Don’t call Kathryn Bigelow a female filmmaker.

The director of Point Break, Strange Days, and Friday’s release of The Hurt Locker can’t stand being pigeonholed. Today she is one of the most recognizable female directors along with Sofia Coppola and Jane Campion, but Ms. Bigelow is certainly part of the boys club.  “If the politics of gender are at work,” she remarked speaking earlier this week about the film, “I am not dignifying them or acquiescing to them—I’m just moving forward at what seems right.”

The Hurt Locker, an independent feature that she helped develop with journalist and screenwriter Mark Boal, follows an EOD (Explosive Ordinance Disposal) tech squad that has the job to stopping dangerous bombs in the center of Baghdad day in and day out. The leader character, Sergeant James, and played with visceral fun by Jeremy Renner, becomes the new team leader with an almost suicidal confidence as he performs what Ms. Bigelow calls “the most dangerous job in the world.”

The film, which won a number of prizes at 2008’s Venice Film Festival, originally came into conception after Ms. Bigelow met with Mr. Boal after she adapted one of his articles for a TV show, and Mr. Boal mentioned his upcoming imbed with an EOD squad. “I was immediately tantalized with the filmic possibilities there,” she remarked. “I saw it was a great opportunity and also a chance to look at this particular conflict meaning Iraq and what is going on over there from the standpoint of the epicenter of this war. It’s really a war of bombs. And as a bomb tech you are front and center in the crosshairs of this particular conflict and so it was a really opportunity to kind of unpack the experience”

Certainly though, Iraq hasn’t been a popular subject for recent movies—Stop-Loss, In the Valley of Elah, and Redacted were all made by talented filmmakers but were criticized for being too political, too rushed, or simply not accessible to audiences. But Ms. Bigelow’s vision is different—The Hurt Locker remains for the most part apolitical and really gives a feeling of the soldier’s point of view. Ms. Bigelow explained, “My interest was to keep it very reportorial and presentational and make it raw and immediate and honest and authentic and realistic, and not judge.”

Certainly one of the films’ strengths is its thrilling realism—the film often runs in real time and Ms. Bigelow brought many non-traditional additions to give it that feeling, including using the iconic bomb disarming suits. “I very curious about the suit, when you see the suit, it’s a real suit. It’s made of Kevlar and steel plates, and it weights somewhere between 100 and 80 pounds, and then you put the helmet on and you can say goodbye to oxygen as you know it, and you are performing bomb disarmament in the Middle East so add to that about 120 degree temperature—its just punishing.”

But as much as Ms. Bigelow wanted to explore Iraq, the film is really about a psychology of these men and these characters—during Mr. Boal’s time, EOD techs had a death rate five times than any other army profession, and Ms. Bigelow wanted to answer to who were these men. “I think it’s a very interesting psychology of somebody who can basically be that courageous,” she explained. “Its one man walking toward what perhaps the population of the rest of the planet would be running from.”

Ms. Bigelow has been a studio director, but instead of making romantic comedies, her films have always been manly action flicks that always sit uncomfortably with producers. Even a film like K-19: The Widowmaker, a submarine flick with Harrison Ford, has Ms. Bigelow’s almost masculine stamp on it that some studios might call the kiss of death when there’s no romance involved. But Ms. Bigelow was fortunate to have complete creative control here, allowing her the important move of shooting in the Middle East. “I think would have been completely a game changer if I would have gone to a studio for this movie.” Instead as an independent filmmaker, Ms. Bigelow shot in Amman, Jordan, and the sets proved perfect: “I’m shooting with four super 16mm cameras and they are in constant motion and they are in that 300 meter containment area and it was important to look 365 degree with no bad angle. So the architecture was great, and you’re in the Middle East, you are able to turn the camera in any direction so you couldn’t move off the set.“ She also remarked that the Iraqi refugees in the area participate as extras and even some of the minor speaking roles. 

Ms. Bigelow mentioned that EOD techs call the moment in which the tech walks alone toward the bomb in the massive suit “the lonely walk,” but in a way, Ms. Bigelow has made her own lonely walk as a filmmaker. Riding lines between studios and independence, male and female, and explosive genre filmmaking and psychologically devastating portrayals, Ms. Bigelow’s career and The Hurt Locker are both one hell of a ride.