A House of Dynamite: Kathryn Bigelow, Idris Elba and Rebecca Ferguson needs you to be scared

Kathryn Bigelow’s first movie in eight years, A House of Dynamite is a film with some terrifying statistics.

The first one: If a nuclear weapon is launched from a submarine in the Pacific Ocean, it takes fewer than 20 minutes for that missile to hit a large metropolis in the US.

The second: The missile defence system in which a ballistic missile is launched to intercept the incoming one has only a 61 per cent chance of success. It is described in A House of Dynamite as hitting “a bullet with a bullet”.

Screenwriter Noah Oppenheim is the first person to tell you he didn’t come up with that line. “That is the way missile defence professionals speak about the challenge of their field,” he said while promoting A House of Dynamite at the Venice Film Festival, where it premiered.

Even more frightening is the 61 per cent number used in the film is, as Oppenheimer revealed, “being generous”. Depending on who you ask, the odds of success can be lower. When it’s been tested on shorter-range missiles moving at a slower pace, it’s higher.

“Obviously, thank god, there’s never been a real-world test of this technology, so all they can do is run drills and simulations and tests, and the conditions vary during those tests,” Oppenheim added.

“You have defence contractors who are involved in trying to prove the efficacy of their systems, so there’s no definitive number, but coin toss is the best way to describe it.”

As Idris Elba put it, “It’s incredibly illuminating we are told to spend more money on these incredible defence mechanisms, (but) actually they’re not that safe.”

Are you scared yet?

Bigelow needs you to be, it’s why she made a film, a piece of speculative fiction, about a nuclear attack on the US. Presented in three sections, A House of Dynamite is about the morning a mystery actor launches a weapon from a sub.

They don’t know who it was, and, at first, where it will land. All the agencies and levels of the US government and military whose job is to respond – the strategic communications team, the intelligence services, the armed services, the diplomatic corps, the administration, right up to the President of the United States – kick into gear as the decision falls to one person as to how to respond.

The threat of nuclear war was something Bigelow, who was born in 1951 during the Cold War, grew up with.

“I literally grew up hiding under desks in case of an atomic bomb blast,” she said.

“Well, that’s not going to help you, but (now) the dialogue about nuclear weapons has been non-existent. So, here we are now, in a situation where (no one is talking), and it’s almost been normalised that they’re out there and we’re living in a house of dynamite.

“My question is, how do we get the dynamite out of the walls?”

The large ensemble cast includes Elba, playing the president, Rebecca Ferguson, Jared Harris, Moses Ingram, Tracy Letts, Greta Lee, Gabriel Basso, Jason Clarke, Anthony Ramos and Renee Elise Goldsberry, each portraying someone with a job or presence in that chain of responders.

Letts, who is also a renowned playwright as well as an actor, described the star of the film as not an individual character but the “circumstances and its ideas”.

He plays the head of the strategic communications unit and when he asked the technical advisors about the minutiae of what his character would be doing, they told him, “You’re trying to get as much information as you can so you can pass that information up the chain of command, gather the information, move the information”.

In some ways, that was also Bigelow and Oppenheim’s job. To collect and disseminate through one of the most effective mediums to not just inform but to genuinely affect people by tapping into their emotional core.

“Without information, nothing can happen,” Bigelow said. “In my opinion, this is a very informative film, and that comes at a very timely moment for this information. My hope is that it has an impact and that it generates a dialogue just like the one we’re having right now, and that can lead to some kind of meaningful action.”

Bigelow is known for taking real-world scenarios, as she did with Zero Dark Thirty and The Hurt Locker, and crafting something compelling at the intersection of narrative feature and documentary.

Elba pointed out that A House of Dynamite is billed as a thriller, and it is that.

At the screenings in Venice, when the lights came on, the audiences looked shellshocked, their bodies visibly tense from the visceral experience of seeing unfold in real-time, the potential end of human civilisation. This is how it would happen.

“We want a lot of people to see it, we want people to have that dialogue,” Elba said. “There’s a version where perhaps it’s more distilled, a little more dry, maybe less tantalising.”

Lee added, “(Bigelow) has that unbelievable, uncanny ability to take a really hard subject matter and make it something you want to watch. It’s a movie, it’s meant to be entertaining. There would be no point to a movie that has a lot of information and it’s teaching you something but no one wanted to watch it.”

Oppenheim said the film came together by talking to as many people as possible, whose jobs are embedded within those teams that would deal with this scenario.

“Kathryn has enormous respect from the folks who work in the military and in intelligence agencies based on her past work,” Oppenheim explained.

“So they’re all very eager to work with her, talk to her. We had access to extraordinary technical advisors, people who worked at the highest levels of strategic command, the White House situation room, the Pentagon, the CIA. I had a past life as a journalist, so I also had my network of folks.”

He added, “The people who understand nuclear weapons the best are oftentimes the most passionate advocates for non-proliferation and disarmament because they understand the threat.”

It ultimately comes down to one person who makes the call, and out of everyone involved, they have the least amount of experience and expertise in the subject, you just have to rely that they can distil all the information and make the call based on that and, perhaps most significantly, their humanity.

No one utters the syllables TR-UMP, but the 45th president’s return to the White House as the 47th has changed the dynamics of the “what if”.

“I’ve always been concerned (about nuclear proliferation), but that concern is more acute now. I don’t see enough guardrails in place that can protect us,” Bigelow said.

Oppenheim added, “One of the things that has kept calamity from happening have been diplomacy, international arms control agreements, institutions that brought countries to the table, forced them to coordinate and talk.

“Obviously, we’ve seen those things crumbling.”

Ferguson said the one question we should be asking is, “Should one single entity have that power to nuke the world?”.

Ignorance can be bliss, having some of the information is scary but having even more is even scarier.

“I’m terrified, but I’m so happy I know about it,” Ferguson said.

“I want to talk about it, I want to provoke, I want us to communicate. It’s f—king absurd, the fact that we have weapons of mass destruction, that this is an option is absurd.”

Bigelow called safety “an illusion right now”, and if audiences realise take that away from A House of Dynamite, then it’s a start.

“(The movie) is fictional but it’s handled in a very documentary style,” she said. “It feels very real and immediate and penetrable. It’s a good style for a story like this, which feels potentially very real.

“If we’re going to avert this, the more real it feels, hopefully the better.”

A House of Dynamite may not be a documentary right now, but it easily could be.

“It’s something that could actually happen because we built these things, and they exist, and human beings control them,” Letts said. “So, it’s not happening until it is happening.”

A House of Dynamite is in cinemas on October 9 and on Netflix on October 24