Kathryn Bigelow has been thinking about death: hers, and mine, and yours as well. History will always remember her as the first woman to win a best director Oscar, which she did in 2010 for The Hurt Locker. But in her new film, A House of Dynamite, history may not have long to run. It is the story of a nuclear missile, launched at an American city. The rest is about what happens next. Bigelow would like you to consider Armageddon.
“Someone I know said the bomb for the audience is realising this is possible,” she says. She smiles. “I’m glad if people come away from the movie as concerned as I am.”
Today, though, her bearing is Zen. Almost six feet and wearing tinted sunglasses, she looks like a rock star, and younger than 73. Her own memories of the nuclear era stretch back to the early 1960s, and a cold-war childhood in California. School involved “duck and cover” drills, teaching kids to stay safe in a nuclear attack. “I grew up hiding under my desk. Of course, I was too young to understand what I was doing down there.”
A House of Dynamite is a belated answer. Bigelow’s previous movie, Detroit, was a 60s true story, an account of racist police violence. Now she is back in the period she most likes making films about: right now. It is an age of ironies. On our phones, nothing is beyond the pale, and everything makes us furious. And all, she says, while ignoring a nuclear stockpile able to render our online dramas irrelevant. “It’s the one thing we never mention, much less question. It’s crickets out there. It isn’t on TikTok, so it doesn’t exist.”
The movie, then, reminds us of a terrifying fact of life. “Our world is combustible. And it’s extraordinary to me how that ever became normalised.”
The cast includes Rebecca Ferguson as a White House security analyst and Idris Elba as the US president. Rich with closely researched detail, the film shows us the same nightmare experienced by multiple characters. Who fired the missile is never clear. Retaliatory strikes are still prepared. The film does exactly what its director intends. It makes everything else you might be thinking about feel absolutely trivial.
Bigelow has long staked out her own place in cinema. Singular and self-made, she is one of the few working film-makers to have climbed Kilimanjaro. She is also still among the most controversial of directors. She first made a name in what were seen as male genres – Blue Steel a cop movie, Point Break a heist flick (with surfers). Later there were political third rails: The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty set amid US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
But only a fool would dispute her gifts as a film-maker: a virtuoso of action, tension and release. Jamie Lee Curtis, star of Blue Steel, once compared her to a military general. It was meant as a compliment, describing a woman of quiet, “machinelike” strength. When I mention it, though, Bigelow’s eyebrows shoot up. “The general!”
The playwright and actor Tracy Letts is among the stars in A House of Dynamite. On a personal level, he says, he still doesn’t feel he really knows Bigelow. But she lost her reserve on set. “I wasn’t sure what I’d find. She really does have a quality of genius, so I wouldn’t have been surprised to meet Francis Ford Coppola on Apocalypse Now. In fact, she was the calm at the eye of the storm.” Working days, he says, were full of praise. “And you’re reassured because you know why she’s there. She’s already got the awards, and I’m sure she has enough money. So, you know, the film actually matters to her.”
One astonishing scene involves a civil war re-enactment. (The event was real, shot documentary style.) On screen, as the world hangs in the balance, it feels brilliantly cool-eyed. America, you think, can be deeply self-obsessed. “I think you are not wrong,” Bigelow says. “And also we are a culture defined by war. I wish we could define ourselves differently.”
For all the dread plausibility of A House of Dynamite, she also keeps its fictional politicians free of reminders of their real-world counterparts. “The situation in our film stands outside that situation.” Even so, it can be hard not to watch Jared Harris play the secretary of defence without remembering has that the post has now has a secondary title attached to it: secretary of war.
Today, Bigelow makes a joke – or half of one – about lately thinking a lot about moving to London. (For the moment she lives in what has been described as a “30-hectare horse property” in upstate New York.) Interviews with movie talent now sometimes specify no questions about Trump; Bigelow doesn’t roll that way. She looks tense when the subject comes up, though. The risk, she says, is derailing conversation about the film. But with troops in US cities, how anxious is she? “Well, I did just make a movie about nuclear war. So that may say it all.”
Part of why her career has been a giant Rorschach test has been her reluctance ever to say too much. Her movies leave room to think as well, much as her characters don’t tend to have backstories. Still, her own can feel like a breadcrumb trail. She was shy at school. Her mother was an English teacher; her father managed a paint factory. (She was an only child, a situation in which, she has said, “You kind of become peers with your parents.”)
