Kathryn Bigelow’s “A House of Dynamite” is an exercise in tension, a countdown to disaster that goes over the same 18 minutes three times from multiple perspectives. A nuclear missile has been launched from somewhere in the Pacific Ocean near Asia and is headed toward Chicago. U.S. military and civilian leadership must figure out who sent it, whether they can stop it and how to retaliate, all under an unforgiving deadline.
The clock ticks and the movie goes into overdrive, then backs up and shows it all again. And again. The audience squirms, again and again.
As she proved with “The Hurt Locker” and “Zero Dark Thirty,” the other two films in a national-security trilogy of sorts, Bigelow is a fiercely accomplished filmmaker. In “A House of Dynamite,” she has the help of a legion of top-notch craftspeople who give her film its breathless drive.
We talked with three whose work is particularly vital in ratcheting up the pressure, all of them past Oscar winners: composer Volker Bertelmann and editor Kirk Baxter, both working with Bigelow for the first time, and sound designer Paul N.J. Ottosson, who has made four movies with the director and earned two Oscars for “The Hurt Locker” and one for “Zero Dark Thirty.”
What did you do to make those 18 minutes feel different each time but also hang together?
KIRK BAXTER The obvious answer is that with each chapter, it goes up through the layer of government. In the beginning, you can be very kinetic with the number of faces that you cut to and the people that you see, and you’ve got big boards and screens. And by the last chapter, we’ve collected all of that data, but we’ve shrunk down to fewer reactions. The film starts to highlight the issue of having sole authority land on one man, putting him in a position to make an impossible decision.
It’s the same information, but it’s just sliced up different ways. The pleasure for me is taking that same thing and delivering it with constant rapid-fire editing, trying to work with what I have to make it powerful.
Volker, how does that affect the music?
VOLKER BERTELMANN For me, the film had complications in the sense that it is documentary-style. For music, that is not good news, because you want to maybe highlight certain things in ways that are not really realistic. You want to get into bombastic bass sounds and all that.
But with something that is so realistic, I was trying to be very careful. I remember Kirk and Kathryn and I had one round where we were thinking, oh, maybe let’s pump it up and make it ven more heavy. I made one heavy round, and the next call was “No, let’s go back.” (Laughs)
You want to keep the three sections together and build on that. And I think the decision we made was to change the music on the president to something more subtle and more emotional. That came very late in the process, where we just felt maybe that’s a good way of ending the film in a more emotional way.
BAXTER That was Volker’s masterstroke. You can go to scores and find ramps —that’s what we used for the end of chapter one and the end of chapter two. It’s exciting. It leans into the thriller aspect of the film. But by the third time, it was a little unfair to the audience. And Volker changed that, so it wasn’t about a thriller, it was more about isolation and terror.
And anyway, Volker, you did get to use those huge foreboding notes at the beginning of the film, in place of the usual Netflix Tudum sound.
BERTELMANN I just had a guy tell me that the projector in the cinema where he saw the film was shutting down on that sound. (Laughs) This is not intentional. I don’t try to use projector-destroying bass sounds.
Paul, at what stage did you come in?
PAUL N.J. OTTOSSON Kathryn sent me a script about two years ago, so I got to live with it for a bit. And I had access to this three-star general very early on to discuss what kind of sounds to use in this environment. As you might notice in Kathryn’s past movies, we use a lot of sounds but we really want a base in reality.
Is the focus on what it would have sounded like exactly, or do you have the freedom to be more impressionistic at times?
OTTOSSON The sounds we choose have to be real. But how we use them, we need to find the peaks to tell an emotional story. Sometimes there’ll be a lot of sounds and sometimes there’ll be a lot less. In the beginning of the movie, the first chapter is about getting information up the ladder to the president. And at times, I felt we should overwhelm the person in the room as well as the audience. Sometimes we’d leave parts of important sentences out, or we’d just hear them a little bit, because we had the opportunity to repeat them later on.
And when we get to chapter three, we leave space and room for Volker’s music — that’s the emotional part. Once the president comes to the helicopter, there’s very little sound except music and the dialogue.
