Word: boal
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...film and an excellent choice for Best Picture. Bigelow's job wrangling this orphan project into shape, and her shot-by-shot mastery of the story, should be considered no less impressive than her swaggering hero's effectiveness in defusing bombs on Baghdad streets. The same goes for Mark Boal's winning screenplay, based on his reporting for a Playboy nonfiction piece about IED squads (which really should have put the script in the Best Adapted Screenplay category). (See pictures of James Cameron's special effects...
Journalist Mark Boal, 37, struck Oscar-nomination gold with his screenplay for The Hurt Locker; as one of the film's producers, he's up for Best Picture too. Boal spoke with TIME's Radhika Jones in Los Angeles about the genesis of his script, the meaning of the phrase the hurt locker and why it's good to kill off famous people in your movie...
TIME: What was the origin of The Hurt Locker? Mark Boal: I wanted to do a story that explained why the war was not going well and that showed the logistical futility of the war. So in 2004 I pitched a story to my editors at Playboy to do a piece on the bomb squad, and found myself in Baghdad eight months later. At some point while I was over there, it occurred to me that the insanity of the war was not being expressed in the popular media and that it could make a really eye-opening, gut-wrenching...
Fiennes, who plays a small role in The Hurt Locker, says Bigelow is "incredibly wired with enthusiasm and excitement. It's physical, palpable, when she sees a shot or a moment that is working." Mark Boal, who wrote and co-produced The Hurt Locker, likens her to an athlete going onto the field: "She's pretty switched on when the cameras start going...
...reminiscing warmly about an Iraqi actor who appears in the film and is now living in the U.S., whom she's put in touch with a casting agent. Her next project is directing a pilot for an HBO series called The Miraculous Year. After that comes another collaboration with Boal, a movie about the drug trade in South America. And in the near future there are the Oscars. She fields a question the other Best Director nominees probably aren't being asked: What's she wearing? She doesn't know yet, but she has one guideline: nothing showy...