Inside The Locker

As Kathryn Bigelow’s acclaimed drama The Hurt Locker faces off against James Cameron’s Avatar at this year’s Academy Awards, its producer Donall McCusker reveals why filmmaking can be a war zone.

Starting his career as line producer for Dan Reed’s Channel 4 drama The Valley (1999), Donall McCusker has spent the last decade producing award-winning TV and film, and has worked on BAFTA-nominated docudramas The Day Britain Stopped (2003) and Death of a President (2006).

His last three projects have all dealt with the realities of war in the Middle East, with McCusker serving as line producer on Nick Broomfield’s Battle For Haditha (2007), an investigation into the massacre of 24 men, women and children in Iraq, and Rowan Joffe’s The Shooting of Thomas Hurndall (2008), a look into the death of a young photojournalism student in Israel. But it’s bomb disposal thriller The Hurt Locker, on which McCusker is co-producer, that could see him accepting that coveted Best Picture Oscar.

We met McCusker at the plush Soho hotel-a far cry from the remote locations he’s been navigating of late-to talk about producing such hard-hitting films and the challenges they bring with them.

• How did you get started in the film business?
I started as a first assistant director in television, on stuff like ITV’s The Bill. I’d also done some big documentaries as a production manager. I then did The Day Britain Stopped with Gabriel Range for the BBC and the concept was, in my mind, the most boring film in the world; essentially a traffic jam movie! But we converted this into crashing planes over London, and it ended up winning an RTS award and a BAFTA. The whole premise was to shoot drama with a documentary crew-similar to the works of Shane Meadows, Michael Winterbottom and Penny Woolcock, who were doing films in unconventional ways. So I worked with Gabriel a couple of times, including Death of a President, then did a film with Nick Broomfield called Battle for Haditha, which brought me to Jordan.

• Did this lead to your involvement with The Hurt Locker?
I was in Jordan when I met [screenwriter] Mark Boal and Kathryn Bigelow, who had just arrived to do a recce for The Hurt Locker. There were a few incidents which meant the line producer who they had hired had to leave and they asked me to do it, because I had just wrapped Haditha. I thought they were a bit mad! I was more of a… I wouldn’t say guerrilla filmmaker, because I had always done films with budgets, but I hadn’t done a big film either. But Kathryn said to me she wanted to make this guerrilla style.

…

This article continues in movieScope Magazine, Issue 16 (March/ April 2010)