BEYOND: Creating realism in 'The Hurt Locker'

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Director Kathryn Bigelow and writer Mark Boal's "The Hurt Locker," the new action-thriller about Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) Squads at the heart of the Iraq war, is dedicated to delivering both an exciting time at the theater and a rarely seen glimpse at some of the conflict's most important soldiers.

"The information to the public at large is not as well-known as it could be," Ms. Bigelow says of the EOD techs and their role defusing improvised explosive devices and other roadside bombs. "Keep the film reportorial; keep it kind of raw, immediate and visceral; and give the audience a real boots-on-the-ground life of a bomb tech," and the story will tell itself: "There's so much inherent drama in that that, as a filmmaker, I didn't have to truss it up."

Of course, it doesn't hurt to have a few directorial tricks up the sleeve. Ms. Bigelow, who has directed action-packed features including "Point Break" and "K-19: The Widowmaker," often shot the suspenseful bomb-defusing sequences in one go rather than breaking them up into their component parts to make them more manageable.

"We would literally do [a] sequence from beginning to end again and again rather than break it down into its more antiseptic, compartmentalized elements," she says, noting that it adds to the immediacy that the audience feels during those tense moments. "They were actually arriving at the scene and disarming a bomb. Four units, moving sometimes in tandem, and sometimes countering them, never knowing where a camera was going to be; [the actors] had to be in the moment and not actually 'performing,' thinking, 'This is my medium, this is my wide.'"

Aiding that realism was Mr. Boal's script, which was informed largely by his time as an embedded journalist with a group of EOD soldiers, about whom little has been written and less shown. "Whether the movie turns out good or bad, you have this element of [the film] being slightly revelatory to people, because you're showing them a side of the military that they're not familiar with," he says. "It's a side of the war that, in a way, is the symbolic heart of the conflict."

That commitment to revelation complements the movie's narrative drive to create a realistic, gripping thriller. "It's not a documentary," Mr. Boal notes. "This shouldn't feel like spinach; it's meant to be entertaining, and it's a summer movie. Nonetheless, it's pretty faithful to what some of those guys went through."

40 years of 'Z'

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, filmmaking came to be dominated by features with a distinctly political bent: Directors absorbed the tumult surrounding them and channeled it into their motion pictures.

"Z," one such picture, celebrates its 40th anniversary this year with a newly struck 35mm print and limited theatrical engagements around the country. Speaking from his home in France, director Costa-Gavras expresses both surprise and pleasure in the fact that his movie continues to strike a chord with audiences four decades later.

"I saw the movie with an audience in New York, and I was surprised to see how the audience was reacting," he says. "I had a chat with them after it, and it was very moving, because people were speaking very nicely about the movie, how they received it. … There were a lot of young people, and they were very interested about everything: Some say 'Oh, it's the situation around the world today' and so forth."