Shoot to thrill: Kathryn Bigelow on A House of Dynamite and her dynamic career

“The thing is, it’s hard for me to analyse what I do because I’m always in the moment and trying to move forward.” Kathryn Bigelow has come to London by train from Paris, where she was being honoured by the Cinémathèque française. “I met Costa-Gavras,” the Cinémathèque’s president, best known as the director of Z (1969). “He’s a hero of mine, and I told him, ‘You invented the political thriller.’ You couldn’t do this movie if it hadn’t been for him.” ‘This movie’ is A House of Dynamite, Bigelow’s first in eight years, and the most sheerly compelling of her career, moving forward with the relentlessness of a rocket. Our interview takes place in between two screenings in two cinemas, at a third location where she spends all of an hour before moving on again.

Bigelow’s career has in fact been a series of forward moves: from art into film, from high style into realism, from fiction into journalism – and indeed, from stasis into motion, spectacle into narrative. Her first feature The Loveless (1981, co-directed with Monty Montgomery), a postmodern biker movie that makes a fetish of 1950s Americana while constantly evoking its violent undertow, “was really an effort to suspend the narrative. If it were a piece of music it would be one note. Whereas shooting A House of Dynamite was like four-dimensional chess.” A nuclear intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) is bearing down on Chicago and the US military and political leadership have about 18 minutes to try to stop it and to decide on a response. We see the same 18 minutes play out three times, focusing on three sets of characters, but with a great deal of overlap since everyone in the film is in near-constant communication with one another.

“It was incredibly complex to shoot, and the script [by Noah Oppenheim] was meticulous.” The momentum is sustained through the repetitions as each one introduces new dimensions to the story. Deeply researched and shot without gloss, A House of Dynamite is the culmination of all of Bigelow’s forward moves, the central pivot in which was The Hurt Locker (2008), a bomb-disposal drama set in Iraq, in which her newfound yen for realism, and for journalism, came together for the first time. She herself calls it a “breathtaking transition”; it was also a kind of comeback after K-19: The Widowmaker (2002), a starry and expensive Cold War thriller, set aboard a Russian submarine, that underperformed at the box office. Made on a much lower budget, and shot on 16mm, primarily in Jordan, The Hurt Locker won the Best Picture Oscar, and, for Bigelow personally, the Directing Oscar. She was the first woman to win the award, and the last for more than a decade, but she has never made a big thing of it, whereas she talks about being screened at the Cinémathèque as “surreal, an out of body experience”.

The two films that followed The Hurt Locker, Zero Dark Thirty (2012), about the US military’s hunt for Osama Bin Laden, and Detroit (2017), set during the riots of 1967, were in the same vein, and based on historical events, and while A House of Dynamite is speculative, it is likewise based on intimate knowledge of America’s defence establishment. What is new within this phase of Bigelow’s career is A House of Dynamites narrative intricacy, its rapid cycling between locations and extensive use of telecommunications. It would not be inaccurate to say that the film’s true location is the ether. In the third act, as the president barrels through Washington DC, we barely notice the sight of his motorcade, and the constant disruption involved in keeping it moving, because the main drama is taking place somewhere on the electromagnetic spectrum; and yet the sequence has the power it possesses because the motorcade is as real as can be. The principals, Bigelow tells me, were in the vehicles, not in the studio.

Still, although A House of Dynamite is highly plausible, and although it is new and distinctively of the 2020s, it is also of a piece with Bigelow’s films before The Hurt Locker and her shift to realism, most obviously Strange Days (1995), which was, after all, an apocalyptic prophecy of the technological near future. For all that she is keen to present A House of Dynamite as an urgent “cautionary tale” for a generation (or two) who have grown up since the Cold War, in relative ignorance of the possibility of instant nuclear annihilation, it can be seen as a vindication of Strange Days’ predictions of an “increasingly mediated” environment, as she described it at the time. The main characters in A House of Dynamite experience the world almost exclusively through screens – we never actually see the ICBM – while they are constantly being looked at through them in turn, and frequently having to authenticate themselves, at the mercy of their devices. The stakes are unusually high but they are just like us.

