Strange Days

Kathryn Bigelow’s subjective camera is a production problem, not a stylistic flourish. To make SQUID recordings read as someone else’s eyes, a year went into a purpose-built camera: a stripped-down Arri lighter than the smallest Eyemo that still took every prime lens. The opening robbery’s jump between two buildings, some 5 metres, was made without a harness and took two years to coordinate; the cuts are hidden, a helmet camera for the leap, a Steadicam for the stairs. Iris running in front of the train was shot with the train backing up, then reversed. Shooting was entirely in Los Angeles across 77 nights. For the millennium crowd, 10,000 people paid 10 dollars each to fill 5th and Flower. The box office was heavy: a 42 million dollar production took 8 million in the United States and Canada, and Bigelow did not direct again for 5 years. Still, at the 22nd Saturn Awards it turned 5 nominations into 2 wins, Bigelow the first woman to take that directing award and Angela Bassett best actress. A good fit if you can stay with police violence delivered through the eyes of whoever lived it, not as news footage. Not for anyone unable to sit through a long passage showing a rape from the victim’s point of view; the sequence split critics on release.