Mark Boal

When Mark Boal wrote The Hurt Locker, he was super new to the game. In fact, he only had a writing credit for one other movie, In the Valley of Elah (source). So, The Hurt Locker is where he really learned all the screenwriting ropes…and then won an Oscar. Pretty cool, right?

The whole idea for The Hurt Locker came from Boal's experiences as a journalist embedded in a military explosive ordnance disposal team in Iraq, which he ultimately turned into an article for Playboy. Kathryn Bigelow got interested in the story, and voilà, the rest is history (source).

So, if the movie seems super realistic and documentary-ish to you, well, that's why—Boal was pulling his ideas for the film directly from watching EOD techs work.

Unfortunately, the subject of Boal's Playboy article, Sergeant Jeffrey Sarver, wasn't quite as impressed with the film as, say, the Oscars were. He claimed that the film was a not-so-thinly veiled depiction of his own experiences in Iraq and that The Hurt Locker had therefore damaged his reputation since Will James' character is...what's a diplomatic word? Let's go with "unsteady."

Boal, for his part, denied that Will James' character was based on any single person he interviewed. Ultimately, the case was thrown out, and Sarver was ordered to pay back the defendants' legal fees...but yeah, there you have it: the dangers of dealing with real people who do dangerous, highly sensitive work.

Boal was also behind the script for Zero Dark Thirty, the film about the hunt for Osama bin Laden. He got nominated for an Oscar for that one as well. So, yeah, we think he's got the whole screenwriting thing down by now, wouldn't you say?

Oh, and we should also mention that he's gotten production credits for his work on The Hurt Locker, Zero Dark Thirty, and another untitled Bigelow project that's currently in progress. Guess Bigelow and Boal figure they make a winning team, huh?