The Hurt Locker ceremony, it won six Oscars, including Best Picture, Best Director for Bigelow (the first woman to win this award), and Best Original Screenplay for Boal. "The Hurt Locker" is based on accounts of Mark Boal, a freelance journalist who was embedded with an American bomb squad in the war in Iraq for two weeks in 2004. The director Kathryn Bigelow was familiar with Boal's work before his experiences, having adapted one of his "Playboy" articles as the short-lived television series "The Inside" in 2002. When Boal was embedded with the squad, he accompanied its members 10 to 15 times a
The Hurt Locker on location in Jordan, before returning to Los Angeles, where she was joined by Murawski. The process took over eight months to complete. The goal was to edit a brutally realistic portrayal of the realities of war, using minimal special effects or technical enhancement. Innis stated that they "really wanted the film to retain that 'newsreel' documentary quality... Too many stage-y effects would have been distracting. The editing in this film was all about restraint". Editing on location led to additional complications in post-production. The production was unwilling to risk sending undeveloped film through high-security airports where the cans could