Showbiz411

This is like hitting Oscar gold with one sweep: “Zero Dark Thirty” director Kathryn Bigelow has made the cover of Time. Pretty cool. No personal stuff, just all about the film and little of her history. (So still no mention of what the status is of her relationship with screenwriter Mark Boal. Oh well, this isn’t People, after all!) Old friend Willem Dafoe tells writer Jessica Winter:

“Kathryn then is the same Kathryn now,” Dafoe says. “She’s attracted to something instinctively, and then she researches it, and her research becomes an adventure. In the late ’70s there was a lot of interest in rockabilly and appreciation of ’50s outlaw culture, so she would go to clubs to scout people for their look and style, and worry about coaxing a performance out of them later. She was so interested in the slang and the idiom and the ritual of that world, which wasn’t really of her own experience. And she’s still interested in learning the language and rituals of hidden worlds. Just look at her titles–Hurt Locker, Zero Dark Thirty. It’s like coded language and she’s cracking the code.” (Zero Dark Thirty’s title is a tweak of “oh-dark-thirty,” a military term for half past midnight.)

It’s over at www.time.com

Roger Friedman

Roger Friedman began his Showbiz411 column in April 2009 after 10 years with Fox News. Friedman previously wrote the Intelligencer column at New York Magazine, He writes for Parade magazine and has written for Details, Vogue, the New York Times, Post, and Daily News and many other publications. He is the writer and co-producer of a film about R&B Music called “Only the Strong Survive,” which was released by Miramax in 2003 and was a selection of the Cannes, Sundance, and Telluride Film festivals.