Kathryn Bigelow’s A House of Dynamite tracks the response to an unattributed nuclear warhead that is destined to land on an American city. The film moves in three terrifying segments replaying the same eighteen minutes of the discovery of the weapon to the President’s (played by Idris Elba) decision how to proceed from a variety of viewpoints in the military and political sphere. Bigelow and writer Noah Oppenheim take the audience inside the halls of power and the soldiers whose duty it is to try to put together a plan for the United States.
Starring Rebecca Ferguson, Idris Elba, Jared Harris, Moses Ingram, Greta Lee, Tracy Letts, Gabriel Basso, Anthony Ramos, Jonah Hauer-King, and Jason Clarke, A House of Dynamite is a “what if” based in a sobering reality.
Nadine Whitney spoke with Kathryn Bigelow, Rebecca Ferguson, Jason Clarke, Anthony Ramos, Tracy Letts, and Noah Oppenheim about how they put the film together and what made them want to tell this story now.
A House of Dynamite is currently in cinemas in certain regions via Netflix. It will be released in Australian cinemas on Thursday October 9 and then be available on Netflix from October 24.
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Kathryn Bigelow: Director of A House of Dynamite
Kathryn, A House of Dynamite is the third film in your war trilogy consisting of The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty. The other two films were based on past events that have happened. What made you decide to do a “what if” scenario?
Kathryn Bigelow: Well, is it? [a “what if” scenario]. I suppose I'm interested in national security, and Noah Oppenheim and I had this idea of what would happen if an ICBM was launched at North America – what would ensue? Noah did a tremendous amount of research, and we met and talked for a few weeks, and he came up with this extraordinary scenario and it felt like it fit very well with The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, both being examinations of the military industrial complex under duress.
A House of Dynamite is an imagined scenario, but a very real version of this scenario. There was a Russian example from years ago which I believe was mentioned in the film that Russia mistook weather conditions for a nuclear threat and there could have been a war.
KB: Yes, I mean, that's how hair trigger the world in which we live is. Meaning that there are over 12,000 warheads globally, if not more. That's just the most recent estimates. We don't know exactly. We have nine nuclear countries, and only three are members of NATO. Just that calculus alone was the impetus for talking to Noah about this project,
That’s something addressed in the film too. As no one knows where the missile came from, only that it was launched in the Pacific it’s assumed it could be North Korea or China but there isn’t time to track it down or work it out., but we can't be sure. Russia says it's not them, but if it was, then they wouldn't say it was. We don't know necessarily, in the Middle East who's armed, either.
KB: Hopefully the film encourages, which is what, Noah and I both discussed, it encourages a conversation about just that, like these warheads are out there. How do we make how do we make sure that they're, they remain untouched and unused. Or how do we actually reduce the nuclear stockpile? That's the conversation that I would love to hear happen.
In Australia we have Pine Gap, which is a “joint” American and Australian operations base almost smack-bang in the middle of the country. The Australian public knows almost nothing about it as it is considered a secret base. What exactly does it do currently? We don't know. To not know what's happening in your own country is frightening and we understand that certain military operations need to be secret, but not having a say in any of that is disconcerting. I think you've captured that.
KB: Thank you. But that's another good point, though, the need and clarion call for transparency. I mean, you should know. We should know. You know what the what is the status of that base? What is the status of these nuclear warheads? Are any of us prepared for what could easily happen? Who are the targets?
Rebecca Ferguson: Captain Olivia Walker. Senior Duty Officer Whitehouse Situation Room
Hi Rebecca. So, you get an email, or a phone call and it says, “Kathryn Bigelow wants you for a part.” What do you do?
Rebecca Ferguson: You get giddy! I kind of relive it when you say it like that, because that's literally how it was. I think my agent called and said, “Kathryn Bigelow wants to meet you for her next movie.” It’s sort of a jolt. It's so unexpected, and it's so longed for and wished for.
To be honest, the moment that Kathryn and I were on a zoom we just merged. It was natural, and curiosity was high. I was so inspired and so excited. Then I got to read the script!
Then you got to read the script, but of course almost immediately you say yes.
RF: I mean one hundred percent I did. Some directors just have that power over me, absolutely.
Speaking of powerful, you've got a very powerful role as Captain Olivia Walker, because you're straddling the line between absolute professionalism, but also, you're one of the characters given a very specific human entry into their life. A young son who is ill who your husband's taking care of, and then you're trying to juggle people and information in the situation room and look after your own family. Can you tell me about how you prepared for such an intense role covering all those spectrums?
RF: I think number one, the script was so well put together by Noah that it was handed to me. You know, the fact that we get to start on Olivia's world, that's, as you said, it's the only person whose life you get to follow from the beginning before you enter the panic of the 18 minutes. Yes, and the only thing that I could prepare was to be as natural and as much as myself because there wasn't enough time to create a character breakdown. I think for me, it was finding the most authentic me before entering a world where I needed to put on the knowledgeable hat of being the senior duty officer of the Situation Room.
Yeah, and having the whole place left to you once Jason Clarke's character is moved out.
RF: It's horrendous and but it's also accurate. Every single point of this film is as accurately depicted as it would be in real life. And it's terrifying, you know. For a second here we get the sight insight into a world of these human beings and these people who are prepared at this level.
You know, one of the things that Kathryn said, and I understood, was the people in the situation room or in STRATCOM, are so much more prepared for an event like this than the actual President, who sits on his finger on a nuclear weapon and who can activate it at any time he wants. It is astonishing to me.
Jason Clarke: Admiral Mark Miller
Jason, this is your second time working with Kathryn. So, when you get a call from Oscar winning director Kathryn Bigelow, what do you do?
Jason Clarke: You feel like you felt when you first started in this business. I've been in this business for a while now and you get numb to certain things. But when you get a call from a director of the calibre of Kathryn Bigelow, it's the same thing with a director like Chris Nolan, you feel like, “Oh my god! This is why I got into this business.” I love doing what I do. You feel like a little child again.
Anthony Ramos: Major Daniel Gonzales. Fort Greely, Alaska
You’ve been touched on the shoulder. Is that what you felt Anthony when you got the script sent to you? Perhaps like “Here’s a Kathryn Bigelow movie and the last time I played a soldier, it was against Godzilla.”
Anthony Ramos: Wow! You brought that back the memory bank for that one! Wow, there’s that! But, yes, that was the last time I guess I played a soldier.
It’s a gift to be able to work with someone like Kathryn and to be on set with some of the most elite actors and crew and to be able to tell a story like this.
It isn’t often that you get a script that you when read it it's perfect. It’s amazing. You're thinking, “Please God I hope I can do this justice, because this is an amazing piece of art.”
Your role Anthony is so essential in that your character is tasked to “stop the bullet with a bullet” -- to deploy the ground-based missiles to stop the nuclear warhead. Despite the statistics being that they only work maybe 60% of the time, there's still the conviction for your character that it's going to work 100% of the time.
How was it channelling that kind of emotion and dealing with that sense of responsibility for your character?
AR: It was getting into the mind of Major Gonzalez. Thinking, “Hey, this guy's got to be probably in his in late 20s or maybe early 30s, and he's, you know, mid 30s at the most, right? He’s going through this situation that is really intense.
He was just going through something before, with his wife on the phone. Now he's coming inside and he's yelling. He's dogging out his friend for being messy and is in a bad mood. That all that goes away when he's hit with the reality of a missile being launched, and them not knowing where it's coming from, and all of a sudden they think it's gonna fall (and not keep going) and it doesn't, and it flattens out. And they're like, “What do we do now?”
I think the one of the biggest things for me was, coming to terms with the reality that there is another 30-something year old guy or woman behind a computer in Alaska. Thar if something like that were to happen, that person, that's who we're depending on. My character and the ones shown are depictions of those people. I tried to put myself into the mind of this guy and taking the gravity of that.
Noah Oppenheim: Screenwriter
Noah, obviously your experience in news has put you in a position to really dig into this script on a molecular level. Can you tell me a little bit about what made you decide to write this and why now?
Noah Oppenheim: The project started when I got a call that Kathryn Bigelow was interested in chatting with me about this topic, which is, of course, as good a call as one can get if you're a screenwriter. It turned out Kathryn and I had a shared, and long standing, interest in the nuclear issue. She recalls growing up and being forced to do nuclear survival drills in school where they would hide under their desks.
I, of course, covered the topic as a journalist for many years. One of the things that makes her so great as a filmmaker is that she's so focused on and committed to authenticity and realism. So, from the beginning of putting together the story, she insisted that we talk to as many people as possible who had worked inside places like STRATCOM in the White House Situation Room, and we talked to them about how an event like this might unfold and how they would speak to one another, what processes they follow.
It was helpful coming from a journalism background, that I was fortunate to be able to reach out to contacts from my past life who had worked in government and enlist them in that research process.
Tracy Letts: General Anthony Brady, Strategic Command.
Tracy, your character is possibly the hardest assed character in the film. How did you build on creating such a straight down the line military man.
Tracy Letts: Well, the truth is, it was all on the page: all of his motivations, his operational expertise, all of that stuff was on the page. Then the context that was built for me via the set and the costumes and my fellow actors. All of that context is beyond support. It's really sort of doing all of the job for me.
Beyond that, we had some technical advisors on the set who know STRATCOM very well and understand those hierarchies very well. They've sat in that seat, and they were an invaluable resource in helping construct that guy, General Anthony Brady.
You say Brady is hard-assed. I mean, again, it's on the page. He's there to offer his range of opinion about what to do, it's not a huge range of opinion, but an impactful range somebody's got to occupy in terms of the script. Somebody's got to occupy that military pole. I understood that that was my job. It's not philosophically where I would be. But, I mean, he makes a cogent argument. He's not a mad man.