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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Jonathan Glazer on his holocaust film The Zone of Interest: ‘This is not about the past, it’s about now’

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The British director’s acclaimed, audacious new film about the family life of Auschwitz’s commandant was 10 years in the making. He explains how it was made – and the importance of finding light in the darkness

Jonathan Glazer grew up in Hadley Wood, close to Barnet on the northern outskirts of London, where his family were part of a thriving Jewish community. “There were all these fantastic characters, who were in and out of my house when I was a little boy,” he says. “Many of them were East End Jews who had moved to the suburbs for a better quality of life, not super-intellectual people, but incredible entertainers – vaudeville musicians, writers and the like. As a child, I loved and absorbed the richness of that culture.”

The Holocaust, he says, was never openly talked about in his home, but “it was always present”. When his late father found out years ago that he was making a film about Rudolf Höss, the Nazi commandant of Auschwitz, his reaction was anger mixed with dismay. “He said: ‘I don’t know what you’re doing this for,’” recalls Glazer, “‘Why are you digging it up? Let it rot.’ Those were the three words he used. His feeling was very much that it was gone, that it was in the past. I remember saying to him: ‘I really wish I could let it rot, but, no, Dad, it’s not in the past.’”

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