Her big bang theory

Kathryn Bigelow has a thing about climbing mountains. The 57-year-old director, known for her relentless, action-driven plots and her visceral depictions of male violence, once climbed Kilimanjaro in sub-zero temperatures because, she said: "I like to be strong."

More recently, while filming her latest movie, The Hurt Locker, in the Jordanian desert, she startled fellow crew members by scaling a forbiddingly high sand dune to shoot a scene of a bomb being detonated.

"There were lots of macho guys on the set, SAS, not to mention all these young, studly actors, and all these guys were falling by the wayside," a colleague recalls. "I said to myself, I'm not walking this hill, no way in hell. I drive up and Kathryn is already at the top. She's beaten everyone up there."

If beating tough young men to the top of a sand dune represents no great challenge for Bigelow, then that's probably because she has spent so much of her adult life traversing one of the most treacherous - and male-dominated - career slopes of all. Bigelow is one of a small band of female directors (others include Nora Ephron and Penny Marshall) who has made it close to the summit of Hollywood, overcoming the sexism of the studio system to forge a successful career spanning more than two decades.

More unusually still, Bigelow has worked throughout her career in that traditional male stronghold, the action adventure genre.

After starting out in her 20s as a conceptual artist and then working briefly as a film academic, Bigelow shot to prominence in the late 80s with her cult classic Near Dark, about a gang of vampires in the American west. From there, she went on to make her two best-known films, the surfing/heist movie Point Break (1991), starring Keanu Reeves, and the futuristic action drama Strange Days (1995), scripted by Titanic director James Cameron, to whom she was briefly married.

In the past decade or so, Bigelow's career has slowed and her more recent films haven't hit the commercial or critical heights of her early work.

It is seven years since her last movie, the submarine drama K-19, came out, a long fallow period even by the standards of Hollywood.

But if Bigelow was starting to be written off in some quarters, her career now looks set for a remarkable revival.

The Hurt Locker has already caused quite a stir. Set in Iraq during the early days of the American occupation, it focuses on a bomb disposal unit whose job is to dismantle roadside bombs planted by insurgents. The main character, Sergeant James, played by Jeremy Renner, is an adventurer addicted to the thrill of high-risk situations - in other words, a typical Bigelow creation.

The film, unlike most of Bigelow's previous work, is relentlessly realistic, something dictated by its origins in reportage. It started out as a series of articles by scriptwriter and co-producer Mark Boal, who spent time embedded with an ordnance disposal unit.

One critic hailed it as a "masterclass in experiential action cinema". It has been described as "the best film yet to come out of Iraq".

But there have also been disapproving mutterings about its avoidance of political commentary. The Hurt Locker doesn't take an overtly critical view of the occupation, something that separates it from other Iraq films such as Lions for Lambs and In the Valley of Elah.

Not everyone has been comfortable with this and one British critic went so far as to say that the film "could pass for propaganda".

This reflects something curious about Bigelow, which is that there is surprisingly little agreement as to exactly what kind of film director she is. Is she right wing or left wing? Radical or conservative? Different people say different things.

As a woman who has triumphed in Hollywood - and done so working exclusively in the action genre - it is hardly surprising that she has often been hailed as a feminist pioneer. But Bigelow has always resisted the "feminist" label and others have argued that, on the contrary, her interest in masculinity (several of her films feature no female characters at all) represents a form of directorial cross-dressing, a betrayal of her true identity in order to conform to the sexist expectations of Hollywood.

What is clear is that Bigelow is going to disappoint anyone expecting explicit political or social messages from her films.

Bigelow's own comments about her new film suggest more straightforward motivations. "War's dirty little secret is that some men love it," she said. "I'm trying to unpack why, to look at what it means to be a hero in the context of 21st-century combat."

Bigelow was born in 1951 near San Francisco, the only child of a librarian and a paint factory manager. She recalls being a gawky and solitary child whose height (she is just under 1.8m and remains forbiddingly thin) made her socially awkward.

As a teenager, she became passionate about Raphael - she would enlarge details of his paintings into huge canvases in the garage. She studied at the San Francisco Art Institute before moving in the early 70s to New York, where she immersed herself in the downtown art scene, hanging out with conceptual artists such as Richard Serra and Philip Glass.

But she found the art world cut off and gradually moved into film. She took a masters in film criticism at Columbia where she studied under Susan Sontag and fell in love with foreign directors such as Passolini and Fassbinder. A trip to a double bill of Mean Streets and The Wild Bunch proved a defining moment. "It took all my semiotic Lacanian deconstructivist saturation and torqued it," she says. "I realised that there's a more muscular approach to film-making that I found very inspiring."

Bigelow made her first feature, The Loveless (starring Willem Dafoe in his screen debut), in 1982. She resisted the temptation immediately to forge ahead with directing and took up a post teaching film theory in Los Angeles. Inevitably, however, her proximity to Hollywood was a temptation and she completed her first big-budget production, Near Dark, in 1987.

Successes such as Blue Steel (1989), Point Break and Strange Days soon followed. After that Bigelow's career seemed to stall and, more recently, discussion has concerned the reasons for this falling away.

Some point to Hollywood's glass ceiling. Others claim, more cynically (and with not much evidence), that her early successes were only ever really down to her relationship with Cameron.

But as her enthusiasm for mountain-climbing shows, Bigelow has never been someone to let obstacles stand in her way for long.

The good news for her many fans is that, with her new film,she is back doing what she always has done best: ramping up the tension and the violence as she portrays the often mad and excessive, but also crazily exciting, world of modern masculinity.

LOWDOWN

Who: Kathryn Bigelow, Oscar-nominated director and the former Mrs James Cameron.

What: The Hurt Locker, also nominated for best picture.

When: Screening as part of the World Cinema, Academy Cinema, March 25, with possibility of wider theatrical release afterwards.

- OBSERVER