A conversation with Kathryn Bigelow, director of ‘A House of Dynamite,’ and screenwriter Noah Oppenheim
Screenwriter Noah Oppenheim and director Kathryn Bigelow at the introductory Q&A for “A House Of Dynamite” during the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center in September. (Photo by Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images for FLC)
At one point in Kathryn Bigelow’s new film, A House of Dynamite, Captain Olivia Walker (played by Rebecca Ferguson) is overseeing the White House Situation Room as a single nuclear-armed missile streaks toward the American heartland. Amid tense efforts to intercept the missile, Walker finds a toy dinosaur belonging to her young son in her pocket. In that moment, the heartbreak and terror of the less-than-20-minute countdown to impact all but overwhelm Walker—and I suspect many who have watched the film in theaters. Suddenly, the stakes are clear: All the young children, all their parents, all the animals on the planet face extinction. Not as a vague possibility or a theoretical concept debated in policy white papers, not as something that might happen sometime, but as unavoidable reality that is actually happening. Right now.
In the pantheon of movies about nuclear catastrophe, the emotional power of A House of Dynamite is rivalled, to my way of thinking, only by Fail Safe, in which Henry Fonda, as an American president, must drop the bomb on New York City to atone for a mistaken US attack on Moscow and stave off all-out nuclear war. The equally relentless scenario for A House of Dynamite is superficially simple: A lone intercontinental ballistic missile is identified over the western Pacific, heading for somewhere in mid-America. Its launch was not seen by satellite sensors, so it’s unclear what country might have initiated the attack. An effort to shoot down the missile fails, despite the best efforts of an array of earnest military and civilian officials, and it becomes clear that—barring a technological malfunction of the missile’s warhead—Chicago will be obliterated. The United States’ response to the attack could well initiate worldwide nuclear war.
Rebecca Ferguson as Captain Olivia Walker in “A House of Dynamite.” Photo credit: Eros Hoagland/Netflix © 2025.
The emotional effectiveness of Bigelow’s film stems partly from its tripartite structure—the story is told three times, from three different points of view, each telling adding to and magnifying the others—partly from solid acting performances by a relatively large ensemble of actors, and not inconsequentially from details like the dinosaur. The film is in one sense a thriller, full of rising tension driven by a terrifying deadline. In a larger sense, it is a tragedy for each of the dedicated public servants trying to stave off the end of the world, and in that sense, it’s a tragedy for all of us to contemplate seriously.
I spoke with Bigelow and Noah Oppenheim, who wrote the screenplay for the film, last week, ahead of its debut on Netflix tomorrow. It opened widely in US theaters earlier in the month, which is why I’ve made no attempt to avoid spoilers in the following interview, which has been edited and condensed for readability. If you don’t already know that A House of Dynamite ends ambiguously, without explicitly showing whether Chicago and the world are or are not destroyed, you do now.
John Mecklin
Before he died, Daniel Ellsberg talked to me about how he couldn’t get a book about nuclear weapons published, and how much nobody wanted to do anything about nuclear threats. And six years later, there’s the Oppenheimer movie, and now your movie. How hard was it for you to sell Netflix on doing this movie, Kathryn?
Kathryn Bigelow
Well, thanks to an extraordinary script by Noah Oppenheim, they loved it. It was a very smooth, fluid process, and they were excited to embrace it. I mentioned that what was interesting to me was to have a conversation about reducing the nuclear stockpile and nonproliferation. And that was, that was where it began.
I met Daniel Ellsberg as well, on The Hurt Locker press tour. That was extraordinary.
Mecklin
He was a good guy; very sad he’s gone.
I found the movie very effective, but I was curious about the decision not to have a depiction of nuclear effects on screen. There weren’t bombs blowing up. The movie had what some people say is an ambiguous ending. You don’t really know what followed. Why no explosions?
Bigelow
I felt like the fact that the bomb didn’t go off was an opportunity to start a conversation. With an explosion at the end, it would have been kind of all wrapped up neat, and you could point your finger [and say] “it’s bad that happened.” But it would sort of absolve us, the human race, of responsibility. And in fact, no, we are responsible for having created these weapons, and in a perfect world, getting rid of them.
Mecklin
So, do you have a different answer to that, Noah?
Noah Oppenheim
No, I don’t. I think that is the answer. I think if I were to add anything, it would only be that I do think audiences are numb to depictions of widespread destruction at this point. I mean, we’ve come off of years of comic book movies in which major cities have been reduced to rubble as if it were nothing. I think we just chose to take a different approach to trying to capture what this danger is.
Bigelow
And to stimulate a conversation. With an ambiguous ending, you walk out of the theater thinking, “Well, wait a minute.” It sort of could be interpreted, the film, as a call to action.
