Big bad Bigelow

IF KATHRYN BIGELOW WERE TO BE RATED FOR POLITICAL CORRECTNESS, SHE'D GET AN F. SHE DIRECTS MOVIES THAT CAN BE VIOLENTLY VIOLENT AND THAT DARE TO SHOW THE NITTY-GRITTY OF EROTICS. HER LATEST FILM, STRANGE DAYS, STARRING RALPH FIENNES AND ANGELA BASSETT, WILL HAVE PEOPLE TALKING ABOUT IT FOR DAYS AFTER THEY SEE IT, IT'S SO CHARGED AND WIRED.

Director Kathryn Bigelow makes fetishistic thrillers with a highly developed taste for luridness and sheeny, blood-slick surfaces. She has a habit, though, of probing deeper into the nature of aberration than many more-visible Hollywood auteurs do. Her latest movie, Strange Days, is a tumultuous, twisty pulp about one Lenny Nero (Ralph Fiennes), a sleazy dealer of black-market digital clips that enable the user to experience the POV sensory impressions of whoever recorded them--whether burglar, prostitute, or murderer. Ostensibly about one fall guy's search for redemption amid the Gomorrah of end-of-millennium Los Angeles, Bigelow's movie is also a rueful comment on state-of-the-art, media-sated man.

GRAHAM FULLER: Strange Days is a kinetic thriller, but when I was watching it, I kept wanting you to stop the plot and just show us more of those POV playback clips of sex and crime that your main character, Lenny, is hawking. They are incredibly addictive, yet the movie is critical of that addictiveness and suggests that the technology that creates such images--if it were ever invented--inevitably would be seized by pornographers and snuff moviemakers.

KATHRYN BIGELOW: The movie explores the idea of watching and the need to watch, and Lenny is a kind of director-to-producer of heightened-reality documentaries that put the viewer into the head of the person having a particular experience. As our society progresses and genuine experience becomes a riskier and riskier enterprise, so the desire for it will increase. Lenny says, "I am performing a humanitarian service. I probably save lives." The streets are a war zone, sex can kill you, but with this technology you can have all the experiences that you might otherwise deprive yourself of. I think cinema as we know it today satisfies that need; it' fundamental to the human condition. The technology shown in Strange Days is an extrapolation of feeding that hunger.

GF: It's one step beyond virtual reality.

KB: There's nothing virtual about it. It's reality.

GF: Except that it's somebody else's reality; therefore it's voyeurism. And it's pernicious because it's addictive. Were you trying to make a cautionary fable?

KB: I think there are both dangers and potential for mind expansion in this stuff, Obviously, for the guy who has no legs [Lenny's wheelchair-bound friend whose fantasy playback enables him to feel what it's like to run along a beach] Lenny provides an unthinkable experience. There might be something hopeful about using the technology this way. But given that this is a thriller, the focus is on serving darker needs.

GF: When you choose a film to direct, how much are you driven by the visual possibilities?

KB: They're inherent. For instance, the playback POVs are just pure cinema. The challenge to light them,to make them as unflinching as they would be if you were actually witnessing and experiencing what they show, and to make them fluid and seamless, was compelling.

GF: There are a couple of playback sequences where we see, from his point of view, a murderer stalking Iris [Brigitte Bako] and Faith [Juliette Lewis]. For those sequences, were you influenced by the killer-cameraman's POV in Peeping Tom [1960?]

KB: I love that film. I didn't rescreen it when I was making Strange Days; I just let it percolate in the back of my mind, having seen it ten or twelve years ago. There's no question that it comes as close as any film has come to utilizing the medium to comment on the medium. It shows how the darker nature of the cinematic process can seduce you and pull you into the abyss. Peeping tom is a brilliant piece of film-making because the subjective viewpoint of the camera when it kills puts you, as a viewer, in a position of culpability.

GF: Lenny is a passive protagonist. The real here of Strange Days is Mace, this tough, no-nonsense security agent played by Angela Bassett. She seems like someone who emerged straight from your own sensibility.

KB: It was interesting to utilize a strong female character and a male character who has great capacity for vulnerability. It would not be something I would pursue if the situation were reversed. There'd be nothing I could personalize; it'd be generic at that point. Something becomes personal when it deviates from the norm. Certainly, Mace is the moral center of the film, and clearly I'm attracted to strong women, but that's not to say that she doesn't have her own vulnerabilities.

GF: Lenny's perspective on Faith, his ex-girlfriend, is voyeuristic and sadomasochistic. You shoot her like a sex-fantasy figure, whereas Mace is stern and maternalistic. Did you see them as the two sides of a madonna-whore complex that Lenny's got to resolve?