Lieutenant General Daniel L. Karbler, Writer Noah Oppenheim and Director Kathryn Bigelow on the set of A House of Dynamite. Eros Hoagland/Netflix Last year, just before retired United States Army General Dan Karbler joined a Zoom meeting with Kathryn Bigelow and a few of her creative collaborators, he hatched a dramatic plan. When he connected to the call, he left his camera off and announced to the group: "This is the DDO from the Pentagon convening a national event conference. Classification is top secret. Because of time constraints, we recommend we transition to a nuclear decision conference and bring the president in." Then, Karbler clicked on his camera and said with a smile, "Ladies and gentlemen, that's how the worst day of America's history will begin. I hope your script does it some justice." Related Stories Movies George Clooney to Receive Film at Lincoln Center's 2026 Chaplin Award Movies The Making of 'Wicked: For Good' With Flying, Belting and a "Wonderful" Ride It was mid-2024, and Bigelow was taking meetings with military and government experts on nuclear armament. The director, known for her razor-sharp depictions of political crises in films like Zero Dark Thirty and The Hurt Locker, had been mulling over the potential of making a film about intercontinental ballistic missiles. "I've had a lifelong fascination with the subject, thanks to growing up with it," Bigelow says. "As a child, we were under our desks and kind of traumatized, and then that trauma begins to normalize and disappear - but it doesn't mean the threat is gone." Her agent put her in touch with Noah Oppenheim, the former president of NBC News who has since veered into screenwriting projects like Jackie and the Netflix series Zero Day. Oppenheim was running the newsroom when North Korea was revealed to be a nuclear power, and the two found their way to the question: If a missile were launched toward America, what would take place within the halls of power? Their concept of A House of Dynamite was born out of a desire to make the rest of the country understand, on a visceral level, the insanity of the answers they found. "The idea that in 20 minutes, the president would have to decide the fate of all mankind, while simultaneously running for his life and worrying about the fate of his family, was just remarkable to us," says Oppenheim. "And then we had a conversation with a former senior official with the Pentagon and the CIA, and asked him how often the president rehearses this scenario, and the response was, 'Hardly ever.' We couldn't believe that was the reality we're living in." Bigelow had long wanted to tell a story in real time, and that desire helped bring them to the narrative device that unlocked the movie - they would divide the script into three parts, focusing on the 18 minutes from missile launch detection to explosion from the different perspectives. "We wanted to give people a slow dip of information," says Bigelow. First, the foot soldiers: White House Situation Room employees and the members of the Army team stationed at the Fort Greeley, Alaska anti-ballistic missile launch site. Next, the mid-level bureaucrats at places like the U.S. Strategic Command and the Presidential Emergency Operation Center. And lastly, the decision makers: the President and the Secretary of Defense (they made the film before our current POTUS changed the position to the far more ominous Secretary of War). There are no starring roles in A House of Dynamite, and the logistics of filming hyper-realistic cross-governmental meetings means that the actors are seen on a meeting screen more than they're seen in the flesh - but everyone wants to be in a Kathryn Bigelow movie, so casting was easy, despite the high level of secrecy involved in initial meetings. (When Anthony Ramos auditioned, they didn't want to give the sides away, so they had him read one of Jason Clarke's scenes from Zero Dark Thirty.) Anthony Ramos says Kathryn Bigelow was so dedicated to the film's authenticity that during a scene at Fort Greeley (set pictured here), she sent the casting director out to find an actress whose entire job was to cry for one specific moment: "They did like five to seven takes and she nailed it every time." Eros Hoagland/Netflix Once Tracy Letts - who plays a STRATCOM, or U.S. Strategic Command, commander - was allowed to read the script, he had an immediate suggestion for the movie's tagline: And you thought you had enough shit to worry about. "That's how I felt when I read it," he says. "And this movie actually depicts a best-case scenario, because the people you see onscreen manning the stations are sober, smart, compassionate people." "I was like, 'What the fuck is this?' " recalls Rebecca Ferguson. "I did not read it and think, 'Wow, what a story' - I thought, 'How could this be true?' I needed to read it again to try and understand how things could possibly happen that way." Production was completed in Washington, D.C., before the 2024