By the 1970s, she had become a New York artist, living and working amid the downtown scene. Philip Glass was a friend; Cindy Sherman a neighbour; a conversation with Andy Warhol helped convinced her she should work with film. “The art world felt rarefied. Everything relied on existing knowledge. But film crossed every cultural and class line, and you could just hit the ground running. It was so much more exciting to communicate with.”
By the 90s, she was a sensation. Blue Steel and Point Break made her a favourite among postmodern theorists and multiplex crowds alike. But the edge of transgression people found so ticklish also caused problems. Her techno-thriller Strange Days (1995) drew complaints about a scene of sexual violence. Then came K-19: The Widowmaker, the true story of a stricken Soviet nuclear submarine in 1961, members of whose crew died preventing an accident that might have started world war three. Executives asked her who US audiences were supposed to root for. The box office was bad enough to stall a once spectacular career.
She says now this was also when she started to think again about the nuclear threat. Making the film, she visited the Arctic, where abandoned subs rusted under the sea, waiting to leak radioactivity. “In the 90s, we’d all assumed the bomb was just going to magically disappear. I realised it never had.”
She made The Hurt Locker six years later, the story of a US army bomb disposal unit in Baghdad. It made for a triumphant next chapter. Being the first woman to be awarded an Oscar for directing even brought a sense of Hollywood respectability. (There was also the fun sidebar of Bigelow beating to the prize her ex-husband, James Cameron, who was nominated for Avatar.) But the thought of being pinned in place as a woman film-maker made her uneasy. “If I can represent that the impossible can be possible, I love it,” she says today of being a role model. Then there is an audible full stop.
Her time in the establishment was short-lived. Her next movie, Zero Dark Thirty, about the US hunt for Osama bin Laden, was a tour de force and a source of vast rancour – and saw her accused of colluding with the CIA. A decade later, she can still seem bruised, though time has made her wry. “Something that struck me …”, I say at the start of this interview. “Uh oh!” she exclaims. Later, I call her films conversation starters. She bursts out laughing. “And I still think that’s a good thing.”
She says she sees a clear relationship between her hot potato films of the past 20 years and her new one. K-19 left her haunted by nuclear ghosts. Then, while others had their say about her, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty sharpened her self-image as a film-maker adjacent to journalism. “The films start with my own curiosity, and then there’s a desire to provide access to information the public doesn’t have that I think might be important.”
The other link, of course, is the military. A retired three-star general acted as a consultant on A House of Dynamite. She points out she has never sought endorsement from the Pentagon. Indeed, the story is more than sceptical about the accepted wisdom of mutually assured destruction – and the billions spent maintaining it. “Our nuclear armoury is a fallible structure,” Bigelow says. “Within it are men and women working thanklessly behind the scenes, whose competence means you and I can sit and have this conversation. But competence doesn’t mean they’re infallible.”
It feels like an idea close to Bigelow’s core. Letts even compares her to Ken Loach. “I know it sounds a strange parallel, but they both make movies about flawed systems, and ordinary characters trapped inside them.” For her own part, she retains an endearing faith in people’s ability to make good choices with enough real information. She also thinks we need to start taking responsibility.
“We are our own villain,” she says. Humanity made the bomb; at some point, we have to deal with it. “Of course, the challenge is this is a global problem. Climate change is the same. But we have to act. And I would say a first action is to see this issue as your main responsibility when you vote.”
But are movies still the all-powerful communication tool they were when the younger Bigelow discovered film? “I do read things about the future of our industry that are very grim. But I’m also kind of detached. I don’t live in Los Angeles any more. And I just keep moving forward.”
And so, inevitably, we come to AI. In 2025, no one talks about nuclear weapons, but the world can’t stop discussing the artificially generated actor Tilly Norwood. Bigelow says she would never use AI for anything to do with a performance. Beyond that, who knows? “When I made Strange Days, which now seems a hundred years ago, I was always being asked about technology. And I said then: what’s important is who uses it.” She tells me she is reading If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, the bestseller about our AI future. It is, she says, as pessimistic as the title implies. “Fascinating.”
The problem, I say, is people often look to film-makers for answers. “I know. They do.” She rewinds out loud back through our conversation. “AI. Climate change. Nuclear war.” She smiles again. “Next time, I’m making a comedy.”
