50 Fun Facts About The Hurt Locker

Who directed The Hurt Locker?

She became the first woman to win the Best Director Oscar.

Who plays Sergeant First Class William James?

It earned him a Best Actor nomination, the year before his Supporting nod for The Town.

What kind of unit does the film follow?

The characters belong to an Explosive Ordnance Disposal team with Bravo Company.

How is Staff Sergeant Thompson killed in the opening sequence?

Specialist Eldridge blames himself for not shooting the man with the phone.

Who plays Thompson, the team leader killed at the start?

Fiennes plays the British contractor leader and Morse a colonel; Camargo is the psychiatrist.

Who plays Sergeant J. T. Sanborn?

He described the shoot as so hot the cast were easily agitated, but 'like doing a play'.

What does James do to Sanborn while disarming the car bomb?

Sanborn is so rattled he later floats the idea of fragging James.

How does James hide his approach to an IED from Sanborn?

He defuses it moments before an insurgent tries to trigger it with a 9-volt battery.

The armed men by the SUV with a flat tyre turn out to be what?

Three of them are killed by a sniper before James and Sanborn take over.

What is Beckham's trade around the base?

James later thinks a body bomb in a warehouse is the boy.

Who is killed by an explosion during the warehouse evacuation?

He had been Eldridge's counselor, deepening the young soldier's trauma.

Where does James end up when he sneaks off base to find Beckham's home?

He flees, and Beckham turns up alive the next morning.

How is Eldridge wounded?

Before being airlifted, he angrily blames James for the wound.

Who plays Specialist Owen Eldridge?

He had already played a Marine in Jarhead.

Why can't James save the man in the bomb vest?

The man was strapped into the vest against his will; Iraqi refugee actor Suhail Dabbach plays him.

What does Sanborn say he wants to leave the army to do?

He laments that only his parents would have mourned him.

What does James do at the end of the film?

He tells his infant son there is only one thing he knows he loves.

Who wrote the screenplay?

He won Oscars for both Original Screenplay and Best Picture as a producer.

How long was Boal embedded with a bomb squad in Iraq?

He went out with the team 10 to 15 times a day.

In which magazine did Boal's article 'The Man in the Bomb Suit' appear?

Bigelow had already adapted another of his Playboy pieces as the TV series The Inside.

What was the script's original title?

'Hurt locker' is a decades-old colloquialism for being injured.

Which earlier Bigelow flop made studios wary of the project?

Iraq War films also had a reputation for losing money.

Which film convinced Bigelow to cast Renner?

He played the serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer in it.

Where did the cast train for a week before shooting?

They learned to use C4, render IEDs safe and wear a bomb suit.

In which country was the film shot?

Some locations were less than three miles from the Iraqi border.

Why did the filmmakers reject Morocco as a location?

Boal's CIA contacts suggested the eventual location because its capital resembles Baghdad.

What was the final budget after Jordanian help?

Voltage had originally greenlit it at $30 million.

Roughly what temperature did the 44-day shoot average?

The actors were housed in a tent with dirt floors and encouraged to method act.

How much weight did Renner say he lost to food poisoning in three days?

The bomb suit he wore all day weighed 80 to 100 pounds on top of that.

What did the special effects artist use for gunpowder because of import restrictions?

They blew up in his face during assembly; he was back at work two days later.

What film format did Bigelow shoot on, with four cameras rolling at once?

The multiple hand-held cameras produced nearly 200 hours of footage.

Who shot the film, chosen for his work on United 93?

Bigelow wanted something 'raw, immediate and visceral'.

At which festival did the film premiere, earning a 10-minute standing ovation?

That was in September 2008; US release didn't come until June 2009.

How many Oscars did the film win?

From nine nominations; it lost Best Actor to Crazy Heart and Best Original Score to Up.

Which film tied The Hurt Locker for most nominations that year, with nine?

It was directed by Bigelow's ex-husband James Cameron.

Who co-hosted the 2010 Oscars, the first dual-host ceremony since 1987?

It was also the first year with ten Best Picture nominees since 1944.

Why was producer Nicolas Chartier banned from the ceremony?

It was the first time the Academy had ever banned an individual nominee.

What did Master Sergeant Jeffrey Sarver claim in his lawsuit?

A federal court threw it out and ordered him to pay over $180,000 in fees.

The film's tiny US gross makes it what among Best Picture winners?

It never even entered the weekend box office top 10.

The film opens with which on-screen statement?

The line comes from war correspondent Chris Hedges.

Bigelow became the first woman ever to win which Academy Award?

She beat her ex-husband James Cameron on the night; she is also one of only three women to win the Directors Guild feature award, with Chloé Zhao and Jane Campion.

Which company picked up US distribution for $1.5 million after the Toronto screening?

It opened on just four screens in Los Angeles and New York in June 2009 and led the country in per-screen average for its first two weeks.

Production company Voltage Pictures announced a mass lawsuit in 2010 against people who did what?

It named 5,000 unidentified users and demanded $1,500 each to settle; the US Copyright Group later dropped all the cases.

The film won six awards, including Best Film, at which ceremony on 21 February 2010?

It managed only three Golden Globe nominations the same season, yet swept most US critics' groups for Best Picture and Best Director.

Which Lost star plays Connie, James's ex-wife, in the film's stateside scenes?

Her cereal-aisle scene is the one even the film's military critics concede rings true about coming home from war.

On Rotten Tomatoes it was the second highest-rated film of 2009, behind which title?

It sits at 96% from 288 reviews and scored 95 on Metacritic; Pixar's balloon adventure edged it.

Which 2007 western made Bigelow want Marco Beltrami to score the film?

Beltrami shared the job with Buck Sanders, and the score came out on Lakeshore Records in June 2009.

The film's first public release, in October 2008, was in which country?

Warner Bros. put it out there a month after its festival debut, eight months before American audiences could see it.

Which actor plays Colonel Reed, the officer impressed by James's tally of defused bombs?

The cast also includes Christian Camargo as the psychiatrist and Christopher Sayegh as Beckham.

The Pentagon first cleared the crew to shoot at which real US Army base in Kuwait?

Clearance was pulled when officials believed unapproved scenes were being shot, so the production used Royal Jordanian Army equipment instead.