Mecklin
Within the expert community, the missile defense part of the movie is being discussed. It isn’t a surprise to them, or me, that missile defense is less than perfect. Some of them worry that this depiction in the movie will impel people to say, “Oh, we need better missile defense. We should build Golden Dome, right?” What do you feel about that? Kathryn first.
Bigelow
I think that’s kind of a misnomer. I think, in fact, if anything, we realize we’re not protected, we’re not safe. There is no magic situation that’s going to save the day. I’m sure you know a lot more about this, and Noah knows a lot more than I do, but from my cursory reading, you could spend $300 billion on a missile defense system, and it’s still not infallible. That is not, in my opinion, a smart course of action.
Mecklin
Noah, obviously you have talked to experts and read a lot about, in general, the nuclear threat, but also missile defense. How did you know to come up with, whatever, 61 percent [effectiveness of US missile interceptors]?
Oppenheim
That came directly from one of the tests that had been done on our current ground-based intercept system. Listen, as long as there are nuclear weapons in the world, it would obviously be better if we had more effective defense systems. But I think that the myth of a perfect missile defense system has given a lot of people false comfort over the years. In many ways, it appears to be an easier solution to chase. Right? How can we possibly eliminate the nuclear problem? So instead, maybe we can build an impenetrable shield that we can all retreat under.
But I think that there’s no such thing as an impenetrable shield at the end of the day, or at least not one that we’ve been able to build thus far. And from all of my conversations with people who work in missile defense—and again, I think we all are aligned and hoping that those systems could be improved—but I think that those folks are the first to acknowledge that it is a really hard physics problem at the end of the day that we may never be able to solve perfectly.
And so we do need to start looking at the other piece of this, which is the size of the nuclear stockpile. And how can we reduce the number of weapons that exist in the world, and how can we reduce the likelihood that they’re ever used?
Mecklin
Before I go on to other things, I wanted to give you the opportunity to name check any particular experts you consulted who helped you with thinking about or writing the movie.
Oppenheim
It’s a long list. I don’t know Kathryn—do you want to talk about Dan Karbler, who worked in missile defense for STRATCOM?
Bigelow
Go for it.
Oppenheim
So, we had a three-star general who came up in the missile defense field and actually has two kids whom he talks about, who also now work in missile defense, as well. We spoke to people who’ve worked in senior roles at the Pentagon, at the CIA, at the White House. We had STRATCOM officers on set almost every day that we were shooting those sequences. And then we relied upon the incredible body of work that folks who work in the nuclear field have been amassing for years. I mean, we talk a lot about the fact that the nuclear threat has fallen out of focus for a long time for the general public. But there is this incredible community of policy experts and journalists who’ve never stopped thinking about it, worrying about it, analyzing it.
And so whether it’s somebody like [the late Princeton researcher and former missileer] Bruce Blair or a journalist like Garrett Graff, who has written about continuity of government protocol, or Fred Kaplan and his book The Bomb—there’s a terrific library of resources that people can turn to.
Mecklin
I have found in my job that nuclear types—nuclear experts, journalists—are very picky. And I’m just curious: Generally with this kind of thing, trying to be a very technically accurate movie, inevitably you get people saying: “Oh, you got this little thing wrong. You got that little thing wrong.” Have you had anything like that that you’d want to talk about?
Bigelow
Actually, on the contrary, just yesterday in The Atlantic, Tom Nichols wrote a piece on the movie, and he said, you would think there might be some discrepancies, you would think there might be some inaccurate details, but according to him, and he’s very steeped in this space, it’s relatively accurate through and through. And it raises the need for a conversation about the fact that there are all these weapons in the world.
Mecklin
To get an okay from Tom is a good thing, because he’s a smart guy and made an amazing shift to be kind of a journalist from being—I originally knew him as an expert in the field.
Now, I have to ask this: Why the dinosaur? Is that a comment on extinction, or was it just the toy that was there?
Bigelow
[Laughter] Definitely it’s a comment on extinction, and also it underscores the humanity. I mean, what’s at stake if we were to destroy all of civilization? What’s at stake is humanity. That’s what we’re about to lose or poised to lose. I mean, look at all the animals in Africa. I mean, they’re so innocent. They have nothing to do with this, yet they will all die. Everything will die.
Mecklin
This is probably a question more for Noah, but why Chicago? What kind of a grudge did you have against Chicago?
Bigelow
Yeah, I want to know.
Oppenheim
[Laughter] Come on, I have no grudge against Chicago. I think again, there are no accidents in a Kathryn Bigelow movie, whether it’s the dinosaur or Chicago. One of the many things that we were trying to convey is the sort of the universality of the danger. This is not just a problem if you live in Washington, D.C. or New York or L.A.; this is a problem for all of humanity. And the city of Chicago, right in the middle of America’s heartland—I think it just represents the fact that nobody is safe from this threat and from these weapons.