In this respect, the roots of A House of Dynamite go back as far as the 1970s, and Bigelow’s formation in the downtown New York art scene and at Columbia, where she studied film. The figure who connected the two worlds was Sylvère Lotringer, one of her teachers at Columbia, a Frenchman who made it his mission to establish “the affinity between recent French philosophy and contemporary art in America”, the great occasion for this being a conference he mounted in November 1975, ‘SchizoCulture’. The French philosophers Lotringer brought over included Michel Foucault, Jean-François Lyotard, author of The Postmodern Condition (1979), and the future film theorist Gilles Deleuze, all of whom appeared in a 1978 issue of Lotringer’s journal, Semiotext(e), also titled ‘Schizo-Culture’, for which Bigelow designed the cover.

What Lotringer and Bigelow took from these thinkers was a novel conception of power relations. In a tribute to Lotringer on his death in 2021, Bigelow described his voiceover contribution to her early short, The Set-Up (1978), in which he speaks of power not being exercised from without, but insidiously, through ourselves: “We reproduce it all the time,” she quoted. Foucault’s famous image for this idea was the panopticon, which he defined in ‘Schizo-Culture’ as a machine “in which everyone is caught, those who exercise the power as well as those who are subjected to it… Power becomes a machinery controlled by no one.” Half a century later, this strikes me as a fairly exact description of A House of Dynamite, in which the president, who is teasingly kept off screen till the final act, building up our image of him as the world’s most powerful man, is revealed to be a cipher, a mere function of a system gone out of control.

Bigelow will not call this a direct influence – “I wish Sylvère were still alive” is her response, when I bring out the Foucault – but it doesn’t need to be. Immersion in theory, she wrote in her tribute, “transforms the way you think. Permanently.” In our interview it is Bigelow who brings up Lotringer. “My understanding of his interpretation of semiotics was really about power strategies, and how you use semiotics to deconstruct power.” She also refers more than once to another of her teachers at Columbia in the late 1970s, Peter Wollen, the British author of Signs and Meaning in the Cinema (1969), and the co-director of several experimental films with Laura Mulvey. 

The Set-Up was similarly experimental: Bigelow presented it as part of an event titled ‘Cine-Virus’, which included shorts by William Burroughs and Antony Balch and a filmed performance by Kathy Acker. Its programme note stated: “Everyone wants to be infected/Everyone wants to be infectious.” Cinema was “a soft-machine of control bringing into proximity different strains of the disease”. Bigelow’s characters, throughout the feature career that she was about to begin, are seekers of extreme experiences; we in the audience share them vicariously. The Loveless is recognisably an artefact of Bigelow’s New York era: it appeared about the same time as an issue of Semiotext(e) titled ‘Polysexuality’ on which she was credited as an editor and designer, and which features a half-naked biker on the cover. Among the written contributions on varied forms of sex are images of violence, notably a mushroom cloud. The issue’s main editor, François Peraldi, explained that these represented “the other side of libido”: the death drive, personified in Bigelow’s thrillseekers. In the film, Willem Dafoe – in his first lead role – seems to describe a nuclear explosion as beautiful.

The Loveless became a cult movie, playing (to give a suggestive example) the Scala Cinema in 13 months in a decade. Bigelow’s second feature, and first as solo director, Near Dark (1987), her ‘vampire western’, six years later – there have been long gaps throughout her career – played in 11 months in five years. These were indie movies from the pre-Miramax era when there was a fairly clear distinction; movies about outsiders, for outsiders. “You could look at Near Dark as a family of anarchists,” Bigelow tells me; “you could walk through it and ascribe somewhat subversive qualities.” Her next move, albeit independently financed as most if not all of her films have been, was into the mainstream, with Blue Steel (1990), an ultra-slick New York-set thriller starring Jamie Lee Curtis as a rookie police officer targeted by a crazed Wall Street trader played by Ron Silver. Bigelow’s director credit appears over an image of Curtis being sworn in, a lone woman among men. From this point on, with a single exception, all of Bigelow’s protagonists would be police, military or intelligence.

