After having gone nearly a decade without releasing a feature, the consensus on the ground at Venice: director Kathryn Bigelow’s latest film “A House of Dynamite” was well worth the wait.
After her last film, “Detroit,” failed to receive the same awards attention her previous two Oscar-winning films, “The Hurt Locker” and “Zero Dark Thirty,” enjoyed the Best Director winner needed a break to find her next subject. At the “A House of Dynamite” festival press conference on Tuesday, she said, “I have to be passionate about a subject matter. For me, I don’t know if I’m really a director or not, but I’m absolutely committed to a subject and a story. And then I feel like I can do anything, but I have to really believe in whatever the material is.”
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“A House of Dynamite,” a Netflix release, takes the audience through various perspectives on what would happen if the White House were to face an impending nuclear missile strike. “This is kind of a global issue, where we are with nuclear weapons. And, of course, hope against hope, maybe we reduce the nuclear stockpile someday,” said Bigelow of her motivation and message behind the film. “But in the meantime, we are really living in a house of dynamite. And so my interest was to get that information out there.”
In the almost 15 years since “The Hurt Locker” won Best Picture, the screenplay races have seen noticeable change, with many more directors also being nominated in the category. Bigelow notably did not opt to write “Dynamite,” instead bringing in Oscar nominee and former President of NBC News Noah Oppenheim (“Jackie”), to pen the thriller.
Of their collaboration, the screenwriter said, “One of the many things that make Kathryn such an extraordinary filmmaker is her commitment to authenticity, and from the very beginning, her mandate was ‘Let’s find out how this would really work. Let’s take people into these rooms where these decisions would be made, and show how it would actually unfold.’ And so from minute one, we built the story together.” For her previous three films, Bigelow similarly worked closely with Mark Boal, who won the Best Original Screenplay for “The Hurt Locker.”
Though Oppenheim was the only non-actor to join Bigelow on stage during the press conference, the director still made every effort to shout out more of her collaborators who helped make the complex political drama happen, starting with Barry Ackroyd, whom Bigelow called “the most talented cinematographer in the business ever.”
“His gift is to make it feel as real as possible. He had come from documentaries, so it’s really just a natural translation and transition into a theatrical piece,” she said. “I probably wouldn’t have made the movie if he wasn’t available. That’s how important he was.”
In terms of Ackroyd’s technique for immersing the audience inside the situation, “A House of Dynamite” actor Tracy Letts said, “At any given moment, I might have 20 cameras on me. That’s very unusual on any set.”
The actor and Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright is a standout among an all-star cast that includes Rebecca Ferguson, Idris Elba, Jared Harris, Greta Lee, and many, many more familiar faces from TV and film (including multiple “Hamilton” alumni). With a cast so huge, it may be hard for Academy members to find consensus on which specific actors to vote for. It is very much an ensemble piece.
During the festival press conference, Letts further commended the work of Bigelow and Oppenheim, saying, “The movie could be performed as purely procedural, and we simply see people doing their jobs and nothing but their jobs. But the truth is, they’re human beings performing these functions. And so humanity seeps out, it creeps out, it pops out in unusual ways and at unusual times, sometimes having nothing to do with the situation we find ourselves in. But I really think that’s part of the beauty and the strength of the film, a reminder that these are ultimately human beings making these decisions.”
Later, Bigelow chose to highlight still more below-the-line crew that were key toward capturing her hauntingly prophetic vision. “We have [production designer] Jeremy Hindle, who built the sets, and provided environments that these people also give it a degree of reality that, yes, the script is extraordinary,” she said. “But at the same time you need the environments in which these actors and characters perform.”
Editor Kirk Baxter also received praise for weaving together the film’s three parts, which show different points of view over the course of the same 20 minutes of action. “It’s like a juggling act. I mean, all of these simultaneities and the details and, yes, the humanity of it. It’s almost like three-dimensional chess,” said Bigelow. “Balancing all of that, and the kind of careful precision that was necessary for the humanity to come through, that’s an extraordinary editor.”
Finally, recent Oscar winner Volker Bertelmann was mentioned for his “off the charts” score, which keeps viewers firmly planted at the edge of their seat. “I’ve never heard anything like it. So I am a very fortunate director to have amassed such a great crew,” the director added.
While the Venice and Telluride film festivals have been a bit of a rollercoaster for Netflix, with “Jay Kelly,” “Frankenstein,” and “Ballad of a Small Player” not being received as well as the streaming service intended, “A House of Dynamite” allows them to end the run on a peak, albeit with some tough material. After all, as Oppenheim said, “The world’s always unstable in some way or another. We’ve constructed this [nuclear] weaponry that could end all life, and it’s miraculous, frankly, that something horrific hasn’t happened already.”
“A House of Dynamite” premiered at the 2025 Venice Film Festival. Netflix releases the film on Friday, October 10.
