and he was really into just being really spontaneous, and he actually hurt himself a couple times, because he was so into the scene and he has his camera up here and he’s running and in the Guy Pearce scene, Guy’s [Pearce] running and Barry’s running after him, and he fell. It was really, a couple cameras fell because of the stuff that they were doing was really kind of all out, but that’s why you hire Barry Ackroyd.

In retrospect, what was the biggest challenge of bringing this film to fruition and following up to that, what challenge most exceeded your expectations that you had when you started the film?

Kathryn Bigelow: Well I think that everything about the film was a challenge, but a gratifying one. One of the biggest aspects that I guess I kind of anticipated, but not to the extreme that kind of unfolded before me was the heat, as you mentioned. We were shooting in the summer in Jordan and the bomb suit is not an art department creation. It was a real bomb suit made out of Kevlar and ceramic plates. It weighs about a hundred pounds. So you add that to whatever the punishing temperature was of the day, maybe a hundred and ten degrees and my real concern was Jeremy, making sure that he was comfortable and conscious. But those kinds of challenges were offset by some of the great bonuses. For instance, in Amman at the time we were shooting, about 750,000 refugees from the war, many of whom were actors, so utilizing them in a shoot as speaking parts as well as background extras…so that kind of offset some of the arduous aspects.

There are three groups of people I was wondering if you got any response from: the people in the military now, the veterans, and the politicians. So did you have any screenings for those specifically or do you know people that saw it from any of those three groups.

Kathryn Bigelow: Well I don’t know about politicians. Do you think anybody, I don’t know.

Mark Boal: I think that the main group that we made the movie for is people like movie-goers. That is who we made the movie for, the American, for anybody that wants to see a good movie. We encourage them to buy tickets. In other words it was not like we made it so now let’s go take it to Capitol Hill and see what they think in the house. I mean, not that I don’t care, but.. But you are not giving them a free pass to a special screening of it.

Mark Boal: I’m sure if Barack Obama wanted to see it (KB laughs), but in other words, it is not that kind of movie, it was not designed for that. But a lot of troops have seen it –

Kathryn Bigelow: And a lot of the EODs had seen it. And what has been their reaction?

Kathryn Bigelow: Phenomenal, and I think they felt, well they’ve said specifically, we showed it the other night to an organization called EOD Memorial Foundation and it is a great organization that raises scholarships for children and helps family whose parent was a casualty. That was really gratifying.

Mark Boal: There is no tougher audience as you can imagine.

Kathryn Bigelow: And they said that every other sector of the military has had their movie, they’ve had NAVY SEALS, they’ve had Air Force Pilots, they’ve had you name it, but they have never had their film and they kind of do what they do with a fair amount of anonymity, Many EOD techs come up to me after screenings, not just that one, and they say, “I’ve been telling people for years what I do and nobody understands, nobody has a clue,” so its kind of been a bit of their own, they are kind of in their own world, they understand and so it was very gratifying, that kind of excitement and appreciation, the fact that EOD…there is now a filmic translation that people can understand, up close and personal what a day in the life of a bomb tech might be. Are these characters based on actual people that you met?

Mark Boal: They are fictionalizations, but I think that they are pretty faithful to the situations that those guys face over there and are inspired by guys that I met and so forth.

About the military, I read that you originally wanted to shoot in Kuwait and in a relationship with the army base there, but that didn’t happen. How do you think changed the way the movie works or what kind of changes did the military want that you were not OK with?

Mark Boal: Well first thing is when you get to Kuwait, it is great to want to shoot in Kuwait, and we really did, but…

Kathryn Bigelow: It was 135 degrees. It was a non-starter.

Mark Boal: It was so hot in Kuwait…

Kathryn Bigelow: You could have only shot at night.

Mark Boal: It is like, it was 135 degrees, you are literally outside of the van and after about five minutes you are ready to pass out. That’s not how you shot that kind of movie that is all outdoor, exterior shots.

Kathryn Bigelow: And you have to shoot for 12 hours a day to make your schedule.

