Kathryn Bigelow And Cast On ‘A House Of Dynamite’

How much do you know about nuclear warfare?

Sitting on a New York City hotel balcony with Kathryn Bigelow, I realize she has just taught me pretty much everything I know on the subject. Her latest film, A House of Dynamite, takes us inside the secret spaces and behind the closed doors of the military-industrial sophisticated, like The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty — her two other films in this “triptych”, as she calls it. This time, Bigelow has applied her meticulously researched, journalistic approach to this terrifyingly real question: what exactly would happen at high levels of government if a nuclear missile was headed for the U.S?

In the film, we learn we’d have about 18 minutes from launch to impact. We also learn that the likelihood of intercepting an incoming missile would be the equivalent of “hitting a bullet with a bullet”, or, as Jared Harris’s secretary of defense puts it, “So it’s a f–king coin toss? That’s what $50 billion buys us?”

Add to that, it’s unlikely the president has ever fully rehearsed this scenario, even though he is the only person with the nuclear codes and the authority to decide our next move. To watch this film is to be fully immersed in a learning experience, while teetering on the edge of your seat, with your heart in your mouth. It’s not technically a horror film, but it should be.

I tell Bigelow I didn’t sleep the night I saw it, and she nods. “There are currently nine countries that possess nuclear weapons,” she says. “Over 12,000 weapons, if that’s an accurate count. And only three of those countries are members of NATO. So that calculus feels very fragile and unsettled to me.”

As Idris Elba’s POTUS character tells us, in a line screenwriter Noah Oppenheim took from the podcast Making Sense with Sam Harris, “We built a house full of dynamite.”

While the sounds of New York City rise up from below the balcony—honking cabs, sirens, squealing schoolkids headed for Central Park a block away—I think of that scene in Terminator 2: Judgment Day where Linda Hamilton sees a children’s playground incinerated in a nuclear blast. That was in 1991. Or the 1986 Jimmy T. Murakami cartoon I once saw, When the Wind Blows, about a couple who build a nuclear shelter out of cardboard. We used to talk about nuclear weapons a lot. When did we stop?

“I think it’s imperative to keep this conversation alive, or rather reignite the conversation,” says Bigelow. “When I was a kid, we had to hide under the desk, because I came from that era. Hiding under the desk! Like that’s going to do any good at all in case of a nuclear explosion. And it stayed with me. And then, of course, watching movies like On the Beach, Dr. Strangelove, Fail Safe… there’s such a rich component of films that then have trailed off. And I feel like nuclear weapons, the prospect of their use, has become normalized. We don’t think about it, we don’t talk about it. And it’s an unthinkable situation. So, my hope was to maybe move it to the forefront of our lives.”

With her debut feature The Loveless (1981), Bigelow made a name for the then-unknown Willem Dafoe in her stylish homage to ’50s biker flicks, and for a while it seemed that knowledgeable cult movies were going to be her thing, like the vampire tale Near Dark (1987) or, more famously, the surf-crime thriller Point Break (1991), Keanu Reeves’ first ever action movie. But with 2002’s K-19: The Widowmaker — the true story of a Russian nuclear sub that went into meltdown in 1961 and almost started World War III — her focus changed. After that, her films seemed to take on a up-to-date political urgency, first with her Oscar-winning movie, The Hurt Locker, about explosive ordinance disposal techs in Iraq, then Zero Dark Thirty, which followed the true story of the CIA’s pursuit of Osama bin Laden, and Detroit (2017), a tense drama about a 1967 race riot in the Motor City — her most recent film before A House of Dynamite.

I feel like nuclear weapons, the prospect of their apply, has become normalized. We don’t think about it, we don’t talk about it. And it’s an unthinkable situation.

Kathryn Bigelow

The idea for A House of Dynamite came when Bigelow wondered, “What would happen if an ICBM [Intercontinental Ballistic Missile] was launched toward North America? What happens in the halls of power? What are the channels of communication to address this?” She has, she says, a tendency to begin with questions and curiosity and dig deep into finding answers. And this has become a part of her filmmaking process. “I think it started really with The Hurt Locker,” she says. “Well, to a certain extent, maybe even K-19, but most definitely Hurt Locker. I didn’t know much about the explosive ordinance disposal techs in Iraq, and yet, I was curious about it. What was the methodology of the insurgency at the time? A quality that personally I love in film is to learn something, not just to be entertained or emotionally moved, but to learn something. All of it together for me is incredibly important.”