BAXTER Let me speak to Paul’s accuracy for a second. When we were getting to know each other, I made the mistake of questioning him on something. (Laughs) They shot (scenes set at the Alaskan military base Fort) Greeley in Iceland. There was water all around, which we got rid of with visual effects. And in the first temp sound that Paul sent through, there were these birds, and they sounded like seagulls to me.
I texted him and said, “Hey, it’s not gonna be by the water. We wouldn’t have seagulls.” And Paul said…
OTTOSSON “…That is not a seagull, it is a bald eagle. They would’ve lived in that area during that time of the year.” With Kathryn, we like to do a deep dive and be very accurate. I remember the conversation with Kirk.
BAXTER I was like, all right, I’m not going to question Paul again.
It also feels as if there’s a very intricate dance between sound effects and music.
OTTOSSON It’s a balance you have to find. Most of the time, you’d find a place to hand things off in a smooth way, where music takes over or music falls out. And sometimes there are scenes where it is just everything at once. The scene explodes, and then maybe the sound kind of fizzles out and the music survives and takes over. I don’t think there’s necessarily a template. It is just really what the movie needs and how it speaks to you.
BERTELMANN When I first started working on it, I felt like, oh, bloody hell, everything is so precise. But the longer you watch it and the more you talk with everyone during the process, you find out that there is a lot of precision but also a looseness. I love that. The more you watch it, the more you can figure out that maybe certain bangs are not exactly on the moment, or one boom may be a fraction late, but that makes it the way we experience things in our daily life.
OTTOSSON Like Volker’s saying, there’s a gut feeling that is better than being 100% accurate. I don’t think that it’s super-necessary to be dead-on with everything.
BAXTER But I did strive to give the movie a very formal structure in terms of how conversations take place and how you jump between locations mid-sentence. I always look for rhythms of sentences to figure out when to cross from one place to another, so they feel balanced. That’s a sort of ballet and I put a very classic filmmaking style on it. It’s done with camera work, and I’ve relied on Paul to sell those changes.
How did you plot out the intricacies of the edit?
BAXTER There were three phases to the edit. The first one, I cut it in story order, which is a huge gift for something this complicated. I cut the first chapter first, and that gave us the template for how things unfold in terms of time. The first edit was done from the gut and based around performance and reaction. And then there were another two passes that happened on it.
The first was trying to get in more cinema. So every gorgeous little shot that I had that didn’t need to go into the emotional storytelling, I went back and said, “Can we find a home for this shot?” That (gave me) the opening shots at sunset that we put titles on, the cutaway of Eisenhower behind the secretary of defense (in another scene). That became a lot of color and style in the film.
And then the last pass on it was all the intricacies of sound — what are the things that we hear and what are the things that we watch being said? And whatever we watched being said is the rule of what we hear. That was microscopic, exacting work, which I thoroughly enjoy doing.
Volker, did you do your typical search for an unusual instrument to serve as the keynote of your score, the way you did on “Conclave” and “All Quiet on the Western Front?”
BERTELMANN No. In this case, there was not so much time to research deeply. The only thing I was researching was to find some sounds for that moaning kind of horn that we hear in the beginning. I was experimenting with low woodwinds and low brass instruments. There was a baritone saxophone player coming into our studio, and he was just humming into the saxophone while he was playing. We were trying to find some animalistic sounds that sounded musical.
Also, the string elements were very important, and I doubled those frantic string lines. And I invited the saxophone player to double all the string lines as if he were totally on fire, so the strings send these alarming pulses out. I’m always searching for things like that that are extraordinary.
BAXTER I watched that unfold, and the precision in the recording made me feel like, OK, if I were interested in doing this, it would take me 20 years maybe to reach a baseline of being able to start where Volker is. And even then I might never have any of the magic.
I’d say the same with Paul. All of us just work in these very specific areas, and it’s wonderful that we get to pass them between us.
OTTOSSON It’s this sum of it all that at some point just creates what we really love about this movie, or any movie.
BAXTER Well, Kathryn’s the orchestrator and we’re the instruments. This is such a clear example of the chain reaction of things.
This story first appeared in the Below-the-Line issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine. Read more from the issue here.
