@Courtesy of Netflix

Q: What surprised you most once you got into the development and research process of the movie? 

Kathryn Bigelow: One of the great surprises was being able to work with Noah Oppenheim. His acumen on the subject is like none other. The most surprising thing was how the president has so much authority on something so potentially catastrophic. It’s just this one man who, within a matter of minutes, has to decide about the utilization of these weapons. What I don’t understand is that a defensive measure could be global annihilation. What are you defending? There’s nothing left. It’s an interesting paradox.

Q: Was the decision to tell the story through different successive perspectives already made in the script? Or was it a decision made later during the editing process?

Kathryn Bigelow: It was early on. We decided to break it into three chapters in order to stay in real time, because an 18-minute journey would have been too brief for a feature. We broke it into three phases in order to do a deep dive in each one of the halls of power.

Noah Oppenheim: The reason we constructed it that way, as Kathryn said, was so the audience could feel what that pressure of 18 minutes would be like. And experience the disorientation that the decision-makers would feel when something like this would first happen. You would hardly be able to make sense of it in those 18 minutes. In the first viewing, the audience is absorbing it in that way. Then we pause, and they have an opportunity to re-experience it with new context. Unfortunately, in real life, the folks who have to make these decisions don’t get the luxury of a second or third run-through.

Q: You’ve directed large casts many times before, but House of Dynamite is your largest in terms of ensemble focus. How did you work out balancing the stories?

Kathryn Bigelow: I was incredibly lucky to have an extraordinary cast. With the editor Kirk Baxter’s help  we were able to balance it. He executed in such a surgical precision and kept everybody extremely forefront in the story. The performances necessitated that.

Q: What was the most beneficial part of helping you prepare for this role, to make your characters feel as realistic as possible?

Rebecca Ferguson: It’s a combination of an incredible script and having the safety of Kathryn. Then we had Larry Pfeiffer, who was the Head of the Situation Room. Basically, the man who played my boss, who is played by Jason Clarke. So I relied on him. I had his WhatsApp messages and his emails. I asked every single question down to: “Who would get this email first?” The authenticity of creating something recognizable for anyone who would have worked in the room to go: that is exactly correct. We had all of that at our disposal. 

Jason Clarke: The other thing I would add is I love the way Barry and Kathryn Bigelow shoot. After many years of career, to go back into their relationship together is extraordinary. It’s my favorite way to shoot. It’s so simple, and yet it’s so immediate. You know she’s taken care of everything, she’s taken care of you, and you’ve given your all. And it’s over, and you move on. And it just keeps a focus and a simplicity to it.

@Courtesy of Netflix

Q: In terms of what was most helpful in the research, what notes were most important for you to play? 

Tracy Letts: The help I had was that a couple of our Technical Advisors were extras. They were background players there. So, I was able to turn to them at any time and say: “Would I do this? What am I trying to do here? What’s my help here?”  It’s very well-written on the page. For me, it had more to do with attitude than anything. These guys are very serious individuals. They take their responsibilities very seriously. And they were just really helpful in conveying to me like you don’t have to answer to anybody. You answer to the President, and beyond that, you don’t have to worry about anybody around you in terms of behavior.  You get to do what you want to do. Well, that’s very freeing to hear.

Anthony Ramos: Like Tracy said, our advisors were  guys that did it. At Greely in Alaska, these guys have a rotation of people that they sit in front of screens all day long and all night watching while we’re out here eating our croissant and drinking our latte. It was pretty relieving when they watched us do the performance, then those guys came up to us and were like: “ Dang, you guys took us there. Made us feel how it feels for us”. 

Q: Did you have the cast go through any type of training or coaching to become as authentic as possible in grasping the specific military and government jargon in their day-to-day duties? 

Noah Oppenheim: I have the privilege to be sitting next to one of the greatest filmmakers who has ever lived. One of the things that makes her so great is her commitment to authenticity and realism, her sense of responsibility in depicting these worlds. If you’re gonna take an audience behind closed doors, if you’re gonna take them to the Situation Room, you want to accurately portray what goes on there. From the very beginning when we started working together, Kathryn Bigelow made it clear to me: If you’re gonna write dialogue in the mouths of these people, it better ring true. Every line, she interrogated: Is this how it would really happen? Is this how they would really say it? We did a lot of work in advance talking to people who held these jobs, who had been in these rooms before, so that we could try to accurately reflect how it would unfold. Then  these extraordinary performers absorbed that sense of responsibility from Kathryn and we all relied on those Technical Advisors.

Kathryn Bigelow: The Technical Advisors were so extraordinary on this, invaluable. They would be with me on the set, we didn’t shoot anything that they didn’t say that is relatively accurate. The authenticity is paramount in something like this. If you’re inviting an audience into space that’s not readily available, especially a story like this, you need it to be as authentic as possible.

Q: Rebecca, what can you say about what made Kathryn unique as a director and her approach working with actors? 