The film that followed is her most widely beloved: Point Break (1991) – memorably paid homage to in Edgar Wright’s Hot Fuzz (2007) – in which Keanu Reeves played the rookie cop, Johnny Utah, and Patrick Swayze the robber, Bodie. Early on, Utah is told that the FBI cracks cases by “crunching data”, and as he goes undercover with Bodie, leader of a gang of surfers who rob banks, he is drawn to their outsider ethos, what Bodie calls the “spiritual side” of surfing, “the place where you lose yourself and you find yourself”, the apparent opposite of the straight world represented by the FBI and the citizens it is trying to protect. Bodie is a capital-R Romantic, seeking the “ultimate rush”, even unto death, and Utah is as attracted to him as he is to Tyler, a more casual surfer played by Lori Petty, who scents “too much testosterone” in Bodie’s extreme stance, while seeing that communion with the ocean has liberated something in Utah. More than one film theorist has delighted in Tyler’s close physical resemblance to Utah, one of the film’s “subversive qualities”.

The perfection of Point Break may stem, at least in part, from Bigelow’s ability to see things both ways, and thereby to dramatise the conflict. Perversely or otherwise, her films from Blue Steel onwards betray a fascination with the protocols of the straight world alongside the desire for unmediated experience manifested by countercultural figures like Bodie; indeed, some of her most extreme thrill-seekers, such as Jeremy Renner’s character in The Hurt Locker, are feeding their need from within the most tightly routinised parts of the machine. 

A House of Dynamite may seem some way distant from these concerns, but its characters are the most governed by protocol of any in Bigelow’s career, as well as the most distanced from real, unmediated experience. And by showing the astounding efforts we have collectively made, as a species, to make nuclear annihilation an ever-present possibility, it is also in keeping with the rest of her films in tracing the lineaments of the death drive beneath modern civilisation’s apparently rational surface. Her response to this? “I don’t know, it’s a real reach.”

Henry K. Miller: Were there any particular films that Peter Wollen brought to your attention?

Kathryn Bigelow: There’s nobody like that today, or is there? I believe we talked about Hitchcock. I know Andrew Sarris did, we spent an entire maybe two months on Notorious [1946]. That was extraordinary, but with Wollen it was much more about Freud and The Interpretation of Dreams [1899], and the process of identification, how that process works from a psychoanalytic standpoint. How film, potentially, can activate your senses and how it works on you similar to a dream state. The process of identification is this desire and need to have a vicarious experience with what you’re watching. It’s why your heart rate quickens, it’s why you fall in love with that character, or are frightened of that character. Either Peter Wollen or Sylvère called it a contract that you have with the screen. 

I was in the graduate programme at Columbia, and it was called ‘Scholarship and criticism’. There was a whole other track, practical – I didn’t take that. Probably should have. I had such great teachers. Susan Sontag was one of my creative advisers – that was earlier, that was when I was still painting. I was lucky to have some pretty extraordinary minds to talk to.

Were you aware of the films that Peter Wollen was making with Laura Mulvey at that time, or of her work?

I was aware, but I don’t know how many of them I saw. He didn’t talk about his own work that much.

Your background was in painting, but is it true that early on you were taught by the filmmaker Gunvor Nelson? Was she your first introduction to experimental film?

Yes. This was at the San Francisco Art Institute. She was incredible. We used to do these Xerox films – not films. You’d do a series of Xerox images and then turn them into a narrative.

When did you yourself start making film? Was it initially part of your artistic practice?

Early 70s and yes it was part of the artistic practice. At this point I had shifted from painting to conceptual art.

What led you towards narrative filmmaking?