Of course, The Hurt Locker won Best Picture and Zero Dark Thirty was nominated in that category. Bigelow also won Best Director for The Hurt Locker and made history as the first woman to win that award. Much has been made of her choice as a woman to make films about ‘traditionally male’ subjects — something I will not be asking her about, because, well, can’t she just be a filmmaker and not a female filmmaker? And what’s a ‘male’ subject anymore anyway?

As to why the military-industrial sophisticated has held her attention specifically, she looks back to her life in the art world, “about ten lifetimes ago.” Bigelow is a highly-accomplished painter and artist, and in 1971, she was accepted into the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study Program before entering Columbia University’s graduate film school. She recalls one of her early tiny films made when she was 26, Psychological Operations in Support of Unconventional Warfare — a kind of adaptation of a U.S. Army field manual on guerrilla warfare. 

“That was in the ’70s,” she says. “So, it’s always been a perennial curiosity, I suppose. But then I began to move from conceptual art, to film, and I was embracing genre. And from there, the imagery really became more journalistic. And as it became more journalistic, it circled back onto a slightly national security focus, back to PSYOP [psychological operations]. So, I was curious about various elements in the military-industrial complex.”

When she began thinking about that ICBM headed for North America, she asked her agent, “Is there anybody who specializes in this?” He told her about a writer who used to be a journalist, called Noah Oppenheim. “You might want to talk to him,” he said, “because he knows a lot.”

Oppenheim, a former president of NBC news, was stunned to hear from Bigelow, calling it “about the best call one can get if you’re a screenwriter.” As they dug into the research together, Bigelow had an idea of how to structure the film. They knew they wanted to approach the 18-minute period from launch to impact in real-time, and Bigelow hit on the idea of spending that 18-minute period three times over, from differing points of view.

Oppenheim describes the three chapters thus: “First, the watch officers in the White House situation room and the soldiers at Fort Greely, Alaska, who are the first line of defense, and who are noticing the missile get launched. Then, trying to coordinate the conference call on which all the decision-makers are going to gather. Then the second act is, let’s live with the head of STRATCOM (U.S. Strategic Command), the general in charge of our nuclear arsenal, and the national security advisor whose job it is in theory to advise the president, and let’s end with the person upon whose shoulders the ultimate responsibility rests, which is the president of the United States.”

Oppenheim began writing, Bigelow says, and “he was literally done two months later. And we were shooting six months later.”

Like Oppenheim, Elba was also surprised to get the call from Bigelow, given she was asking him to play the U.S. president. His response was, “You what? I’m not American,” Bigelow recalls. “But he was so game and fearless, and he gives that part and that character so much heart. And… I don’t know, I always had loved him, from the first time I was aware of him. I think he’s incredible.” Bigelow’s repeated collaborator, producer Greg Shapiro had introduced them. “We almost connected on Zero Dark Thirty, but the schedules didn’t work,” she says.

Just imagine that the people who are running the government aren’t entirely competent. Imagine that. And then think how the scenario might play out.

Tracy Letts

Elba says he was “definitely apprehensive about playing POTUS. Not that I doubt my capabilities, but I just was like, ‘Whoa, wait a second. POTUS, huh? OK.’ And she made it very clear. She was like, ‘Selfishly, I would vote for you if you were running for office,’ which was like, ‘Oh, OK. I got the job.’ She was so open to ideas, and I hadn’t even read the script yet, and I talked about things like, how do we humanize this guy? The many depictions of POTUS we’ve seen are tough guys, typically, and it’s a tough role. It’s the commander-in-chief. And I felt that at the segment that she wants to see the POTUS, we need to have a human moment. For the audience, it’s, ‘Hold on a minute. I’ve just been beaten in the face with so much information. How do I grasp onto this?’”

Bigelow and Oppenheim are careful to not offer up any kind of villain. No one can pinpoint the origin of the missile, so how can anyone calculate blame? It’s the hook the film hangs upon: When everyone is dead, will it matter who started it? 