Rebecca Ferguson: I don’t know how many cameras we had in our room, but there were a lot. We didn’t over-rehearse. Kathryn was specific but she gave us space. She gave us information. She gave us the people. Greg Shapiro, one of the producers, would hand over numbers and details so that we could do the research. It was, do your own job as well. And then three cameras were rolling, and you didn’t know which angle she was going to take. She’s like a composer. It’s like someone playing music. You look at her behind the monitor and you can see that she’s feeling things. It’s not micromanaging a scene. It is catching an emotion that feels authentic for that moment. It’s very freeing. It’s scary because you know that you have a moment to offer her and she will grab it if it’s good. But she also grabs something else if it’s better.

Tracy Letts: It was a hard gig. The truth is that your scene partners are, for the most part, on computer screens. Sometimes live, sometimes recorded. Your dialogue is a foreign language to most of us. I counted, at one point, I had 25 cameras rolling. I’m not kidding. Kathryn’s just the calm at the center of the storm. It was always in the form of a question: What are we doing here? What is this about? What do you think is going on at this moment? I always felt I could turn to Kathryn with a question or even to just say, wait a minute, I don’t understand what we’re doing here. 

@Courtesy of Netflix

How did you work with Barry Ackroyd to create the atmosphere of the film?

Kathryn Bigelow: I worked with Barry first on Hurt Locker, we developed a visual language. But it was really him teaching me this incredible latitude that he provides. He basically lights an entire environment. In the case of Hurt Locker, we were outdoors for most of it. Then he covers it with cameras, and there’s no marks. Basically, the actors are left alone to do their job. He captures it. It’s the most extraordinary way. It’s very much like a documentary but applied to fictional narrative. It gives, like Rebecca was saying, a tremendous amount of freedom. And that was imperative for The Hurt Locker, imperative for something like this. They need to feel like they own the space. 

Q:. Was there a piece of advice from op military and intelligence officials that made you rethink a major scene?

Noah Oppenheim: I don’t know about rethink. There was one conversation that we had at the beginning of our process that stuck with both of us, rattled us and informed a lot of the rest of the film.We were talking to a gentleman who had served in senior roles at the Pentagon and the CIA. The movie is predicated on this notion that the President of the United States has the sole authority to decide whether to use nuclear weapons. It’s only up to him in our system. So we asked this former official: “How much does the president practice? How much does he read on the subject? How much does he prepare for that moment?” And the person’s response was: “Not at all.” Basically when the president takes office – any president, it’s not specific to any individual – they’re given a very short briefing on the briefcase that gets carried around, less than an hour sometimes. And that’s it. They don’t think about it ever again. The fact that the folks at the top of the decision-making ladder might be the least prepared for the moment was stunning to both of us when he shared that.

Kathryn Bigelow: It’s just shocking. We were completely surprised by that. He said, “No, there’s so much else that they’re doing.” At StratComm, when we visited, there was this admiral that we met: she said they practice the protocol for nuclear weapons 400 times a year. They’re very practiced. On the other hand, the president is not. Which is another paradox. 

Q: How did you approach building a sense of unbearable tension around time? And how does leaving the origin of the missile undefined amplify the audience’s anxiety throughout the film? 

Kathryn Bigelow: How does it amplify that? I’m not sure. It was important that within the incredibly finite timeframe, this case being 18 minutes, you have limited information to make a decision. There’s so many elements you don’t know. You’re left flying blind. That made everything far more complicated. 

@Courtesy of Netflix

Q: How the production design, the cinematography, the conditions of the set felt for you as an actor? What level of realism did allow the performances that we see on screen?

Jason Clarke: There’s an intensity to it. As there should be. You’re let in, you’re mic’d. You’re led into a very intense room. A wall of light and color. There’s officers. With any great director, like with Chris Nolan or anyone I’ve worked with at the level of Kathryn, everybody is putting so much thought into it. The extras are focused. Everybody’s part of it. Literally every single person in that room is part of what’s going on. That’s a great set. 

Anthony Ramos: Yeah. Everything was specific. We’d have these moments where it wasn’t about the lines you were saying. It was about what you were doing when you weren’t talking. How your body was moving. What was happening on that monitor. When news is given about something, who’s making eye contact with who? It was like what was happening in between the lines. Everything was so thought-through and specific. That’s all Kathryn Bigelow, she was super locked-in on all of that. 

Q: You spent years in news production. How did your time as a journalist influence the script?

Noah Oppenheim: The primary way to play a role is my ability to pick up the phone and call folks who had held these jobs and lived in these worlds. Whether they were Pentagon, CIA officials, former White House officials. There is this incredible community of policy experts and journalists who think about the nuclear issue and write about it, and have been for decades. One of the things Kathryn has mentioned about her motivation to make the movie is that the general public unfortunately has forgotten that we live in a world where there are weapons that could end all of civilization in a matter of minutes. That’s a great luxury for most of us to ignore. But there is this incredible group of hardworking people who think about this every day and try to find solutions and write about it and draw attention to it.Just the fact that I had to be able to speak to them and draw them into this process was really helpful.

Q: What do you hope the audience will take away from the way you end the film?

Kathryn Bigelow: How it ends, it’s an invitation to the audience to take away something. My hope is engaging in a conversation about nuclear weapons. There’s nine nuclear countries and only three are members of NATO. That itself should give everyone pause. It’s an opportunity to reach out to the audience,  then hopefully take the conversation further.

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Here’s the trailer for A House of Dynamite: