How Andy Warhol sparked the career of Kathryn Bigelow

From the heart-pounding intensity of The Hurt Locker to the gritty portrayal of urban unrest in Detroit, Kathryn Bigelow has stamped her mark as one of the industry’s finest. Her accolades aren’t just a testament to her talent and recognition of her pioneering spirit: in 2010, she broke ground as the first woman to clinch the Oscar for ‘Best Director’.

We now know Bigelow as a maestro of cinema, one who genuinely changed the face of the craft forever. Aged 71, with a filmmaking career spanning over 40 years, this image of her seems almost eternal. However, when you delve a little deeper into her past, you’ll find that this illustrious director once walked a very different path – one that meandered through the expressive world of paint and canvas rather than lenses and film stock.

It turns out that Bigelow’s initial romance was with painting. During her formative years, she honed her skills at the San Francisco Art Institute, later advancing to New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art’s independent study programme in the 1970s. Despite mingling with renowned artists such as Philip Glass and Susan Sontag, Bigelow remained relatively unknown. However, a serendipitous conversation with the iconic artist Andy Warhol facilitated through a mutual friend, became the nudge she needed towards a new direction.

As Bigelow shared during an interview with Time: “Andy was saying that film is way more populist than art—that art’s very elitist, so you exclude a large audience.” An epiphany struck her during a subsequent museum visit: “A Malevich or a Mondrian requires that you come to it with a certain amount of information, a context,” she elucidated. “You don’t necessarily need that with film. A movie is accessible – available. That was exciting to me from a political standpoint.”

Her journey from a painter to a filmmaker wasn’t without its challenges. The struggling artist phase saw her inhabit unique dwellings, such as a renovated bank vault in Tribeca, even spending cold nights in a sleeping bag. “Tribeca, SoHo—those concepts didn’t really exist in the early 1970s,” Bigelow reminisces. “So I’d be down in the freezing bank vault, hearing gunshots up top quite often. But none of us students were worried for ourselves. It was a great community that formed.”

However, destiny had its own designs. A short art film she crafted made its way to Miloš Forman, the mastermind behind cinematic masterpieces like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Amadeus. Impressed with Bigelow’s work, Forman offered her a scholarship for a film course at the prestigious New York University, Columbia.

This gesture from such a celebrated figure in cinema was more than a simple act of generosity; it was an endorsement of Bigelow’s undeniable talent and potential. In essence, the encouragement from indomitable titans of their respective fields – first Warhol and then Forman – propelled Bigelow from the world of brushstrokes to the realm of Oscar-winning film reels.