Talk about the real deal.
Actor Jeremy Renner, recalling scenes shot over a week in the scorching Jordanian desert, said, "That was a tough one, physically. There was no shade for 18 hours. That was no makeup, that was all real. Real flies, real sweat, real sand, real pain."
That was in September during the Toronto International Film Festival when "The Hurt Locker" was in the middle of landing a North American distributor. Summit Entertainment bought the rights and now finds itself with a possible Oscar contender.
To play a cheerful, swaggering and highly skilled bomb tech, Renner trained with disarmament experts, donning the same sort of protective suit on and off screen. Made of Kevlar fabric with ceramic plates, it can weigh 80 or more pounds.
"You put on the suit. It's 120 degrees. Initially I was very cavalier about it. It's not so bad, I'm doing jumping jacks. I can do this," Renner said.
Ten minutes later, after being asked to move a stack of paper clips from one spot to another four feet away (a maneuver that required him to get up and down), he said, "I nearly died." And he wasn't even lugging ordnance or dragging a broken-down robot or "bot."
After 45 minutes of increasingly difficult tasks, he took off the suit and tackled math problems. "Simple division. Good luck. Good luck. Fourth-grade math ... Four into eight, what does that mean?"
In addition to training with real bomb experts, he spent time trying to figure out what makes them tick. "They don't like to get shot, nothing to do with the bomb, nothing to do with an IED (improvised explosive device), they don't like to get shot at," an observation incorporated into the movie.
In the middle of all the boring but basic information, Renner was told the techs always put a dog tag in the boot. Why? "Well, you always find boots. When people get hit by an IED, you miss heads, arms, bodies. Torsos disintegrate, but you always seem to find a boot.
"And he's saying this eating a sandwich. Wow, man, this is brutal. What am I getting myself into?" he wondered. As it turns out, "an octane-pumping ride of a film, from the music to the editing," he says.
Director Kathryn Bigelow, in a phone call this week, conceded, "There's no question that Jeremy bore the brunt of it, in that bomb suit," which she put closer to 100 pounds.
"Shooting in the summer with an average temperature of about 110 degrees, was in and of itself pretty challenging," she said. Co-star Anthony Mackie was tied up on another film until mid-July 2007 and he went from that project to "The Hurt Locker" in and around Amman, Jordan.
This is vastly different from Bigelow's 2002 submarine thriller "K-19: The Widowmaker," called the most expensive movie ever directed by a woman and costliest independently financed film at the time.
"This was an all-location shoot. I knew going into it that I wanted to have complete creative control, final cut and be able to cast emerging talent," the 57-year-old director said.
She shot largely in chronological order, a rare luxury, and hired up-and-comers Renner, Mackie and Brian Geraghty, much as she did with Willem Dafoe on "The Loveless."
"There's something kind of really satisfying where you're working with somebody whose rawness and immediacy and emotional investment is so acute," she said. More importantly, it keeps the suspense humming since the audience isn't thinking, "Well, he's a movie star, he can't die till the third act."
Famous faces pop up in "The Hurt Locker," and some survive and some do not.
"A day in the life of a bomb tech in Baghdad, circa 2004, is an inherently dramatic profession, arguably probably the most dangerous job in the world," Bigelow said, as demonstrated by embed reports from journalist-screenwriter Mark Boal that inspired the movie.
"You take that innately dramatic element and then give it just some context and specificity and authenticity -- realism, actually -- and then I think you're combining entertainment and substance ... the Holy Grail of filmmaking."
Bomb techs choose deadly jobs, score very high on IQ tests, have extraordinary motor skills and a preternatural ability to make a multitude of decisions under pressure. In 2004, a single team could have been called out 10 to 15 times a day in a densely populated area.
"You're like a surgeon, that's the kind of analogy I kept coming back to, when I would meet these men. Like a surgeon, you come in all shapes or sizes but there is no margin for error.
"If you make a mistake on the operating table, your patient doesn't make it. If you make a mistake bending over an improvised explosive device, you risk your life."
Bigelow calls the movie "fairly rigorous," but acknowledges it is a movie, not a training film. "This is an interpretation of an embed in Baghdad in 2004 at the dawn of the bomb squad being at the epicenter of this particular conflict. So it was a bit like the Wild West."
As for how a woman, even one nearly 6 foot tall, wrangled a production in Jordan, actor Geraghty said of the locals, "They loved her, loved her, embraced her," calling out in accented English "Kathy, Kathy" or "Point Break, Point Break."
Geraghty starred alongside Mackie in "We Are Marshall" and played a social misfit Marine in "Jarhead."
"I do have certain attributes of every character I play, they are definitely parts of yourself. Obviously it's a very vulnerable part of myself," he said of his "Hurt Locker" character who cannot shake the image of a colleague alive one minute, dead the next.
Geraghty plays him as an "Everykid" who just wants to get out of Baghdad alive and intact. "We're a team, we're there for each other and we do our jobs."
He also spent time with Army explosive-ordnance-disposal teams at a national training center in Fort Irwin in the Mojave Desert, but it was a conversation that proved most helpful.
"I talked to a guy who lost his team leader ... we were driving the bot around Fort Irwin, I went down to California, and he actually shared with me a personal story about that. Because obviously I suffer a loss and then another one (on screen) and that's how it is, I guess.
"I tried to portray that the best way possible. Actually, it gives me chills just talking about it."
(Pittsburgh Post-Gazette movie editor Barbara Vancheri can be reached at bvancheri(at)post-gazette.com.)
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
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