The Hurt Locker is a 2009 American war thriller directed by Kathryn Bigelow. Shot entirely on location in Jordan, the film is based on recently declassified information about a U.S. Army Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) team in present day Iraq. The Hurt Locker is written by Mark Boal, a freelance writer who was embedded with a bomb squad. The Hurt Locker has been picked up by distributor Summit Entertainment. The film is scheduled for domestic release in the U.S. on June 26th, 2009 in New York and Los Angeles, going wider in July.
The Hurt Locker stars 2009 Independent Spirit Award best acting nominees Jeremy Renner and Anthony Mackie, as well as Guy Pearce, Ralph Fiennes, Brian Geraghty, and Evangeline Lilly. The script was written by first-time screenwriter Mark Boal, a freelance writer who has contributed to Playboy, The Village Voice and Rolling Stone Magazines and who also wrote the short story that inspired the film In the Valley of Elah. [12] Boal spent time embedded with a real bomb squad, which was a source for the story.
Other members of the key filmmaking crew include cinematographer Barry Ackroyd, film editors Chris Innis and Bob Murawski, production designer Karl Júlíusson, production sound mixer Ray Beckett, and costume designer George Little. The film’s real explosions and special effects were designed by Richard Stutsman and his team. The score was composed by Academy Award nominated composer Marco Beltrami and Buck Sanders.
The Hurt Locker was shot entirely on location in the Middle East, over forty-four days from July to September 2007, during the height of the Iraq war surge. Often four or more camera crews filmed simultaneously, which resulted in nearly 200 hours of footage.
Although the filmmakers scouted locations in Morocco, director Kathryn Bigelow sought greater authenticity and wound up shooting most of the movie in Jordan because of its close proximity to Iraq. Some of the locations were less than three miles from the Iraqi border. All the Iraqi roles in the film were played by displaced Iraqi war refugees living in Jordan, many of them trained actors who had been forced to flee their country.
Lead actor Jeremy Renner, who trained with real EOD teams prior to shooting the film, says that great pains were taken to ensure the film’s authenticity. According to Renner, shooting the film in the Middle East contributed to this. “There were two by fours with nails being dropped from two-story buildings that hit me in the helmet and they were throwing rocks… we got shot at a few times while we were filming,” Renner said. “When you see it, you’re gonna feel like you’ve been in war.”
According to screenwriter Boal, “It’s the first movie about the Iraq war that purports to show the experience of the soldiers.”[22] “We wanted to show the kinds of things that soldiers go through that you can’t see on CNN.” He adds, “Most war movies don’t come out until after the war is over. It’s really exciting for me, coming out of the world of journalism, to have a movie come out about a conflict while the conflict is still going on.
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