“Our World is Flammable”: Kathryn Bigelow on Artificial Intelligence, Andy Warhol, and Nuclear Armageddon | film

yourAatheryn Bigelow was thinking about death: her death, my death, and yours too. History will always remember her as the first woman to win the Academy Award for Best Director, which she did in 2010 for The Hurt Locker. But in her new film, “House of Dynamite,” history may not have long to go. It is the story of a nuclear missile fired at an American city. The rest is about what happens next. Bigelow wants you to think about Armageddon.

“One person I know said the bombshell for the public is realizing this is possible,” she says. She smiles. “I’m happy if people stay away from the film as much as I’m concerned.”

Today, though, her direction is Zen. She’s about six feet tall, wears tinted sunglasses, looks like a rock star, and is younger than 73 years old. Her memories of the nuclear age go back to the early 1960s and her Cold War childhood in California. The school included “duck and cover” drills, teaching children how to stay safe in the event of a nuclear attack. “I grew up hiding under my desk. Of course, I was too young to understand what I was doing there.”

“Dynamite House” is a late answer. Bigelow’s previous film, Detroit, was a true story from the 1960s, a story of racist police violence. She’s now back in the period when she loves making films: now. It is an age of paradoxes. On our phones, nothing is out of the ordinary and everything makes us angry. All this, she says, while ignoring the nuclear stockpile capable of rendering Internet dramas irrelevant. “It’s the one thing we never mention, let alone ask about. It’s the cockroaches that are out there. And they’re not on TikTok, so they don’t exist.”

The film then reminds us of a terrifying fact of life. “Our world is combustible. It is extraordinary to me how this has become normalized.”

The cast includes Rebecca Ferguson as a White House security analyst and Idris Elba as President of the United States. The film is rich in closely researched details, showing us the same nightmare experienced by multiple characters. It was not at all clear who fired the missile. Preparations are still underway for retaliatory strikes. The film does exactly what its director intends. It makes everything else you might think about seem completely trivial.

Bigelow has long defined her own niche in cinema. Unique and self-taught, she is one of the few filmmakers to have climbed Mount Kilimanjaro. She also remains among the most controversial directors. She first made a name in what were seen as masculine genres – Blue Steel, a cop movie, and Point Break, a heist movie (with surfers). Later there were third political tracks: The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, set amid the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

But only a fool would dispute her talents as a filmmaker: a gift for movement, 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 with a quiet, “machine-like” strength. When I mention that, though, Bigelow’s eyebrows rise. “General!”

Playwright and actor Tracy Letts is among the stars of A House of Dynamite. On a personal level, he says he still doesn’t feel like he really knows Bigelow. But she lost her reserve in the group. “I wasn’t sure what I was going to find. She really has the quality of a genius, so I wasn’t surprised to meet Francis Ford Coppola in Apocalypse Now. In fact, she was the calm in the eye of the storm.” He says his work days were full of praise. “And you’re reassured because you know why she’s there. She’s already won awards, and I’m sure she has enough money. So, you know, the movie really matters to her.”

One stunning scene involves a Civil War reenactment. (The event was real, filmed in a documentary style.) On screen, with the world hanging in the balance, it seems so cold. You think America can be too self-obsessed. “I guess you’re not wrong,” Bigelow says. “And also we are a culture defined by war. I wish we could define ourselves differently.”

For all the shocking plausibility of “House of Dynamite,” it also keeps its fictional politicians free of reminders of their real-world counterparts. “The situation in our film stands outside of this situation.” However, it may be difficult not to watch Jared Harris play Secretary of Defense without remembering that the position now has a secondary title attached to it: Secretary of War.

Today, Bigelow makes a joke — or half-joke — about how he’s been thinking a lot lately about moving to London. (Currently, she lives on what is described as a “30-acre horse estate” in upstate New York.) Now interviews with film talent sometimes don’t specify any questions about Trump; Bigelow doesn’t roll that way. She looks nervous when the topic comes up. She says the danger is disrupting the conversation about the film. But with troops in American cities, how concerned should they be? “Well, I just made a movie about nuclear war. That might explain it all.”

Part of the reason her career has been such a big Rorschach test is her reluctance to say much. Her films also leave room for thought, just as her characters don’t tend to have backstories. However, it can feel like a trail of breadcrumbs. She was shy at school. Her mother was an English teacher. Her father ran a paint factory. (She was an only child, a situation in which she said, “You kind of became a peer with your parents.”)

