Kathryn Bigelow The first and only woman to win an Academy Award for Best Director, Kathryn Bigelow’s command of visual narrative, her tenacity and her choice of subjects that have the ability to provoke change, have redefined the landscape of cinema today. The American director also produces and writes for many of her films. Bigelow co-wrote and directed her first feature film The Loveless (1981) and in the late 1980s and 1990s directed a trilogy of action films — Blue Steel (1989), Point Break (1991) and Strange Days (1995) — which challenged the conventions of that genre. Her status as a Hollywood heavyweight was confirmed with the political action thrillers The Hurt Locker (pictured below) in 2008 and Zero Dark Thirty in 2012. For The Hurt Locker, Bigelow won Academy Awards for Best Picture and Best Director. In her most recent feature film, Detroit (2017) — based on the 1967 Detroit riots — Bigelow explored race-related violence in the US. As always, her films provoke an examination of so
ciety and have established the director as a true auteur.




see the example, it excites us and we say ‘I want to do that, or my version of that’. Then we have to pass on what we know to a new generation.”

Iñárritu: “(A mentor is) someone who helps you see something within yourself, something that you have not seen and who gives you the confidence to carry it out. I would like to be there for someone else, in much the same way as [my mentors] were there for me.” Scorsese: Scorsese credits one of his university lecturers in New York with setting him on the path to greatness: “He set a fire in our hearts... If you were crazy enough to think you have got to make a movie, he was the one who inspired you.”