Mark Kermode on… Kathryn Bigelow, a stylish ruffler of feathers

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From vampire noir to Bin Laden, Point Break to Detroit, the first woman to win an Oscar for best director has never pulled her punches Watching new Jeff Nichols release The Bikeriders , starring Austin Butler and Tom Hardy as 60s Chicago greasers, I was reminded of two other movies: László Benedek’s 1953 Marlon Brando vehicle The Wild One , explicitly cited as an inspiration, and The Loveless , the 1981 feature debut of Kathryn Bigelow , the American film-maker (b.1951) who would go on to become the first woman to win a best director Oscar with her 2008 war drama The Hurt Locker . A symphony of leather-clad posing (with just a touch of Kenneth Anger ), The Loveless was a staple of the late-night circuit in the 80s, often on a double bill with David Lynch’s Eraserhead . Sharing directing credits with Monty Montgomery, Bigelow playfully deconstructed masculinity and machismo in a manner that was one part wry to two parts relish. I remember seeing The Loveless at the Phoenix in East
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Baz Luhrmann: ‘I need freedom above all else’

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The film director, 60, on what inspires him, the life-changing meeting he had with his wife, and why running away from home was his first act of rebellion

I grew up in a tiny country town in New South Wales, about 180 miles north of Sydney. It was like living on an island. There were 11 or so houses, and a gas station, and a farm. For a while we ran the local cinema.

When my father came out of the Vietnam war we were forced to have extremely short hair. This was the 70s, when if you didn’t have long hair you were a dead person, so it was a big problem. My parents broke up, I got estranged from my dad, and ended up in Sydney with the freedom to grow my hair. I’ve got really curly hair, and all the mean kids at the Christian Brothers’ College I went to started calling me Basil Brush, which then became Baz, which I then painted on the side of my school bag. When I was 19 I changed my name by deed poll to Bazmark. I’d always thought Mark was a boring name.

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