We can’t easily blame any of the characters. We can’t assist liking the president. He’s at a kids’ basketball meet-and-greet when he gets the news—Oppenheim’s nod to George W. Bush having been at an elementary school when he learned about the 9/11 attacks. Utterly unrehearsed for this eventuality, Elba’s president tells Harris’s secretary of defense, “I had one briefing when I was sworn in. One. And they told me that’s the protocol. Sh-t, I had a whole f–king briefing for when a supreme court justice dies, what to do if the replacement dies, and what to do if the original guy crawls out of his grave and wants his job back.”

As with everything else, Bigelow and Oppenheim did not pluck this scenario from slender air. In their research, they learned that typically, presidents do not get a full rehearsal. “They’re focused on everything else that they have to do, and I’m sure their schedule is packed,” Bigelow says. “So, they come into a situation like this, like in the film, with very, very little information. We spoke to a former Pentagon chief of staff, and he said they just don’t have time.”

Elba’s POTUS openly admits his inexperience, and, as his government awaits his decision, he calls his wife (Renée Elise Goldsberry) for the ultimate end-of-the-world advice. He’s doing his best. Oppenheim says, “That is the point we wanted to make, which is that even in the best-case scenario, if you had a president who is thoughtful, responsible, informed, deliberative — to ask someone, anyone, to make a decision about the fate of all mankind in a matter of minutes while he’s running for his life simultaneously is insane.”

Whether it’s Harris’ secretary of defense, who is busy trying to call his daughter (Kaitlyn Dever) while the president awaits his counsel, Tracy Letts’ general, who demands a counter-strike, or Gabriel Basso’s deputy national security advisor, who suggests we do nothing, it’s clear that the message is, let’s diffuse the dynamite, and not let’s point fingers. “I think the minute you lay blame, suddenly, in a way, it’s too easy to point a finger, and that’s not really the problem,” says Bigelow. “The challenge is keeping this conversation alive and perhaps one day reducing the nuclear stockpile.”

Oppenheim adds, “The point is that the entire world has built this system where we have nine nuclear countries, we’ve got thousands of weapons, any one of which could go off at any given time, based on either the decision of an insane person in a leadership position or a mistake. So, we wanted to focus on the system, not any one bad actor or villain.”

Early in the film’s first chapter, we meet Rebecca Ferguson’s Captain Olivia Walker as she is at home tending to her ailing child. Then, she’s walking into work at the White House situation room, where, despite no doubt wishing she could be available to her family, she carefully locks her cellphone into a glass case outside the door, as per the protocol. All these specific details, down to the way she sanitizes the phone receiver at the start of her shift, came from the film’s tech advisor Larry Pfeiffer. In real life, Pfeiffer held the role of Walker’s onscreen boss, Admiral Mark Miller (Jason Clarke), and is a former CIA chief of staff and national security and intelligence commentator. “I would literally be on his ass about every single detail,” says Ferguson. “He said, ‘You are the person who connects the world. You decide who speaks to whom. If you can’t access the person in charge, who’s the next person? And then who’s the next person? You can leave your station, you can break down in the loo, you can do whatever you want, scream, cry, hit the f–king wall, but you come back calm, and you control the room, and you’re the last person standing.’”

Similarly, Letts had advisors on hand to support his role of General Anthony Brady. “I had a couple of guys in the room, they’re background players who were technical advisors on the movie. They’re actual guys who spent their whole careers in STRATCOM. And so, they were invaluable to me as a resource, and that wasn’t the only capacity in which they served as technical advisors. They knew this world very well. They were able to talk me through every moment, like, ‘You would do this. You would not do this. Here’s what you’re trying to do here.’ So, I had had a kind of puppeteer just right off camera, helping me through every bit of that.”

In order to recreate all the restricted-access spaces accurately, Bigelow and production designer Jeremy Hindle visited Fort Greely in Alaska, the battle deck at STRATCOM in Omaha, and the White House situation room. Says Oppenheim, “Those sets we know are realistic down to the grain of wood, because our technical advisors who worked in those places walked onto the sets and were floored. They just couldn’t understand how they had been recreated.”

It’s very much a Kathryn film as we know it. And, I would dare say, better. It is as fresh as she always has been. She’s provocative.