Mark Boal: It was like forget it, just forget it. There is a reason why no one shoots movies in the middle of the desert.

Kathryn Bigelow: Everyone would become dehydrated (laughs). The only restriction there was elemental. It was not. Then we took off to Jordan, and it was great because it has got an elevation of about twenty-five hundred feet so instead of being 135, it felt kind of that low desert heat. Average temperature 110.

Kathryn Bigelow: And we were actually just looking at the base scenes in Kuwait. We weren’t going to shoot the whole movie. It is an urban movie and there is nothing in Kuwait that looks like anything in Baghdad, which Amman did have sections that kind of looked like Baghdad.

Kathryn Bigelow: East Amman.

Mark Boal: But yeah, even in day there it would have been like, “No.”

Kathryn Bigelow: It was like somebody had a hot engine, I can’t even –

Mark Boal: A blow dryer.

Kathryn Bigelow: A blow dryer in your face and you can’t get rid of it. I mean, you are just sucking in this hot air. In the film it still looks brutal.

Kathryn Bigelow: No, it’s brutal, but…

Mark Boal: Once we got back to Jordan we were like, “Oh my god, this is like being in North Dakota (both laugh).” In the scene after the Ralph Fiennes character is killed and then the two men are trying to shoot the enemy combats that are on the small house up the hill, it just, it got so hot and dusty, and then there were all those flies. Did you bring in flies or…

Mark Boal: The flies are ordered from L.A.

Kathryn Bigelow: We had a fly wrangler and a cat wrangler…

As someone who has family in the military, did you have someone in your family that’s military that inspired this from the get go?

MB: Well my Dad was drafted and his Dad was too, so they were army guys. But I never was and no, it just really came out of me going to Baghdad and in the Gulf War was really what it was and seeing what these guys do firsthand and really feeling like nobody realized that the US Army has a bomb squad and they are out there disarming twelve bombs a day, and it is the most dangerous job in the world, or one of them, statistically, it is the only one of the most dangerous jobs in the military, and that would be a great for a dramatic war movie. It really is potentially exciting and suspenseful and interesting and makes you think and a few explosions too.

Mark, being embedded with the troops and then writing the articles on the war, how did you condense all of the subject matters in this one script. What was the process of taking one point, leaving it in, another one leaving it out?

Mark Boal: Well, you just try to pick the stuff that you think will tell the story the best, and it’s just a process of looking at it over and over again, and trying to decide what feels like the most, what would get the story across the most effectively. In the production notes it said that there were seventeen drafts of it.

Mark Boal: The process took a while (laughs). How did it evolve from the initial draft to what it is now?

Mark Boal: Well, you just try to add more detail each time and make it more specific. And I mean these scenes are really complicated, I mean, not to pat myself on the back, but they are pretty complicated action sequences, so getting them right took a little bit of work. And getting the characters to feel like real and not cartoons took a little bit of work.

How did making this film impact your perspective on US Foreign policy and how did it impact your view on the nature of war?

Kathryn Bigelow: Well I think it certainly; I probably entered the project thinking war is hell and certainly leaved the project thinking war was hell. It gave me an appreciation and an admiration, before as we speak, having this roundtable, there are men and women out there risking their lives and that was, that and looking at incredibly heroic individuals, but also looking at the price of heroism, so it was pretty moving I think, just getting up close and personal with this particular conflict from the standpoint of the soldiers, who are kind of at the epicenter of it, being the bomb techs.

A lot of the films you do have characters who are kind of like these adrenaline junkies, so I was wondering if you, yourself, were attracted to that in someway?

Kathryn Bigelow: No.

Mark Boal: She likes to knit (both laugh).

Why do you think it works so well in film? Kathryn Bigelow: I think that it’s, I think film can be so experiential that, I don’t know. I don’t shoot the movies because of that. You know, there are extreme moments in various people’s lives and I don’t think making a movie out of somebody sitting still is necessarily…it can be.

Mark Boal: Empire.

KB: Empire, exactly. So I don’t know. It just depends on maximizing the potential of the medium.