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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Rebecca Miller: ‘There’s an abyss between you and your kids. They’re speaking a different language’

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The writer and filmmaker talks about parenting with Daniel Day-Lewis, directing Peter Dinklage and Anne Hathaway in her surreal new romcom, and gathering material in a Sex Addicts Anonymous meeting

What do you do with a storyline requiring two US states with different marriage laws, reachable in a single journey without resort to roads? The obvious answer, for a writer as versatile as Rebecca Miller, would be to work it into a novel or short story. But no, it was a film she wanted to make. “I realised that I needed two states on a river where they had different laws. It was like a crazy puzzle that I was trying to figure out,” she says. Her solution was a tugboat which could chug between New York and Delaware. This led to a riot of further possibilities: what if one of the characters was an eccentric female tugboat captain suffering from erotomania, who fixates on a creatively blocked opera composer with a therapist wife who would really rather be a nun?

The result, She Came to Me, which premieres in Berlin on 16 February, is one of the wackiest romcoms ever to lay claim on the genre: an intergenerational story of love overcoming every obstacle that modern domestic life can throw in its path. “When I read it I thought it was a creatively risky, golden-hearted script full of incredibly drawn, nuanced characters – a somewhat rare find. I felt very clearly how much I wanted the film to exist,” says Anne Hathaway, who plays the cleanfreak therapist.

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