Probably meeting Andy Warhol. I had lived and breathed artwork that is a little abstract for most audiences, but then you look at Warhol’s work and you realise, “Oh, art can cross all class and cultural lines.” That’s what narrative can give you; it can slip into the bloodstream before you know it.

You’ve spoken about the realism of A House of Dynamite, but it is also a great exercise in suspense, in more than one way – keeping the president out of sight until the third act and bringing him in as a coup de théâtre, and so on. How do you weigh up the competing claims of realism and suspense?

That was an idea that came along the minute we decided to break it into thirds, so that the audience could experience the problem in real time, and starting it at Fort Greely, the missile defence base, and then going to the White House Situation Room, where the information starts to move up the chain of command to Stratcom – Strategic Command – then finally to the Pentagon and the president. It was also fairly logical – the president was not in a place where he could be easily teleconferenced into the wall of faces. You’re not always in a place of maximum communication; in that role you’re oftentimes not in your office. I think it’s fairly real.

Without wanting to detract from that, isn’t there also an aspect of the film that connects with earlier films like Strange Days, which shows us a world in which people relate to reality almost entirely at one remove, through screens?

I just don’t look at it like that. That’s the truth of that environment in Stratcom, the nuclear umbrella, that is located in Omaha, Nebraska. That’s the environment in which those people work, which is replicated authentically and realistically and accurately. So no, it’s not an aesthetic choice of “Let’s have everyone working on screens”, it’s an almost perfect replica, and part of the responsibility of the film to be as faithful to reality as possible.

Beneath the ‘big board’ in the control room at Stratcom, there’s a panel saying ‘The Big Board’, a reference to Dr. Strangelove [1964]. It feels like a meta joke, but is it real?

It is. I was surprised – I was there, I visited Stratcom, and so that’s there, and yes it’s a nod to Dr. Strangelove. I found it wonderfully human in an environment that’s so technical and serious. I mean, how does it get more serious?

Meanwhile the notion of ‘dual phenomenology’ sounds like a philosopher’s joke.

No, this was real. We had a wonderful technical adviser called Dan Karbler, a three-star general who used to work in missile defence, and he said that when an object is picked up on multiple satellite and radar systems, that’s called dual phenomenology.

I think this is the first of your films not to have visible, graphic violence in it. Is that right?

Probably. I don’t look at it like that.

When did you begin your turn towards research?

Probably K-19. That was also my introduction to the world of atomic capabilities and fallibility. I think that’s where it began, and the journalistic aspect of it was really fascinating to me, to make it – again – as real as possible I met many of those submariners who were on that submarine, those who were still alive.

The K-19 project, which augured this change in direction towards research and realism, began in the mid-1990s, about the time you finished Strange Days. Do you see Strange Days as a kind of closing statement on the postmodern condition?

Process is predominately instinctual and moving from one dynamic to another was usually predicated on the nature of the content. The form doesn’t dictate, the content dictates.

Looking back on Strange Days, which seems so prescient, do you feel vindicated?

Look at Neuralink that’s being invented right now by Elon Musk – it’s almost like it’s happening. Can you experience another person’s experiences? I think we’re minutes away from it if we want to be. I just don’t know where it gets us.

At the time of the release of Zero Dark Thirty you spoke of “having gone through different permutations” in your career. Could you talk about how the current one began?

I would say that it’s really partnering up with [cinematographer] Barry Ackroyd on The Hurt Locker. Working with him was a real eye-opener. He used to work with Ken Loach, and that’s a real immediate way of looking at the narrative. He does treat it like a documentary, he comes from documentaries. And so when we were in the Middle East it was very interesting to me – I had never worked like that before – to create a very fluid environment, with no marks on the ground, in which the actors are just – and I say “just” in inverted commas – doing their job. They have to clear 300 metres of explosive ordnances, and there’s not a question of “This is your close-up, this is your medium shot, this is a wide” – you’re just going to do your job and we’ll cover it. So it’s treating the narrative, or the action within the frame, like a documentary. He uses a lot of cameras and the cameras are constantly moving, and we switch it up after each take, it’s not the same take to take. I remember Jeremy Renner was coming around the Humvee and said, “Wait! There’s a camera there!” That would happen over and over until they became relaxed with it. And that’s the same stylistic approach I’ve used in Zero Dark Thirty, Detroit and now A House of Dynamite. There’s a lot of freedom and a lot of latitude. Even though the set is very fixed, there’s a lot of freedom in what the actor can or needs to do. We also have technical advisers who give the actor a lot of information about what is standard, what’s not standard – about what is the protocol of your job.

