Before Youth Without Youth had come out, I think we were working on the mix, or about to work on the mix. I was approached by Kathryn Bigelow, with whom I worked on K-19, and she had a film that she wanted to... Me to work on, that was based on a bomb disposal expert. This was the film Hurt Locker. And I read the screenplay, and met with Kathryn, and I said, 'I don't think I want to work on this, because I...' Jarhead, which was in similar, but different territory, I was still a little bruised from that experience of working on that film and it not being as successful as we wanted it to be. And then I realised I had worked on five war films in a row, if you count [Apocalypse] Redux as a war film, and K-19 as a military film, and Cold Mountain as a military film, and Jarhead as a military film. Hurt Locker would be another military film, and I was just... I felt that it was just... I wanted to change the subject a bit from military stuff.
And it's, you know, it's one of those decisions that if in retrospect, of course, Hurt Locker went on to win the Best Film. It won Best Film, and it won Best Editing, and it won Best Sound, and it swept the Oscars. And that year, you look at that and say, 'Well, that could've been me', but maybe it couldn't, you know. It... The dynamics are very peculiar, but the chances are that that would've been a very successful film that I... with which I could be associated with. And I had had a run of films that were slightly less successful than they... than we hoped for them, so that would've been nice to counterpoint it.
But that's, as they say, that's the breaks, that's the business. You have to make decisions based on the information that you have at the time, and that was the decision I made, and you... That's just the... That's part of the world that all of us who work in this business live with. There's a great deal of uncertainty about how these things come together, and when they come together, and if they come together, and... But that is a particularly clear example of turning down a project, and then seeing, in fact, what happened as a result of that.
