Biography

Competed with ex-husband James Cameron for the Best Director Oscar in 2010. This marked the first time that (ex-) spouses were nominated alongside each other in this category. She went on to win the award--the first woman director to do so.

In 2010, she became the first woman in Oscar history to win the Best Director award.

On March 7, 2010, at the Kodak Theatre in Los Angeles, CA, her Best Director Oscar statuette for The Hurt Locker (2008) was presented to her by Barbra Streisand, the only woman ever to have won the Golden Globe for Best Director.

Hung out with Susan Sontag and Philip Glass when she first came to New York City in 1970. She and Glass even collaborated on a business venture where they bought old loft places in Soho and Tribeca, renovated them and then sold them. She says she was often the one who sanded the floors.

As of 2018 she has directed two actors to Academy Award-nominated performances: Jeremy Renner (Best Actor, The Hurt Locker (2008)), and Jessica Chastain (Best Actress, Zero Dark Thirty (2012)).

If there's specific resistance to women making movies, I just choose to ignore that as an obstacle for two reasons: I can't change my gender, and I refuse to stop making movies. It's irrelevant who or what directed a movie, the important thing is that you either respond to it or you don't. There should be more women directing; I think there's just not the awareness that it's really possible. It is.

[on Strange Days (1995)] If you hold a mirror up to society, and you don't like what you see, you can't fault the mirror. It's a mirror. I think that on the eve of the millennium, a point in time only four years from now, the clock is ticking, the same social issues and racial tensions still exist, the environment still needs reexamination so you don't forget it when the lights come up. Strange Days (1995) is provocative. Without revealing too much, I would say that it feels like we are driving toward a highly chaotic, explosive, volatile, Armageddon-like ending. Obviously, the riot footage came out of the LA riots. I mean, I was there. I experienced that. I was part of the cleanup afterwards, so I was very aware of the environment. I mean, it really affected me. It was etched indelibly on my psyche. So, obviously, some of the imagery came from that. I don't like violence. I am very interested, however, in truth. And violence is a fact of our lives, a part of the social context in which we live. But other elements of the movie are love and hope and redemption. Our main character throws up after seeing this hideous experience. The toughest decision was not wanting to shy away from anything, trying to keep the truth of the moment, of the social environment. It's not that I condone violence. I don't. It's an indictment. I would say the film is cautionary, a wake-up call, and that I think is always valuable.

I always want to make films. I think of it as a great opportunity to comment on the world in which we live. Perhaps just because I just came off The Hurt Locker (2008) and I'm thinking of the war and I think it's a deplorable situation. It's a great medium in which to speak about that. This is a war that cannot be won, why are we sending troops over there? Well, the only medium I have, the only opportunity I have, is to use film. There will always be issues I care about.

You cast not for marquee value but for performance and talent. The right actor for the part. Anything else is a compromise.

[on The Hurt Locker (2008)] War's dirty little secret is that some men love it. I'm trying to unpack why, to look at what it means to be a hero in the context of 21st-century combat.