Arifa Akbar: Getting to grips with the real Iraq

T he Hurt Locker doesn't premiere in Venice until Thursday, but all week the film festival has been abuzz with whispers that it could take the coveted Golden Lion prize next week. Despite its modest budget – it is described as an $80m movie that has been made for $11m – it is among only five American films to have made it on to the 21-strong selection list for the festival's prize. Billed as the "ultimate" Iraq war story with few, if any, soft edges, the film is a "true fiction" that depicts the tour-of-duty horrors for an elite American army bomb disposal team that spend its days cheating death in the unruly epicentre of Baghdad.

What marks out The Hurt Locker from the wave of recent films about Iraq is its unique "insider's look" at the conflict. Its scriptwriter is Mark Boal, a former war correspondent who was the first reporter in the world to be embedded with the high-risk bomb disposal team in Iraq in 2004. And, in a move that sets a new benchmark for method acting, the cast, including Ralph Fiennes and Guy Pearce, undertook a gruelling training regime with army experts, using live ammunition during filming and – on one hair-raising occasion – finding themselves mistaken for the enemy while on a shoot in Jordan.

Industry insiders are hailing it as the dawn of a new level of realism in the dramatisation of the Iraq conflict. Boal was determined to make a movie that dealt with the conflict rather than skirted around its edges. Episodes he witnessed with the bomb squad, which has a mortality rate five times higher than any other military branch, together with recently declassified information, inspired the central concepts of the film. "It's fictional but a couple of scenes are direct translations of something I experienced and saw."

Its leading actors, including Jeremy Renner, who was in last year's Venice sensation The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Brian Geraghty, who starred alongside Shia LaBeouf and Anthony Hopkins in Bobby and Anthony Mackie, from the Oscar-winner, Million Dollar Baby, spent months training with elite squadrons using real bullets in Jordan and on American army bases. Pearce, meanwhile, was trained on the set while Fiennes was given lessons by a mercenary soldier.

Boal, who caught the eye of the industry last year for his acclaimed screenplay for In the Valley of Elah, starring Tommy Lee Jones and Charlize Theron, claims this is the first film to take an unflinching look at "live" combat. In a conflict that has roadside bombs at its centre, other films have refused to confront Iraq's domestic issues head on, he says. "Most of the movies that Hollywood has made on Iraq have primarily been polemical and dealt with the home front, the consequences of coming back and reintegrating. The Hurt Locker is really different. It takes place exclusively in the country and it's more like a classical Vietnam war movie, like Full Metal Jacket. An IED (improvised explosive device) is a key signature of the war, the way that the jungle was in Vietnam."

What Boal especially wanted to unravel in his script, he adds, was the compulsive state of mind of the men who volunteer to disarm these bombs. "I went on missions with these guys every day. They had a variety of techniques including hi-tech robots but when I was there, there were just too many bombs, so that it was a trade-off whether to take a hi-tech approach to it or run in with very little equipment to defuse it quickly.

"These men do this every day. The demands of the job are astonishing and there's a psychology that exists among these soldiers which appears as if they're addicted to highly stressful situations. There is nothing more momentous than making a life-or-death decision and these men make them 20 times a day.

"Normal life starts to seem really boring in comparison. I visited some of them after they had come back to the United States. They were talking about wishing they could go back. They weren't excited to be home."

Kathryn Bigelow, best known as the director of James Cameron's police conspiracy Strange Days starring Ralph Fiennes, which premiered in Venice 13 years ago, said she was compelled to explore this darker side of "men at war" after hearing Boal's observations.

"He told me stories about men in the army who disarm bombs in the heat of combat. When he mentioned that they are extremely vulnerable and use little more than a pair of pliers to disarm a bomb that can kill for 300 metres, I was shocked. When I learned that these men volunteer for this dangerous work and often grow so fond of it that they can imagine doing nothing else, I knew I had found my next film," she said. The film's action begins when a maverick sergeant, played by Renner, takes over a highly trained bomb disposal team and recklessly plunges his two subordinates into a deadly game of urban combat, behaving as if he is indifferent to death, leaving his men struggling to control their wild new leader.

Boal explains: "The lead actors all had extensive training with US army soldiers as part of the research for their roles. Jeremy spent time at Fort Irwin, in California, which is the premier anti-IED facility in the US, working with US army bomb technicians who'd just returned from Iraq.

"He participated in live-fire training exercises with real explosives, learned to operate the bomb suit and the robots, and became friends with several of the bomb techs.

"Once in Jordan, before and during the shoot, we ran more training courses for the actors with several technical advisers who had spent time fighting in Iraq – men from the US navy seals and British SAS – and in these courses they worked on bomb skills and basic soldiering skills as well, such as how to shoot various carbines and sniper rifles. Many of these sessions were conducted "live" with real ammunition in real-world environments." Last month it was reported that while shooting the film in Amman, locals became convinced that Renner was the enemy. The action was filmed near a Palestinian refugee camp and the cast had to fend off occasional missiles being thrown at them as they worked.

"We got shot at a few times while we were filming. I can almost say I was in a war, but, to be honest, I was just some jerk-ass actor pretending I was in it," Renner said.

As for Boal's future, while he broke away from war reporting to write this script, he has ambitions to return to the front line. For a writer who has shown a remarkable ability to translate journalistic reportage into searing fiction, first in his script for In the Valley of Elah, in which a father discovers disturbing truths about the state of veterans returning from Iraq while he searches for his missing son, to this film describing life on the front line, it's tempting to wonder if another "real life" encounter with war might inspire his next script.

What he has sought to create in The Hurt Locker, he says, is high energy, "true fiction". "This movie is about what it's really like," he says. "I don't think there has been a true Iraq movie yet." Or at least, not until now.

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