What led you to collaborate with Ackroyd, whose background is so far from Hollywood?

Because he had done documentaries. We shot The Hurt Locker in the Middle East. Not everybody was that eager to go there, you know the Iraq war was still going on five kilometres away, sometimes we were so close to the border [in Jordan]. Since he’d done it, he’d shot this way, I met with him and saw that this is perfect, this is just the perfect situation, the perfect cinematographer for something that was going to be really physically difficult. We were in the desert and we had very limited resources to make the film, and we were just gonna… shoot it, do it. It was very immediate, my most treasured way of working.

It was really an eye-opener, working with that much fluidity and that much immediacy, and moving through the material and giving the actors that much freedom. I had never experienced anything like that; it was a breathtaking transition for me, because it also informed the choice of material. Now I was interested in something that was as realistic as possible, as authentic as possible, as journalistic as possible. I like to make films that give you something you didn’t already know. Like what you do, perhaps.

I work on film history.

Have you ever seen – I don’t know why I flashed on this – Hitchcock’s silent movies?

I wrote a book about The Lodger [1926].

Seriously? I didn’t know that. They’re phenomenal. Very few people have seen them, they’re incredible.

Does Maya, Jessica Chastain’s character in Zero Dark Thirty, reflect something of the researcher’s plight?

Maya’s job was a targetter for the CIA. That job is predicated on extensive highly complex research.

In films like Near Dark and Point Break and even Strange Days there was still a counterculture, an ‘outside’, set apart from the heavily surveilled, heavily regulated, technology-saturated world your newer characters, like Maya, inhabit. Have you considered returning to the outsiders?

No, not the outsiders. But I think there’s something perhaps subtly subversive about all of them.

Many of them are intensely self-disciplined…

I love that idea of self-discipline…

…and most of them are cut off from a part of themselves. In Point Break, Johnny Utah is brought back to himself through Lori Petty’s character, but subsequently, with characters like Maya or Jeremy Renner in The Hurt Locker – there’s no release for them.

All these characters, they do share a quality in common. They’re sort of loners. The Jeremy Renner character, what makes him happy obviously is what would terrify most people on the planet, and of course Johnny Utah is a fish out of water who becomes quite comfortable in his situation. And in A House of Dynamite you have people who are facing the ultimate problem, and even though they rehearse for it, they practice the procedure, the protocol, it’s still extremely difficult to control the outcome. You’ve got so many variables: human fallibility, technical fallibility, a cell call that drops out. On and on, this is the life, the web, the matrix of the world in which we live. You look at it and you think “This can’t be” – but it is! Every day without thinking about it, like right now.

A House of Dynamite struck me as a black comedy…

…not a knee-slapper.

Not a knee-slapper, but there is something about the president’s predicament, being at the top of the power pyramid, but without many options.

“Surrender or suicide.” Unless what you take from the film is, perhaps, wanting a world that’s slightly different.

It doesn’t just say “If only we had a better president”.

I wish!

In the past you’ve spoken of cinema as a “cathartic medium”. But A House of Dynamite doesn’t provide much in the way of catharsis.

I think that catharsis in this piece, if it does exist, is with the audience. Is this a reckoning that the audience wants to take on? I think of the film as a question: here is the military-industrial complex dealing with an incoming nuclear ICBM. This is the protocol, these are the halls of power that are traversed. The answer is in your hands. The end of this film is written by you.