By the 1970s, she was a New York artist, living and working amid the downtown scene. Philip Glass was a friend. Cindy Sherman is a neighbor. A conversation with Andy Warhol helped convince her that she should work in films. “The art world felt rarefied. Everything relied on existing knowledge. But film crossed all cultural and class lines, and you could get started quickly. It was much more exciting to communicate with it.”

By the 1990s, it was a sensation. Blue Steel and Point Break have made it a favorite among postmodern theorists and polymath crowds alike. But the edge that people found so sensitive also caused problems. Her art thriller Strange Days (1995) sparked complaints about a scene of sexual violence. Then came K-19: The Widowmaker, the true story of a doomed 1961 Soviet nuclear submarine, whose crew died while preventing an accident that may have sparked World War III. The executives asked her which American audience she was supposed to be rooting for. The box office was bad enough to halt an amazing career.

She says now that this was also when she started thinking again about the nuclear threat. While filming the film, she visited the North Pole, where abandoned submarines rusted under the sea, waiting for radioactivity to leak out. “In the 1990s, we all assumed the bomb would magically disappear. And I realized it never did.”

Six years later, she directed The Hurt Locker, the story of a US Army bomb disposal unit in Baghdad. You made for a triumphant next chapter. Being the first woman to receive an Academy Award for directing, she brought a sense of respectability to Hollywood. (There was also the fun sidebar that Bigelow beat out her ex-husband, James Cameron, who was nominated for Avatar.) But the idea of ​​being pinned down as a filmmaker made her uncomfortable. “If I can imagine that the impossible can be possible, then I love it,” she says today about being a role model. Then there is an audible pause.

Her time at the institution was short-lived. Her next film, Zero Dark Thirty, about the US hunt for Osama bin Laden, was a massive effort and a source of enormous rancor – and saw her accused of collusion with the CIA. A decade later, it still looks bruised, though time has made it cynical. “Something shocked me…” I say at the beginning of this interview. “Uh oh!” I shouted. Later, I would call her films conversation starters. I burst out laughing. “And me Still I think that’s a good thing.”

She says she sees a clear connection between the hot potato films she’s made over the past 20 years and her new film. K-19 left her haunted by nuclear ghosts. Then, while others had their say about her, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty cemented her self-image as a filmmaker close to the press. “The films start with my own curiosity, and then there’s a desire to provide access to information that the audience doesn’t have that I think might be important.”

The other link, of course, is the army. A retired three-star general served as a consultant on A House of Dynamite. She notes that she never sought Pentagon approval. Indeed, the story is more than a question of the accepted wisdom of mutually assured destruction – and the billions spent on maintaining it. “Our nuclear weapons warehouse is a fallible structure,” says Bigelow. “Inside it are men and women working thanklessly behind the scenes, and their competence means we can sit down and have this conversation. But competence does not mean they are infallible.”

It sounds like an idea close to Bigelow’s essence. Letts even compares her to Ken Loach. I know this seems like an odd similarity, but they both make films about flawed systems, and the ordinary characters trapped within them. For its part, it maintains a strong belief in people’s ability to make good choices with enough real information. She also believes we need to start taking responsibility.

“We are our own evil,” she says. Humanity created the bomb; At some point, we have to deal with it. “Of course, the challenge is that this is a global problem. Climate change is the same. But we have to act. I would say the first action is to look at this issue as your primary responsibility when you vote.”

But are movies still the powerful communication tool they were when the younger Bigelow discovered film? “I’m reading very bleak things about the future of our industry. But I’m also kind of isolated. I don’t live in Los Angeles anymore. I’m just moving forward.”

And so, inevitably, we come to artificial intelligence. In the year 2025, no one’s talking about nuclear weapons, but the world can’t stop discussing artificial actor Tilly Norwood. Bigelow says she would never use AI for anything performance-related. Beyond that, who knows? “When I made Strange Days, which now seems like a hundred years ago, I was always asked about technology. And I said, ‘It’s who uses it.’” She told me she was reading If Nobody Builds It, Everyone Dies, a best-selling book about the future of artificial intelligence. She says it is as pessimistic as the title suggests. “Impressive.”

I say the problem is that people often look to filmmakers for answers. “I know. They do.” It comes back loudly during our conversation. “Artificial intelligence. Climate change. Nuclear war.” She smiles again. “Next time, I’ll do a comedy.”