The latest film from the director of Zero Dark Thirty and The Hurt Locker follows the 1967 police killing of black teenagers amid a racially charged riot. It could be 2017’s most urgent movie

Kathryn Bigelow sits very straight and considers events last weekend in Charlottesville, Virginia. “It was an atrocity,” she says. “I don’t know where we go from here.” Does the crisis of American racism scare her? She repeats the question back as if peering at it under glass. “Does it scare me? Does it scare me?”

We are in London, a long way from Charlottesville, and a piano tinkles nearby. Bigelow, who is wearing a black top and jeans, is almost 6ft tall, gracefully angular, still the only woman to win an Oscar as best director, for her Iraq war masterpiece The Hurt Locker. The movies she makes – spotted with raw, precision violence – might suggest a certain kind of personality. In fact, I’m not the first person meeting her to be reminded of a benign professor.

“Fear is not an option,” she says finally. “So I feel compelled to do what I can in response. And using the medium I have available to do that.” She gives a tiny nod, as if deciding on balance to award herself a passing grade.

With a new film coming out, Bigelow is being asked a lot of questions. The project is a true story called Detroit, like most of her films ambitious, virtuoso and profoundly troubling. The scene is the “Detroit rebellion,” the 1967 riot triggered by brutal police racism. But then her gaze narrows to the Algiers motel, a black-owned business in the heart of the chaos. Exactly what happened there on the night of 26 July would end up being contested in federal court. The stark facts are that by 27 July, three young black men were dead, with three white police officers and a black security guard charged with killing them in cold blood after a series of vicious beatings. In Detroit, Bigelow fills in the blanks. The result is the rare film you can’t bear to watch while also being unable to look away.

Detroit review – Kathryn Bigelow rages against brutal chapter in US race struggle Read more

Not many stories set 50 years in the past speak so clearly to the right now. Bigelow recites just some of the names of the black Americans killed since she started work on the film. “Philando Castile. Michael Brown. Trayvon Martin. Eric Garner.” On set, working with a young cast – among them British actors John Boyega, Will Poulter and Hannah Murray – the mood of dread could be overwhelming. “You can’t just switch it off. You carry it with you.” The desire to tell a story that seemed to have been forgotten was, she says, what kept people coming back to work. “James Baldwin said: ‘Nothing can be changed until it is faced.’ And in America, there seems a radical desire not to face the reality of race. So these events keep replaying.”

Then, of course, there is Donald Trump. “I’d like him to see the film. I’d like to see how he reacts.” She smiles, as she does more often than you might think just from a transcript of her words. Is politics now her real motivation? She nods again. “It’s been that way a long time. It’s just more obvious now.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest John Boyega in Detroit. Photograph: Francois Duhamel/eOne

It is also more complicated now. Bigelow was 15 in 1967, growing up 2,000 miles from Detroit in San Carlos, northern California. Although aware of the riot, she had never heard of the horror of the Algiers motel until her regular screenwriter, Mark Boal, pitched her the project. For these reasons, and the fact of her whiteness, she and the film have already been drawn into a controversy about whether a white director should be involved with such an unhealed wound in black American history. Did that response take her by surprise?

She squints. “That hasn’t had a lot of traction.” Really? She must have seen the pieces? The debate has been widespread, and frequently intense – the critic Angelica Jade Bastien wrote of Detroit being made by “white creatives who do not understand the weight of the images they home in on with an unflinching gaze”.

“Right,” Bigelow says. “But they have been mitigated by the sense that the most important thing is to tell this story and get it out there.” She talks about the deep research she and Boal undertook, the presence on set of surviving witnesses, the involvement of figures such as veteran Detroit congressman John Conyers. She looks at me with what I think must be annoyance. But it isn’t that. At first, I can’t quite place it.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Detroit, which tells the story of the 1967 riot triggered by brutal police racism. Photograph: Francois Duhamel/eOne

“Certainly, my first reaction when I heard this story was: ‘Am I the right person to make this film?’ Because I am absolutely not. But it’s been 50 years in the shadows, and what is more important than whether I am the right or wrong person to tell the story is that it is told. There is a responsibility the white community needs to take for racism in America. And I’m trying, with what means I have, to be a part of encouraging that conversation.”

A conversation has been had around Detroit. As she says, it has also had plenty of support. But now I think I realise what her expression was saying. It was a sad “here we go again” that owes less to her new film and more to the one before it – Zero Dark Thirty, about the CIA hunt for Osama bin Laden, which was plagued by accusations that it promoted torture. If Bigelow can seem anxious, the thought of something similar happening to Detroit would explain it.

For now, she circles back to the message that white people everywhere have to find ways to fight racism. “You choose to engage or not to engage. I want to engage.”

She is not a fan of backstory. Her characters tend to go without it, as she would rather do herself. “My emphasis is on the work,” she says drily. But the world does know a little. Bigelow’s mother was a librarian and her father wanted to be a painter but ended up managing a paint factory. An only child, Bigelow came of age in a world at boiling point. By the “Long Hot Summer” of 1967, TV news brimmed with images of the riots in Detroit and a dozen other US cities, and the rolling nightmare of Vietnam.

