A graduate of the San Francisco Art Institute and scholar at the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study program, Kathryn Bigelow seemed destined for a career in the art world, mentored by visiting artists like Susan Sontag and Richard Serra. She applied to Columbia Film School primarily to gain access to funding and their editing equipment for a conceptual short she was developing. Fortunately for us, she made the pivot to writing and directing feature films.

From her first experimental short film, The Set Up (1978) - centred on two men trying to kill each other – Bigelow is known for her gritty and intense depictions of violence. It is telling that one of her favourite filmmakers is Sam Peckinpah who, she says, “uses the language of violence to speak about honour”. The action in her films feels high-impact and visceral – and, indeed, listening to her reflect on the absence of stunt coordinators in her first film (“I knew I needed these various shots”) and Patrick Swayze’s insistence on doing his own stunts in Point Break (1991), as well as the Millennium Eve crowd scene at the end of Strange Days involving 20,000 extras, 50 cops, 12 cameras and filmed in an anarchic frenzy from 9pm to 4am on a Saturday night – there is a genuine and exhilarating element of danger and risk in her scenes.

While Strange Days was considered a major box office flop and divided critics (Roger Ebert described it as a “technical tour de force”), it has since garnered a growing fanbase. It also prompted Bigelow to build an at-the-time revolutionary point-of-view camera that mimicked human vision and weighed just 8lb.

Asked what she’ll be working on next, she acknowledges that Strange Days took almost four years to make and was the culmination of a lot of her ambitions, so “my next project is to take a little bit of a break.” It would be five years before she made her next movie.