8. Stealth shooting

To keep the actors on their toes - and to maintain the sense of immersive realism, Bigelow chose to keep several cameras running at once, shooting from different locations and never quite letting her actors know when they might be on camera.

Off-putting? Not according to the director. "I think it was actually not challenging at all, it was kind of exciting and exhilarating.

"And once the actor got used to the surprise of the camera—or absence of a camera where you think one might be—then suddenly there's maybe a total immersion and a kind of purity to that experience.

"So rather than give a particular segment of that scene a particular nuance for that particular kind of camera lens, you're actually performing a bomb disarmament from beginning to end, and the cameras are there catching that bomb disarmament."

“Half the time we didn’t know where the cameras were, so that made it kind of exciting,” says Jeremy Renner. “We called them ninja cameras. They were hiding out in trunks of cars and on camels. Sometimes Kathryn didn’t even know where they were. She’d say, ‘Where’s the fourth camera?’”

Next: Trailer time

And so, to the trailer...