Kathryn Bigelow was motivated to make A House of Dynamite to bring awareness to the reality of nuclear war

For those who have seen Oppenheimer, while much of the film is about the physicist’s journey to meeting his immensely dangerous goal, the movie also illustrates how he felt the weight of his creation and how he knew he had changed the world forever. The ending, in particular, is a haunting montage in the mind of J. Robert Oppenheimer about his horrific visions of seeing the atomic bomb being used in an all-out nuclear battle between warring countries. Kathryn Bigelow’s new film, A House of Dynamite, aims to do the same in a modern hypothetical story.

Bigelow presented the film in Venice today. According to The Hollywood Reporter, the director described the topic of her upcoming film as “a global issue” and said she was motivated by a desire to “get that information out there.” She also stated, “Hope against hope, maybe we will reduce the nuclear stockpile someday, but in the meantime, we are really living in a house of dynamite.” When Bigelow was asked to expound on the film’s message, she answered,

We need to be much more informed, and that would be my greatest hope — that we actually initiate a conversation about nuclear weapons and non-proliferation in a more perfect world. The film is an invitation to decide what to do about all these weapons. How is annihilating the world a good defensive measure?”

She continued to explain her motivations for making the Netflix paranoia thriller, “I grew up in an era when hiding under your school desk was considered the go-to protocol for surviving an atomic bomb. It seems absurd now — and it was — but at the time, the threat felt so immediate that such measures were taken seriously. Today, the danger has only escalated. Multiple nations possess enough nuclear weapons to end civilization within minutes. And yet, there’s a kind of collective numbness — a quiet normalisation of the unthinkable. How can we call this ‘defense’ when the inevitable outcome is total destruction?”

Then, she continued, “I wanted to make a film that confronts this paradox — to explore the madness of a world that lives under the constant shadow of annihilation, yet rarely speaks of it.” The film is due to release in select theaters on October 10, and then it will be available to stream on Netflix on October 24.

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