Kathryn Bigelow on ‘A House of Dynamite’ and the nuclear ‘elephant in the room’

Post Reports

The Washington Post

Daily News, Politics, News

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🗓️ 11 November 2025

⏱️ 27 minutes

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Summary

Kathryn Bigelow has been thinking about the threat of nuclear war ever since she was a kid. “I come from the era of duck and cover,” she says, “where when I was very little, we had to hide under the desk in the event of an atomic bomb blast.”

Over the last 40 years, she’s been directing tightly-paced thrillers such as “The Hurt Locker” (which won her the Academy Award for best director) and “Zero Dark Thirty.” Her latest film, “A House of Dynamite,” takes on a question that has been on her mind for decades: What would happen if the U.S. were targeted by a nuclear missile?

The film, which is out on Netflix, has struck a nerve with audiences, becoming the streamer’s most-watched movie in the world and igniting conversation about the accuracy of its depiction of the U.S. missile defense system.

Today on Post Reports, Elahe Izadi speaks with Kathryn Bigelow and with the film’s screenwriter, Noah Oppenheim, about why they chose to make this film in this moment, and about how they responded when they saw news that the U.S. could restart nuclear testing for the first time in decades.

Today’s show was produced by Peter Bresnan and Josh Carroll, with help from Emma Talkoff. It was edited by Reena Flores and mixed by Sean Carter.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	I mean, it really has been normalized. It's sort of the elephant in the room, and nobody talks about it anymore. And I thought, well, this might be interesting to kind of begin to dig beneath the surface of it. And lo and behold, you know, there's a lot of material there.
0:15.0	There's a lot of material there. And it's terrifying, you know, like to have 12,000 nuclear warheads, if that's if the count is accurate, nine nuclear countries, only three are members of NATO.
0:26.3	I mean, that's a calculus that I think is kind of heart-stopping.
0:34.9	This is Catherine Bigelow.
0:37.1	She's been writing, producing, and directing films for the last 40 years.
0:41.6	And much of her work grapples with power and the way the government wields it.
0:47.4	Her 2008 film The Hurt Locker was set during the Iraq War, and it won the Oscar for Best Picture.
0:54.0	Bigelow also won for best director,
0:56.5	making her the first woman ever to win that award. She went on to direct Zero Dark 30,
1:02.0	the 2012 film about the search for Osama bin Laden. Now, she's out with her first film in eight
1:08.8	years, a house of dynamite.
1:11.6	The movie follows government workers and officials responding to a nuclear missile.
1:17.0	They don't know who launched it, but they do know it's headed toward the U.S.
1:22.3	Current velocity indicates the object will go suborbital.
1:27.4	Current flight trajectory is consistent with impact somewhere in the continental United States. indicates the object will go suborbital.
1:30.1	Current flight trajectory is consistent with impact somewhere in the continental United States.
1:34.0	What's your level of confidence on that, Tony?
1:39.9	It's not an error.
1:41.7	We're tracking in our multiple radar systems now.
1:45.3	I'm told hi, Jerry.
1:47.0	We have dual phenomenology on the track.
1:50.0	19 minutes to impact.
	...

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