Idris Elba

Ferguson says of the White House situation room set: “The carpet. I remember walking in going, ‘God, it’s ugly. Who the f–k designed this?’ I mean, it’s not pretty, but there’s charm to the fact that it isn’t pretty. It doesn’t have character. I mean, it does have a character, but it’s like a flaccid, dull character. Nothing oomphy about it. I loved it. It was drained. But it was more the idea of what these rooms have seen, and what they’ve been a part of, the walls. It’s amazing. It’s quite incredible walking down these corridors.”

One of the things Pfeiffer had told Ferguson was that there would be no personal items whatsoever in the situation room. However, Ferguson had in her bag a petite dinosaur toy given to her by her onscreen son. Bigelow then told her to put it on the desk in front of her. “It triggered me,” Ferguson says, “and it just became its own little arc of human connection. My despair and my grief came from that.” At some point, someone asked her, “Did you realize the symbolism of extinction?” She hadn’t. It was pure coincidence. But after that, Bigelow began texting her the occasional dinosaur emoji.

Now, as the cast prepares for the world premiere, Elba reflects on his experience working with Bigelow on this third leg of her triptych. “It’s a bucket list-type thing,” he says. “They’re incredible films, important films. They stick with you. And I feel that this film fits right very well into that trilogy, just because it’s very much a Kathryn film as we know it. And, I would dare say, better. It is as fresh as she always has been. She’s provocative. I think the conversations post-film, like her other films, have really got into the zeitgeist. I remember when I watched it, I sat in silence for about five minutes. I was like, wow, that feels so of our time. Even though we shot it a year ago, it’s like that movie needs to come out now.”

For Harris, Bigelow’s decision-making is refreshing too. “We’re expecting the way that stories are told now, that there’s always a resolution, and the resolution is positive, and we can all go home, comfortable in the knowledge that we’re going to be safe. But she goes, ‘No, we’re not going to let you walk out of the theater that way.’”

Letts says of his personal aftermath, “It’s like you’re living in a house of worry, and you find there’s another room in it.” He pauses, frowning. “I’ve come around to admitting that I’m pissed off. The movie makes me angry. But I would hope it would make enough people angry enough to say, ‘Why don’t we change this? Why don’t we change this horrible concept that we’ve put in place, that we are capable of ending human life on this planet?’… The truth is, that what we see in this movie, we see all of this functioning pretty well. I think a character even says at one point, ‘We did everything right.’ So, you do everything right, and this is the result. Well, just imagine that the people who are running the government aren’t entirely competent. Imagine that. And then think how the scenario might play out.”

He notes of working with Bigelow, that she has a “gentle presence. Which is interesting, because I didn’t necessarily know that going in, not having worked with her before. She’s a real, pure filmmaker. So, I guess I wouldn’t have been surprised if her manner had been different than it was, but the truth is that she’s very calm.”

This is something that I, too, experience in meeting Bigelow. She speaks warmly but succinctly and seems more like a still observer than someone who particularly enjoys the sound of her own voice. I ask how she feels about being part of the awards conversation, especially given the way she was previously attacked in the run-up to Zero Dark Thirty’s Oscar success, when some claimed the film was ‘pro-torture’. It takes her a moment to respond, and when she does, her voice is supple, her demeanor serene. “Well, I go back to Hurt Locker,” she says. “It never occurred to me that that movie or my work would be even remotely part of that conversation.” Really? “No. Never.” For now, it’s clear that her focus is firmly on the hope that vital conversations might be had about nuclear weaponry.

The September morning of the film’s festival premiere at Venice, Ferguson had placed that petite dinosaur toy on her hotel room nightstand. She’d begun carrying it with her for luck, almost as though she was warding off the extinction event she’d played out in the film. That night on the red carpet, Bigelow pulled out the dinosaur and held it too, like a talisman.

A House of Dynamite is in theaters from October 10.

WATCH THESE CLIPS FROM A HOUSE OF DYNAMITE:

Deadline cover shoot producer: Andrew Zaeh at East Deck Creative; director/ editor/ DP: Jack Mallett at East Deck Creative; production designer: Anna Maltezos; lighting designer: Everett Gilpin; production assistant/ art PA: Ray DellaMura.

Shot on location at The Whitby Hotel, New York.