“I’m Kathryn Bigelow, and I’m the Director of “A House of Dynamite. So here we are with Deputy National Security Adviser Jake Baerington, played by Gabriel Basso. And he’s in a hurry because he’s just learned that there is an incoming nuclear ICBM to North America. And he’s getting this information and trying to get to the White House, which is where he works. So he’s in a hurry and he’s trying to communicate with our general from Stratcom, played by Tracy Letts, “By moving to DEFCON 2, sir, we are potentially risking a spiral of alerts.” And what’s interesting about this scene is, of course, the movement and the urgency of it. But the fact that you have two different philosophies, You have a more hawkish approach that the general is providing, and then you have a more dovish approach, a wait and let’s try to analyze this in a more careful fashion that Jake Baerington is putting forward. “That’s your job, not mine. You have someone you can call who will tell us just what the hell’s going on? Don’t let us hold you back.” So what’s interesting here, I think, is all the different sets that we had to create as a seamless movement from A to B. Well, you start with the security kiosk, and that was a build. And then he gets through the security kiosk. And then. And then he’s going through the White House briefing room. He’s on his way to the White House Situation room. And that’s in the middle of a briefing. And that was also a build, but in another part of the studio. And so trying to make it a seamless integration, then we needed an exterior to make that work. And so we went to a golf museum, which was built in the same period as the White House was built. And it has pillars and it has a portico that’s actually architecturally very similar. And so we did a couple of beats there to get him from the kiosk to the press briefing room. But we’re intercutting that with Stratcom, which is Strategic Command located in Omaha, Nebraska, which is the home of the nuclear umbrella for America. And that’s where the general is speaking from. Throughout all this, the clock is ticking down. The ICBM is on approach, its inclination has flattened. So they now know this is not a test launch of anybody’s equipment. It’s absolutely on course and on track for impact in the continental United States. So it’s a very heightened moment exploring various options and various trajectories. And so trying to put all these different locations together in a way that makes it feel seamless. And then we see our flight pilots who are going to ready the B-2s, a B-2 is a particular bomber of which carries nuclear warheads. So if we were to, in this situation, retaliate, that would be one method of retaliation. We shot at a studio in New Jersey called Cinelease, and we had three of their stages, and each stage was a different set. One was Fort Greely interior, one was Stratcom interior and one was White House Situation room interior. And our production designer, Jeremy Hindle, was truly brilliant in his replication of these locations. He and I visited the White House Situation room and stratcom only for minutes. We couldn’t take pictures, but even based on having been there a few minutes, he was able to replicate it to such a great extent that military personnel that we’re familiar with those locations, they thought we had shot there. I mean, it was kind of that accurate. “Sir, our GBIs will be airborne momentarily. This is what we do.” “Jake, you’re still there?” “Yes, sir.” Well, this is all happening live. It’s almost like a theater piece where the other actors that you see on the screen in the teleconference call, they’re on the set as well, in different sets a ways away, but they’re there so that their response is live to the people, let’s say, in the room of Stratcom, that’s a simultaneous situation. And that was actually fairly complicated to set up. But it was very helpful to the actor to have it be live and have that response time be immediate. “Once the kill vehicle separates, our mid-course intercept system has a success rate of 61 percent.” “So it’s a coin toss? That’s what $50 billion buys us?” “We are talking about hitting a bullet with a bullet.”
