‘Hurt Locker’ is intense, riveting
"If I’m gonna die, I’m gonna die comfortable,” Staff Sgt. William James declares to the two other members of his Army explosive ordnance disposal team.
After donning the cumbersome gear on set in the broiling heat of a Middle Eastern summer, Renner, 38, could see his character’s point.
"I have mixed feelings about the suit,” the actor said during a Q&A at spring’s American Film Institute Dallas International Film Festival. "On one hand, it is quite peaceful. It’s like, you know, 100 pounds or so; it’s equally distributed through your entire body, so the physical weight is interesting at first. And the sound you hear is just your own breath, that’s all you hear.
"Always, once I got the suit on, I’d put headphones in my ears and I would play Beethoven, ‘Moonlight Sonata,’ and it became poetry. It became this very sort of esoteric, sort of like ‘All right, let’s go paint this painting while I disarm or render safe an IED.’”
But the tranquil feeling of sporting the suit, which looks more spaceman than Army man, always proved short-lived.
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"After like, you know, five minutes in it, I’d want to kill myself because it’s so arduous,” he said. "The training in it was a stack of paper clips is on the ground, a stack of hundred, and you pick one up. Just to get on your knees and to get down and pick one up and get up and go 15 feet and put it down, it takes like three minutes. ... So, you move that stack over to there and that’s it, that’s all you have to do, but that’s pretty intense just to do that.”
"Intense” effectively describes virtually everything about "The Hurt Locker,” from the 44-day shoot in Jordan to director Kathryn Bigelow’s riveting action sequencing to the film’s commitment to authenticity.
Set in Baghdad circa 2004, the film follows Bravo Company, an Army bomb-disposal team tasked with neutralizing homemade bombs, or improvised explosive devices. For war-weary Sgt. J.T. Sanborn (Anthony Mackie) and Spc. Owen Eldridge (Brian Geraghty), having James take over the team with just 38 days left of their tour is scary. Along with casting off his safety suit, James tends to swagger casually into potentially deadly situations.
But as they get to know their taciturn new leader, Sanborn and Eldridge wonder whether he is an arrogant renegade hooked on the adrenaline rush or a skilled professional with a penchant for selfless heroics. Renner said the character still has him pondering.
"There’s always a question with discovering this guy,” he said. "Every time I watch, I still question. I think it will always be unfolding to me, and hopefully that reveals itself to the audience. You constantly think you know him and then something or other will turn and give you something else.”
The California native is earning widespread acclaim and early Oscar buzz for his nuanced performance.
His previous credits include the films "Dahmer,” "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford,” "28 Weeks Later” and "S.W.A.T.,” along with the recent short-lived TV series "The Unusuals.”
"The Hurt Locker” screenwriter Mark Boal, who based the script on his experiences as a journalist embedded in Iraq, enthusiastically praised Renner and his co-stars.
"You write something and then you’re like, ‘OK, that seems like it might be pretty cool,’ or not. And then you get a great actor to read it, and you all the sudden say, ‘I’m a (expletive) genius, I can’t believe I really wrote that,’ because it’s invested with so much humanity and so much depth,” Boal said.
While he respects the real-life Army bomb squads, Renner said he couldn’t really speak to what motivates soldiers to take on the job.
"‘What does it take to put on the suit?’ You know, why does somebody want to be a schoolteacher? There’s a thousand schoolteachers that do it for their different reasons. Why does someone choose to do that? ... Why we do what we do separates us from everybody else on the planet. I can only speak for James,” he said.
"I would never do it. Jeremy? No, no, no way.”