Mecklin
Okay, I’ll pick a fact for you: the casualty figure, the death figure that gets thrown out in the movie. It was like 10 million or something. Where did that come from? How did you get that?
Oppenheim
It came from the population of the city of Chicago and surrounding areas. And as the character says, that doesn’t really take into account what it might be downwind.
Mecklin
Okay, there’s a whole array of nuclear movies and TV movies. I wondered if either of you would like to talk about how much influence they had on this movie? Were there attempts to make this different than previous ones? The Day After—it’s got to be different than The Day After; it’s got to be different than Dr. Strangelove. How did that play into your thinking?
Bigelow
For me, if anything, it was the fact that there’s an absence of movies about this subject, really, since Fail Safe, The Day After being a wonderful exception. But there’s been this incredible silence about this subject, certainly in terms of the medium of film, and that I felt was an important gap to fill.
Mecklin
How about you, Noah?
Oppenheim
I agree with Kathryn. It’s been a long time since somebody tried to grapple with this topic. Strangelove was one of my favorite films of all times; Fail Safe; I even loved the movie War Games. I’ve probably seen it 100 times. So I’ve loved this genre of filmmaking since I was a kid. And like Kathryn, I was kind of struck by the fact that it had fallen off and felt like there was an opportunity to do something fresh in the space. And I think what’s also interesting is the extent to which those films are actually kind of in conversation now with people who work in the nuclear field. So if you notice in the movie in STRATCOM, under the big monitors, it says “the big board,” which is directly lifted from Dr Strangelove. It’s not our conceit; that’s actually in STRATCOM in Omaha, they have put that under their big board. So in the same way that The Godfather influenced the mafia in America, nuclear films have influenced the nuclear establishment in America. And you know that conversation is ongoing, and we hope to draw attention back to this subject, because it affects all of us, and it is so serious.
Bigelow
Absolutely.
Mecklin
I’m going to ask sort of a craft question. The narrative of the movie is telling essentially the same story three times from different points of view. And I’d just like to hear both of you talk about why and the challenges of doing that. Because the second, third time through—hey, maybe people get bored and walk out of the movie.
Bigelow
They don’t seem to.
I was interested in doing this story in real time, but of course, it takes 18, 19, minutes for that missile to impact, which would not be long enough for a feature film. But also, it’s not the same story, because you’re looking at it from different perspectives. You’re looking at it from the missile defense men at Ft. Greely. Then you’re looking at it from the White House Situation Room, where they need to get the information up to the president as quickly and as comprehensively as possible. And then you’re looking at it through STRATCOM, which is the home of the nuclear umbrella. And then, of course, finally, the Secretary of Defense and the president. So each time you’re looking at it through a different set of parameters.
Mecklin
And was that a difficult thing for you, Noah, in terms of writing it? There’s got to be the narrative thing that keeps people watching, right?
Oppenheim
First, as Kathryn mentioned, trying to give the audience a visceral understanding of how short a period of time something like this would unfold in was really important. But during that incredibly short period of time, the number of moving parts within the government and within our military are vast, and so I actually looked at it as an opportunity, right? Because there’s so much going on in various agencies—at Greeley, at STRATCOM, at the Pentagon, the situation in the Situation Room—and so you have the chance to kind of layer the audience’s understanding with each retelling. Because the first time you experience it, I think it’s just overwhelming, just making sense of it all. And then the second and third time, you’re able to appreciate additional nuance and deepen your understanding of the challenge that our policymakers and military officers would face. And I think the weight of that just accumulates over the course of the film, when you realize what we would be confronting if this were to happen.
Bigelow
And I’ve heard from various and numerous audience members that each time they learned more and more and more. And so my interest is to get across as much information as possible without it feeling, I don’t know, a little too pedagogical.
Mecklin
I can feel people trying to pull Kathryn off the camera to my left, so I’m going to ask sort of a last question. You’ve talked about wanting to start a conversation. What do you really hope will happen as a result of the movie? What would you like to see happen?
Bigelow
Well, I’d like to see people decide they don’t want to live in a world that’s this volatile or this combustible. And then of course, the next step is to reach out to their representatives and try to, you know, create a movement.
Mecklin
Noah, you come out of the news media. What would you like to see happen in that realm?
Oppenheim
As Kathryn alluded to at the beginning of the conversation, we created nuclear weapons. We created this threat. We therefore have the capacity to solve it. It’s too easy to push it out of our minds. It’s too easy to ignore it because it feels abstract. But it’s a calamity that could unfold at any moment, and we shouldn’t leave the decision-making around it to a small cadre of experts. We should all be involved in the conversation and in trying to push the world towards a safer place.
Bigelow
That’s beautifully said.
