Kathryn Bigelow

Kathryn Bigelow (born 1951) came to film from painting — she studied at the San Francisco Art Institute and was a Whitney programme fellow before making genre movies with an art-critic’s eye: Near Dark, Blue Steel, Point Break, and the millennial cyber-noir Strange Days. In 2010 she became the first woman to win the Academy Award for Best Director, for The Hurt Locker. Zero Dark Thirty and Detroit followed, along with the accusation, which has trailed her for a decade, that her procedural realism shades into endorsement of the systems she films.

Who uses it

She returned in 2025 with A House of Dynamite, a Netflix thriller that replays the same eighteen minutes of a nuclear launch alert from three vantage points and refuses to say who fired. It premiered at Venice and became the year’s most argued-over film about automated decision-making under time pressure — a subject that put AI questions in front of her all autumn.

Her answer, given to The Guardian in October 2025, was neither a denunciation nor an embrace. Per that interview she would never use AI for anything to do with a performance — a hard line drawn just as the synthetic performer Tilly Norwood was dominating the trade press — but beyond that she declined to prophesy, and reached back thirty years to the last time she was asked to.

She is not disengaged from the risk argument: she told the same interviewer she was reading If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, the AI-extinction bestseller co-written by Eliezer Yudkowsky, and pronounced it “fascinating” and as pessimistic as the title implies. Asked why people look to filmmakers for answers, she rewound through the conversation — “AI. Climate change. Nuclear war.” — and smiled: “Next time, I’m making a comedy.” On record, that is the whole of her public AI position: a refusal for actors, an instrumentalist framework for everything else, and a reader’s curiosity about how badly it could go.