Kathryn Bigelow is exceedingly calm when she talks about nuclear annihilation.
That’s not to say she’s nonchalant about the topic— much the opposite. The Oscar-winning filmmaker discusses it with grave, matter-of-fact seriousness. But she also doesn’t need to dress up the threat in hyperbole, whether in conversation or in her new film “A House of Dynamite.” The reality of how it would all play out is chilling enough.
Eighteen minutes is not a lot of time to decide the fate of civilization, after all. But that’s about all U.S. leaders would have in the face of an imminent nuclear strike launched from somewhere in the Pacific. The film, in theaters Friday and streaming on Netflix on Oct. 24, goes inside the White House Situation Room and U.S. Strategic Command to show audiences exactly what might happen in those precious few moments.
The nuclear paradox
The intersection of the military and geopolitics is familiar territory for Bigelow, whether exploring the decade-long hunt for Osama bin Laden in “Zero Dark Thirty,” or the stresses of diffusing explosives in Iraq in “The Hurt Locker.” Nuclear weapons have been in her films too: “K-19: The Widowmaker” was about the Soviet Union’s first nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarine. Her most acclaimed works seem to always start with a rigorous deep dive into a real world scenario.
“I find myself at the intersection of art and information and journalism and, in this case, the military again and again and again,” Bigelow told The Associated Press. “It always starts with a question I’m curious about. In order to find the answer, I have to do these movies. It’s a rather cumbersome way to get to it.”
A child of the Cold War, Bigelow, 73, remembers doing the duck and cover drills. Nuclear extermination has simply been a fact of life for as long as she can remember. Though the threat hasn’t lessened — nine countries currently either say they have nuclear weapons or are believed to possess them — Bigelow believes public interest has. The word is stillin headlines almost daily, but the conversation is decidedly elsewhere.
Sounding the alarm
To take on the maddening paradox of living in this “house of dynamite,” she teamed up with Noah Oppenheim, a career journalist and screenwriter who presided over NBC News from 2017 to 2023 and who shared her nuclear obsession. He spoke to many current and former military officials across several administrations to build a story about that 18-minute window from three different perspectives. It would start at missile defense and work its way up the food chain to the decision-maker: The U.S. president.
“There are so many layers of people that would be involved in a crisis like this and a decision like this. And one of the ironies is that the folks who spend the most time practicing for it, who have the most expertise, are actually lowest on the ladder,” Oppenheim said. “The President of the United States is the only person who has the authority to make a decision about what to do. But it’s likely that whoever that president is, and this has been true since the dawn of the nuclear age, has not spent a ton of time thinking about this.”
When asked how much time the president or the secretary of defense spends training for this, one former official told them, “Less than an hour.”
A complex game of 3D chess
Putting it all together was, Bigelow laughed, like playing a game of 3D chess. Actors’ schedules quickly dashed dreams of shooting it all simultaneously. Instead, it would involve a complex choreography of phone calls, zoom screens and various sets to weave together the many people involved including in the Situation Room, the Pentagon, U.S. Strategic Command, FEMA and at Fort Greely, where they would launch the “ground-based interceptors.”
There were three- and four-star generals on the set as technical advisers who were ready to answer questions big and small about anything from the chain of command to simply how an officer might handle the “nuclear football.”
“I was in a room of actual soldiers,” said Rebecca Ferguson, who plays a situation room watch floor senior duty officer. “It speaks to who she is as a director, it feeds the realism of this moment in this room.”
Equally imperative was the idea that behind the suits, the training and the security clearances, were human beings with lives. Ferguson’s character was up all night with her sick child. The North Korea expert (Greta Lee) has the day off. The national security adviser is getting a colonoscopy and his deputy (Gabriel Basso) is operating in his stead (and running late for work).
“It’s so important to humanize a situation as abstract and terrifying as this,” Bigelow said.
The secretary of defense, played by Jared Harris, is grieving his wife and too distracted thinking of his estranged daughter to be of much help.
“Opening the window, when you can, on those moments of human frailty is what’s fascinating about playing stories like this,” Harris said.
No, Idris Elba is not playing Barack Obama
Several reviews already have made the assumption that casting Idris Elba as the U.S. president is a nod to Barack Obama. But that was not the filmmakers’ intention. In fact, Bigelow and Oppenheim made a point to make the film as non-partisan as possible. They were not interested in having a conversation about which party was in charge, even with their actors.
“The president has been depicted in films many, many times,” Elba said. “What Kathryn wanted for this segment of the film was for the character of the president of the United States to be human. To be relatable.”
One of the biggest questions is who launched the missile. Some argue it’s North Korea. Others think it’s Russia. One says it could have just been a jilted submarine captain. The aggressor was left intentionally ambiguous.
“You can’t be on the side of anyone because there are no sides,” Ferguson said. “There’s a system, and the question is: Is it faulty? Is it good? That the president can push a button and nuke the world. Do we support that? Do we know this?”
We are our own villain
Like her other geopolitically themed films, “A House of Dynamite” straddles the line between entertainment and journalism, conveying important information in a thrillingly cinematic way, and allowing people to viscerally feel the danger and the stakes.
“She puts people in the shoes of a bomb tech or a CIA analyst or the STRATCOM or missile defense people and makes you really understand on a gut level what this is about and what these people face and what we collectively need,” Oppenheim said.
Filmmakers today can often be coy about what they want audiences to take from their movies. Many will talk about wanting to inspire “conversation” and “debate” but not go so far as to announce their own positions. But Bigelow is refreshingly direct about her hopes for “A House of Dynamite.”
“Non-proliferation should be the No. 1 subject that we are tackling right now,” Bigelow said. “We invented these … we are our own villain.”
