164 HURT LOCKER, THE
finding and disarming IEDs planted by Iraqi insurgents. Boal subsequently
published an article on the experience— “The Man in the Bomb Suit” (Playboy, Sep-
tember 2005)— and then worked with film director Kathryn Bigelow to make a
fiction film based on the events he had witnessed. Boal and Bigelow collaborated
on a script, originally titled “The Something Jacket,” and sought $20 million in
financing, but none of the major Hollywood studios were interested in a movie
about an unpop u lar war. Instead, in the summer of 2006, they signed a $13 million
deal with Nicholas Chartier’s Voltage Pictures, an in de pen dent production
com pany. Bigelow then went about assembling a cast, hiring a few “name” actors
(Ralph Fiennes, David Morse, Evangeline Lilly, and Guy Pearce) but mostly cast-
ing unknowns so as not to distract viewers with famous faces and dilute verisi-
militude. Jeremy Renner, cast in the film’s lead role as Sgt. Will James, researched
his part by spending time with an EOD team at Fort Irwin National Training
Center in California. As for location, filming in Baghdad was simply too danger-
ous, so Amman, Jordan, was selected as its substitute. Production ran into a major
snag when the Jordanians would not clear the detonation equipment and supplies
needed by special effects supervisor Richard Stutsman. Just before the shoot was
scheduled to begin, Bigelow was able to get a customs official to authorize release
of most of the materials.Production
Principal photography on The Hurt Locker took place in Amman, Jordan, over
44 days between late July and early September 2007. For cast and crew, discomfort
reigned; there were no air- conditioned trailers or private bathrooms during a mid-
summer shoot that saw temperatures often reach 120° F. Anxious to put viewers
into the thick of the action Bigelow and her British director of photography, Barry
Ackroyd (United 93), employed an intensified sort of cinema vérité style that fea-
tured lots of subjective camera, reaction shots, tight framing, slow motion, and rapid
switching between points of view. These effects were made pos si ble by using a
high- speed Phantom HD camera and up to four handheld Super 16-mm Aaton
XTR- Prods to shoot the action from multiple angles si mul ta neously: a technique
that produced over 200 hours of raw footage, edited by Chris Innis and Bob
Murawski over an eight- month period down to 131 minutes (a 92:1 shooting ratio).
The film’s final firefight was filmed in a Palestinian refugee camp that the film-
makers were told was off limits as too dangerous, but Bigelow persisted and was
given permission to shoot there.Plot Summary
The film opens with an on- screen quotation from War Is a Force That Gives Us Mean-
ing, a best- selling 2002 book by Chris Hedges, a New York Times war correspon-
dent and journalist: “The rush of battle is a potent and often lethal addiction, for
war is a drug.” In the opening scene, in Baghdad during the Iraq War, a bomb-
handling Talon robot breaks down, forcing Staff Sergeant Matthew Thompson (Guy
Pearce) to get close to an IED when it is remotely detonated by cell phone, killing
him. Sergeant First Class William “ Will” James ( Jeremy Renner), a former U.S.