“A year later,” says Bigelow, “I was out protesting against the war. You become aware of the power of the collective voice.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze in Point Break. Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo

She had been a shy kid. “Painfully,” she smiles. In adulthood, she briefly modelled for Gap, but in adolescence her height made her acutely self-conscious. Even now, she can seem like someone for whom the social is a second language, diligently learned. She became an artist, moving from teenage closeups of details from Old Masters, copied at supersize on to 12 ft by 12 ft canvases, into conceptual pieces similarly concerned with heft and scale. She spent a stretch of the 70s spent studying in New York, working under the guidance of Susan Sontag. Friends included Robert Mapplethorpe, Philip Glass and Laurie Anderson. “What I learned was that art has a political responsibility. It’s not meant to be decorative.”

Her first experiment with film was The Set-Up, a short portrait of two men having a fistfight, over which a pair of semioticians provided a commentary. It was the first of many bloodied bodies she would put on screen. I ask if she ever saw violence in real life, if that was the source of the fascination. Her privacy screen comes down. “I’m not sure what the origin story would be. I’ve always seen violence as political. I see it as a power strategy.”

She still talks about semiotics with a fluency you suspect may not come so easily to Guy Ritchie. Yet moving into film full time, it was the multiplex that attracted her, the thought of smuggling in ideas like a bottle under her coat. “I knew film had the potential to cross all lines of culture and class. That excited me.” Despite coming from art, she had limited interest in art movies. Or rather, she made art movies so weird they could pass for Hollywood – loud, brash, off-kilter films with fuzzy lines between good guys and bad. Almost in passing, she shaped the future of cinema: her horror movie Near Dark prefaced the revival of the vampire saga; the much-loved tale of surfing bankrobbers, Point Break was a direct link to the globally all-conquering Fast and Furious franchise.

In 1967, they watched their city erupt. Fifty years on, how has Detroit changed? Read more

What she didn’t often do was make films about women. When she did, with 1990’s Blue Steel, her heroine was a cop who falls for a psychopathic killer. For much of her career, Bigelow was the only woman in America making big-budget genre pictures, then as now doing it far more interestingly than most of her male peers. She resented the way the sexism of the studios left her expected to speak for all female directors. That even – especially – coloured her Oscar moment in 2010. (A soapy twist saw her defeat her ex-husband James Cameron, nominated for Avatar.)

“I was surprised and saddened at the same time [as] I was thrilled and honoured,” she says. “All those emotions arrived simultaneously. The gender demographics in the film industry are painful. And my feeling was that if I can make what feels impossible to someone feel possible, then I’m glad. But I always saw myself as a film-maker, not as a subset.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Jessica Chastain in Zero Dark Thirty. Photograph: Snap Stills/Rex Features

When she talks about The Hurt Locker, the real significance to her is the form it took – cinematic journalism, she says. She talks a lot and with passion about her affinity for journalists (“like you, I’m a conveyor of information”), or at least the noble version of the trade as tirelessly speaking truth to power, rather than knocking out listicles about Games of Thrones.

But journalism can be treacherous. Part of the job is asking awkward questions, another asking them at awkward moments. If The Hurt Locker showed audiences aspects of war they hadn’t seen before, three years later Zero Dark Thirty took them back to others – Guantánamo, “enhanced interrogations” – they no longer wanted to think about.

When I tell her I would like to talk about the film, she exclaims: “Yes!” But she looks as if she is about to receive medical test results. The fallout from the movie was toxic. It clearly hurt. There were accusations that she and Boal had colluded with the CIA. Naomi Wolf wrote an open letter in which she compared Bigelow to Leni Riefenstahl. Many of her most irate detractors hadn’t seen the film. In fact, she made the quest for revenge after 9/11 look squalid and pyrrhic, a fearless decision for any American director. But much of the film industry scattered. The vitriol rained down.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Jamie Lee Curtis in Blue Steel. Photograph: Lightning/Kobal/Rex/Shutterstock

“Part of being a film-maker,” she says carefully, “is that you enter a public discourse. And I value and respect that. Even at the risk of the dissonance it may encourage.” Then she stops. Beyond that, she says, there is nothing she can add, at least not on the record. She hunches forward. I tell her I think the film was misunderstood. She says she would be happy if I put that in the piece. But she won’t say it herself? Silence descends.

Is she afraid of the trouble reigniting? Or is this just the artist in her, disliking explaining her films at all? “See, that’s the thing. I constantly advocate for this arcane idea of letting the work speak for itself.” Another silence. And then, abruptly, she breaks it. “Zero Dark was not a simple narrative. Nor were the events.” She pauses and frowns. “I’m trying to think how to say this. It’s complicated. But sadly, yes, I think the film was misunderstood.”

She pauses again. The thought is unfinished. Then she pins down what it is she really wants to say – the absolute heart of the matter. “But I take full responsibility.”

Detroit is already out in the US. It is on release in the UK on 25 August and in Australia on 9 November.