The Big Picture

Director Kathryn Bigelow faced a disappointing box office flop with K-19: The Widowmaker after a successful career, leading to her longest hiatus. The failure of K-19 can be attributed to its similarities to The Hunt for Red October and Harrison Ford’s inconsistent Russian accent. Bigelow made a triumphant return with The Hurt Locker, a unique war film that earned critical acclaim and made her the first woman to win a Best Director Oscar.

Anyone who has put together a long career in Hollywood is bound to have ups and downs. It’s a roller coaster ride filled with disappointing lows and majestic highs. For director Kathryn Bigelow, her climb to the top of the movie world was preceded by a box office flop that also led to the longest hiatus of her 40-year career. Now 71, Bigelow has made a number of well-received box office successes, including the original Point Break in 1991 starring Keanu Reeves. When she turned 50, Bigelow made a film starring Harrison Ford called K-19: The Widowmaker. It was a massive loss for Paramount Pictures, which had dropped a cool $95 million on the project only to see the promising story about a Russian submarine captain during the Cold War only hit the tiller with a $65 million return. If you do the math, that’s a loss of $25 million and a terribly disappointing point in Bigelow’s career. It led to an extended break, where she took a step back from making motion pictures and got her ducks in a row before making a triumphant return in 2008 with The Hurt Locker, an unexpected tour de force effort that would elevate her to the very top of Mount Tinseltown.

Why Did ‘K-19: Widowmaker’ Bomb at the Box Office?
Image via Paramount Pictures

A Cold War movie about a Russian submarine captain. Hmmm, that sounds familiar. Probably because Tom Clancy’s The Hunt for Red October had already been adapted for the big screen to both critical and public acclaim about 10 years prior. The story about Jack Ryan (Alec Baldwin) guiding a Russian sub captained by a defecting Russian captain through a diplomatic gauntlet to safe waters was one of the best submarine movies ever made. It’s not that K-19 was released too soon on its heels, but the plot was similar enough to draw comparisons anyway, and it’s a tall order to live up to that standard. When a studio drops almost $100 million at your feet and says, “Go make a great, blockbuster film like The Hunt for Red October,” it’s a daunting and intimidating undertaking, and Bigelow must have felt the weight of the world on her shoulders helming such a massive project. Not to mention that she had one hand tied behind her back by being bound to a rather unremarkable real-life story in 1961 about another failed Russian nuclear weapon endeavor. And she still delivered a serviceable movie, it just suffered in comparison to better movies in the action sub-genre including Das Boot, Crimson Tide, and the Jack Ryan adaptation.

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What is Going On With Harrison Ford’s Accent in ‘K-19: The Widowmaker’?

Harrison Ford is a legend. If he had never made another movie after the original Star Wars trilogy, Blade Runner, and the Indiana Jones franchise, his spot among the best action stars on film was secure. So it begs the question, what exactly was going on with his accent in K-19? Sometimes he labors through his dialogue with a flimsy Russian accent while in other scenes he drops the accent completely — often in mid-sentence. Harrison Ford is synonymous with American action. Asking him to do his best in a half-assed foreign dialect was never going to turn out well, and it is painfully obvious throughout. This may not have been Bigelow’s unilateral decision, but it certainly didn’t do her or K-19: The Widowmaker any favors at the box office. But enough about the fall, let’s talk about how Bigelow made her triumphant return.

Kathryn Bigelow Shot Commercials While Creating ‘The Hurt Locker’

After the disappointment of K-19: The Widowmaker, Bigelow took the longest hiatus between films of her long and storied career. K-19 was released in 2002, and she claimed the Oscar for The Hurt Locker in 2010. So what was the director doing during that span that led to her crowning achievement behind the camera? She cringes at the notion that the submarine flop almost put an end to her career. But, afterward, in order to pay the bills, she made commercials. It had to be a humbling few years after being on set with the likes of Harrison Ford and Liam Neeson in a $100 million film to peddling stuff on television, but she also spent those years working with longtime collaborator and screenwriter Mark Boal. Together, they had an idea for a unicorn of a war film that was so unique in its perspective on the American conflict in the Middle East that it would make her the toast of Hollywood. And Bigelow knew that she was sitting on a gold mine with the project, calling it, “The Holy Grail of filmmaking” because it was an entertaining genre film that explores an aspect of war that has never really been addressed in earnest.

How ‘The Hurt Locker’ Became a Huge Bounce-Back Success For Bigelow
Image via Summit Entertainment

After getting rave reviews at both the Toronto and Venice film festivals, it was becoming pretty clear that audiences were seeing the same unique qualities about the material that she and Boal did. The story of the Iraq War Explosive Ordnance Team bomb technician and adrenaline junkie Sergeant William James (Jeremy Renner) and fellow soldier Sergeant J.T. Sanborn (Anthony Mackie) as they quite literally risk life and limb every time they put that protective, hazardous suit on to disarm IEDs (improvised explosive devices), was a very fresh but still extremely gritty and harrowing take on a war that was becoming more and more unpopular as the years wore on following the tragedy on 9/11. It also had us on the edge of our seats as we got to know these well-written and directed characters throughout the film. There’s nothing like the drama of a possible mistake causing a bomb to go boom! while you have it in your hands, is there? It’s a classic plot device, but it had never been examined as the focus of a war movie the way Bigelow did with The Hurt Locker. The fact that both Renner and Mackie both brought their A games and delivered great performances with terrific chemistry certainly didn’t hurt either. The box-office numbers are almost irrelevant with such a fine piece of art, nonetheless, the film managed to earn more than a 300% profit, bringing in $49 million on a $15 million budget.

Kathryn Bigelow Becomes the First Woman to Win a Best Director Oscar
Image via Summit Entertainment

The Hurt Locker was made in 2008 but wasn’t widely released in the US until the summer of 2009, which is why she had to wait until the 2010 Academy Awards ceremony to get her hands on the crowned jewel of the movie industry as the Best Director of the year. Things had come full circle for Bigelow, and it’s a fabulous story of how perseverance and dreams can triumph over everything else. And perhaps the cherry on top of the raison d’etre is forever being known as the first woman to win the Best Director Oscar. That is something that can never be taken away from her. From directing commercials to becoming a historic filmmaking pioneer, Bigelow’s story is nothing short of an inspirational triumph.