Kathryn Bigelow, The Weight of Water
If there's specific resistance to women making movies, I just choose to ignore that as an obstacle for two reasons: I can't change my gender, and I refuse to stop making movies. It's irrelevant who or what directed a movie, the important thing is that you either respond to it or you don't. There should be more women directing; I think there's just not the awareness that it's really possible. It is.
- Kathryn Bigelow
Kathryn Bigelow is an American filmmaker, best known for directing films Point Break and Zero Dark Thirty. In 2009, Kathryn became the first woman to win an Academy Award for best director for The Hurt Locker film (2008). Kathryn Bigelow was born in San Carlos, California in 1951. Young Kathryn was inspired in part by her father, who liked to draw cartoons but never achieved his dream of becoming a cartoonist. First, being a talented painter, she was studying at the San Francisco Art Institute after which she won a scholarship to study film at Columbia University School of Arts, graduating in 1979. (Biography.com) Kathryn works are characterized to have “incredible visuals and heart-pounding action sequences.” Some of her films’ trademarks are: using first person perspectives (in Strange Days and in Point Break); frequent use of slow motion, especially in action scenes. (IMDb, 2017)
The latest of her works were dedicated to the US military actions in Iraq, particularly – story of Osama bin Laden hunt in Zero Dark Thirty and The Hurt Locker that tells about Explosive Ordnance Disposal team in Iraq: "I was fascinated by his [Staff Sergeant William James, played by Jeremy Renner] stories – by the idea that these bomb technicians are always walking toward the thing that everybody else is running away from. It's kind of an epic, lonely walk that only the man in the bomb suit performs."(Pesta, Abigail) Kathryn comments the shift in her films topics towards war and US military stories: “Once you've opened the window on topical material, it’s very hard to close it. Holding up a contemporary mirror is more attractive to me now than ever.” (IMDb)
The film Weight of Water released in November 2002, was chosen for the assignment. It is “intense and sexually charged drama” (MRQE) about a newspaper photographer Jean, who travels to a New Hampshire island with her husband Thomas, brother-in-law Rich, and his girlfriend Adaline. Jean (played by Catherine McCormack,) is working on a story about the 1873 crime and suspects that the man hanged for it wasn't guilty. In this murder she finds her own relationships paralleling those of a woman who survived the crime.
The Weight of Water film wass “experimenting, trying something different” for Bigelow. (Metacritic) Mostly known for action movies, Kathryn tries an intense drama about jealousy. The movie reviews are mixed: reviewers give good points to the picture and visuals, nautical motif and pure wild sea nature. The actors …
